[page 535:]

EDGAR POE was living in a time between times. There were a great many ideas in the air — a great many things were happening — but in America, at least, nothing had yet solidified politically, socially, or intellectually. Literature, as a consequence, was equally chaotic. There was a restless drift to the free lands of the West, Individuals found the answer to individual problems toy abandoning the environment and atmosphere which produced them. The East was thus relieved of the pressure of solving what could happily be left to future and more crowded generations.

“The period from 1846 to 1860 was our period of comparative free trade. ... It was a period of very great and very solid prosperity ... the manufacturers did not perish, (nor did they) gain sudden and exorbitant profits. They made steady and genuine progress.”(734) The bows of Yankee clipper-ships clove the most distant seas, from which the seaboard cities from Boston to New Orleans reaped a noble harvest. They were the homes of a stable merchant class, influenced to a considerable degree by European culture and Oriental importations. Already the Parthenon was beginning to mate with the pagoda. Hospitality was lavish. There was a supporting stream of immigration, and plenty of room for all. Consequently life still moved fairly leisurely, and with a self-assurance, and a certainty of abundance, that it has seldom attained elsewhere.

In New York, which was then verging on the half million mark in population, the literary and social problems of the day were eagerly and constantly discussed in the various “parlours” of those who were benefiting by a prosperous order of things; but discussed with a perfunctory ardor, and a sentimental perfervidness possible only to people who, as yet, failed to understand the aesthetic and social implications of questions which they restlessly agitated without feeling a compelling necessity to solve. Three great movements were already well initiated: abolition, prohibition, and woman suffrage. Thus matters went on in the colorless administration of James K. Polk, and the days of the Wilmot Proviso.

Could we now be suddenly introduced into one of the numerous salons of the time in Manhattan, after the shock of the costumes of the time had passed, we would then notice, as the chief difference thrust upon [page 536:] our attention, the accent and mannerisms of the vigorous speech of the time.(735) The spoken language was still largely that of the provincial English of the Eighteenth or even of the Seventeenth Century, inherited from colonial ancestors, and, as yet, undenatured by the debilitating and “refining” toil of three generations of sure but mistaken school “marms.” “Calm” and “clam” were still pronounced alike, as they were meant to be. The Lord and lard were still confounded in sound, after the manner of Pope, and the grand vigorous “r” still rolled in “thunder,” undenounced as yet by such expatriates as Henry James, and Rhodes scholars accustomed to the English curate's “Swahd of the Lahd and Gideon” affectations. “Umbrellers” were invariably carried in New England where the drive against the “r” began.(736) In the South where babies were nursed, and often suckled by “mammies” and “dahs” not long from the Congo or its tributaries, the Ethiopian accent was already fixed, and a matter of pride. The hard dry nasal twang pressed westward with the frontier. It was a difficult country in which to write classical English poetry. There were few who made capital of the condition as Poe did.

As the days of 1846 began to flap back on the calendar, the nation began to drift with a complacent, imperial, and largely slave owner's optimism into war with Mexico. In July, 1845, Texas had accepted a Congressional proposal of annexation. In May, the President had sent a message to Congress “announcing a state of war.” The Mexicans, he said, had invaded our territory and shed the blood of fellow citizens on our own soil! A vast new territory was ruthlessly annexed, and the problem of slavery or free soil became more explicit. Henceforth politics, literature, and journalism began more and more to be given over to slavery vs. abolition, federal vs. state's rights. In such an atmosphere, the purely artistic products of poetical imaginations were less and less thought about or valued, Whittier's innumerable stanzas on “bondsman and proud Sothrons,” and the atmosphere for Uncle Tom's Cabin were soon to be created.(737) In 1846, such literature was getting under way. [page 537:]

Underneath all of this, there was a blind political and social optimism difficult to understand.(738) To the spread of American political institutions, there was practically no effective resistance in North America. It was a vast field, and the inference was easily arrived at, that the wings of the eagle were rapidly to overshadow the world. The statements of statesmen, politicians, and journalists of the time, make the outbreak of imperialism in the 1890's seem like the maiden dreams of a child. “At no remote date the American continent will rejoice under the beneficent shadow of our free institutions destined to spread their blessings upon all from pole to pole.”(739) It is impossible to exaggerate the ridiculous bombast that rolled in rhetorical periods from rostrums, stumps, and editorial sanctums. “Our destiny is bounded only by the world!”

The enormous impetus given to “progress”(740) by the suddenly acquired power conferred by mechanical inventions, and the application of machinery, led naturally to the expectation that the fields of psychology and art would be as rapidly exploited. The world was credulously prepared for the announcement of any new wonders. To an age which seemed to be, and actually was, swiftly acquiring a mastery over natural forces at an unprecedented speed, it seemed only natural that the realm of the supernatural might soon be annexed, explored, and exploited as a kind of spiritual Texas. In a few years, spiritualism, “psychic phenomena,” and new religions were in full swing. Mormonism was already prospering alarmingly. The America of the 1840s and 1850s added new comments and offshoots to the Christianity of the era, the most powerful and, in numbers, th£ most far-reaching which had agitated men since the Reformation. A transatlantic Protestantism long cut off from its source, under new conditions, was following out its “natural destiny” of splitting up again and again into an infinite variety of mutually antagonistic sects. The same Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper which had conferred the $100 prize on Poe's Gold Bug was filled with the pictures and doings of Prophet Joseph Smith and his adherents. The vast unsettled lands of the great American desert revived and excused the institution of polygamy. In a few years, thousands of Americans were to dress themselves in white and calmly await upon [page 538:] housetops the second coming of Christ. Almost anything might happen, for almost everything had. In 1849, Eldorado was actually found.(741)

Such were some of the movements and cross-currents which agitated the more simple members of the new republican community. Even the more cultured and refined were leavened by the general ferment. The control of the conservatism of the New England, and the plantation communities was fast passing away. In the fourth generation, the sense of their being homogeneous communities with distinct European ideals was being absorbed, and weakened by the general continental mass. Puritanism, Quakerism, and Calvinism, all alike were in process of disintegration, and felt keenly the infringement upon them of the ideas and ideals of the new industrial democracy, against which, in self-protection, the “cavaliers” two decades later appeared in arms. Literature, as a reflection of all this, was no exception. It was starred by strange, and, to us, vague and naive currents.

About Boston and Concord, the Puritan elements, still holding to some of their old tenets, were embarked upon the adventure of transcendentalism in religion and philosophy, or the social experiments of Brook Farm and Fruitlands. The whole northeastern seaboard from Maine to Virginia was stirred by the beginnings of spiritualism. New York was a hotbed. All classes, from the hard-headed Horace Greeley to the grandsons of patroons, attended lectures on mesmerism, the possibilities of galvanic resuscitation, and phrenology. Trance poets, phrenological professors, and psychically sensitive ladies were going about lecturing and writing for magazines. The society which had conquered nature by the machine, now felt itself to be on the verge of solving the mysteries of the intellect and of the spiritual world

In western Pennsylvania the colonies of “Economists” and their like,(742) the last of the Eighteenth Century social experiments akin to the “Pantosocracy” of the Lake School, were going out of business from natural causes. In eastern Pennsylvania, Quakerism, Dunkerism, and the Mennonites still held firm. The Philadelphia Wistar Parties were continued among the aristocratically elect, and intellectually impotent Brahmins.(743) The brief light which the Tusculum group had shed in Baltimore in the ‘20s had proved a will-o’-the-wisp. That locality was absorbed in commercial enterprise, and the profitable planting of the Eastern Shore; Washington was conducting a war, and preparing for the duel between Calhoun and Webster; Richmond was given over to tobacco, politics, genealogy, and entertaining. The Southern Literary [page 539:] Messenger already pointed with pride to the days of Poe, and grew querulous over abolition. In South Carolina, Simms and Paul Hamilton Hayne suffered between literary admiration and social contempt, while the Charlestonians planted rice and engaged in their horse racing and gardening. In Georgia, one solitary and pathetic man strove in vain against his environment, inventing new metres, and silk-spinning machines. Chivers was troubled with the visions of transcendentalism, and wrote to Poe about the nature of God and “how do you pronounce ‘Melpomene?’” He published volumes of poems composed of stanzas of pure inspiration followed by other stanzas of unutterable bathos. It was a new, a strange, a pregnant, and a baffling world to understand.

It is all very well now to patronize and belittle it through the easily reversed lenses of hind-sight, but it was all very real and we may be sure very confusing to those who were swimming in the contemporary whirlpool, unable to get their heads above the level of its troubled waters to see the grand rapids ahead. Not to have some understanding of it, is to continue in an ignorantly patronizing attitude, and to throw an unnecessary cloak of mystery about such a man as Poe.(744) In one sense he was inevitably a part and parcel of it all. His stories of scientific mystery, Von Kempelen and His Discovery, Mesmeric Revelation, or The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, must be read as the products of their time, m exploitation of its great expectations for physical and psychic science.

Says Poe — under the circumstances of time and place, of course, not! It did so. The world was ready for it Such facts were taken seriously by many on both sides of the water —

That was from a druggist in Stonehaven, Scotland.

And in old England Mrs. Browning was greatly interested. No doubt her own interest extended to her group.

That these stories are so well constructed that their manner is still convincing and interesting, is simply to say that Poe exploited, successfully, certain of the thought currents of his time in the realm of imaginative art. That he was greatly impressed, but by no means wholly taken in by the pseudo-science, and secondary philosophies of the time, was due to his reliance upon reason, his scorn of mob emotion, and his egotistic certainty in his own powers of analysis. It must be remembered that his seeming and, sometimes, actual technical familiarity with many of the sciences and pseudo-sciences was due to the special material which he elaborated with special pleading to develop his themes. It was the power of his imagination which gave to this material a peculiar life. Hundreds of similar attempts to use it now lie forgotten in the unread pages of Middle American magazines and dusty volumes.(744)

In the Winter of 1845, and through the Spring of 1846, Poe was, for the fest time since early Richmond days, certainly for the first time during his mature manhood, made welcome to the drawing-rooms, and to the circles of a contemporary American society that had some claim to consider itself of importance, and actually did at that time make an audible noise in the world.(747)

In Baltimore, his poverty and youth had made such association impossible. The return to Richmond, as we have seen, had found many doors closed to him for family reasons; in Philadelphia, the tradition of exclusiveness had made it impossible. New York was already more cosmopolitan, and with the fame that bad accrued to him since the publication of The Raven, in certain circles, Mr. Poe found himself not only able to appear, but actually much sought after. If the “parlours,” and in some cases the salons, which he now found thrown open to him were not the most exclusive, they were certainly the most active in a literary way, and the most interesting in New York. That Poe was anxious for social recognition, that the old sting of his repulse in Richmond now found some balm in another Gilead, and that his appearance in drawing-rooms of both fashion and pretension, was part of the reward of fame, and sweet to one who had had to stomach much that was [page 541:] bitter, there can be no doubt at all. “This is a world of sweets and sours —” he had written years before. Most of his experience had been with the sours. The effect upon him of the sweets was somewhat peculiar. The records of it are to be found in the history of his flirtations and the papers of the Literati.

After the demise of the Broadway Journal, Poe was now to be found more frequently than before at the houses of such literati, and dispensers of hospitality and conversation, as Miss Anna C. Lynch, Mrs. Fannie Osgood, the Reverend Orville Dewey, Mrs. Seba (Elizabeth Oakes) Smith, Margaret Fuller, Marcus Spring, James Lawson, and Dr. Manly. In Brooklyn, then and later, Poe was seen frequently at the home of Sarah Anna Lewis, a poetess of immense sentimental capacities. About these people, and in their parlors, gathered the literary, journalistic, and the outer fringe of the social life of the city. There, were to be found the many women then actively interested in writing but more so, in their own literary reputations, so aptly called “The starry sisterhood.” The journalists and anthologists upon whom they battened and were battened upon were also present, and certain poets, minor authors, and artists. Occasionally, but not frequently, their busy system was disturbed by the transit through its midst of some larger, and less nebulous star. The galaxy of New York had satellites, and was in communication with solar systems to the north, chiefly with Boston, Concord, and Providence.

The queen regnant of the literati, whose parlor was the most eagerly thronged, and whfch approached more nearly to the dignity of a genuine salon than any other, was Miss Anna C. Lynch (afterward, in 1855), the wife of Professor Vincenzo Botta). Miss Lynch entertained frequently in the evening at her house on Waverley Place. She was an occasional contributor to the contemporary magazines, newspapers, and parlor annuals, and was even ambitious enough to have attempted, with some success, A Handbook of Universal Literature. Miss Lynch is described as having been very pretty with a flair for repartee, with the tact of a Frenchwoman, and as generally quite charming. She had also a reputation for social exclusiveness which enhanced the value of her invitations. In the Spring of 1846 her hospitality was frequently extended to Edgar Allan Poe. According to Poe, her talent as a poetess, which he sardonically characterized as “unusual,” rested upon her Bones in the Desert, and her Farewell to “Ole Bull.”(748)

Visitors to Miss Lynch's salon were admitted by a trim twelve-year-old [page 542:] maid, and ushered upstairs to two parlors, warmed at either end of a vista of “corded and machicolated draperies by opposite coal fires.” In front of one of these, neatly framed by a black mantel, it was the custom of Miss Lynch to receive her guests — “In person she is rather above the usual height, somewhat slender with dark hair and eyes.” Beside her stood her elderly mother, and her sister, Mrs. Charles Congden, who had the rather fearsome reputation of being a lady humorist. Thither came the ladies of the literati in hoopskirts, and ostrich plumes, head-dresses, hair parted in the middle with thick water curls, or with heavy looped and taffy-like coiffures.

The gentlemen arrived in stove-pipe hats, black cloaks, and shawls. All except Horace Greeley.

The guests to be met at Miss Lynch's were certainly interesting. There was Miss Bogart, the spinster, who wrote solemn lyrics, the authoress of He Came Too Late; Mrs. Fannie Osgood — “she sparkled, exhaled and went to Heaven”; Mr. W. W. Gillespie, a mathematical genius who stuttered; and Dr. J. W. Francis, a florid, and delightfully good-humored, and wise old man with long white flowing locks. It was he who sometimes treated Poe. Thither also came the silent and somewhat Olympian William Cullen Bryant and his chatty wife, Fitz-Greene Halleck, now a little cynical, and G. P. Morris of Woodman Spare That Tree ... Mrs. Oakes Smith, somewhat feared for her radical woman's rights proclivities, was frequently present, accompanied by her two young sons in roundabouts — Mr. Poe had just used up Powhatan and Mr. Seba Smith, its author, preferred to remain at home.(750) But there were also Dr. Griswold, and Ann Stephens, the dangerous, gossipy Mrs. Ellet, Mrs. Embury, Mrs. Hewitt, and many others.

Richard Henry Stoddard, the youth whom Poe had so offended some months before, also came to Miss Lynch's — “I was introduced into her salon either by Dr. Rufus Wilmot Griswold or by Mr. Bayard Tayler.”

Here we must leave the romantic young Stoddard sheepishly warming his hands before Miss Lynch's coal fire to visit Mrs. Seba Smith, at home in Greenwich Street.

Mrs. Smith's gatherings were held fortnightly, on Sunday nights, and it is at her house, probably in the Winter of 1846, that we hear of Virginia's appearing in public for the last time. She was dressed in a homemade gown of some red stuff, trimmed with, rather quaint homemade yellow lace, and sat silently, pale but smiling by the fire, while her husband recited The Raven to an applauding little company. One never hears of Mrs. Clemm's being at any of these parties, but it is known that she capitalized “Eddie's friendship,” and borrowed money from Poe's lady friends, which put hfm in great embarrassment, and sometimes obligated him for favorable reviews or revisions of their poetry. There was no other way to pay back such favors. On the other hand, Mrs. Clemm, no doubt, found that there was no other way to live. A good many of the “starry sisterhood,” it seems, called from time to time at 15 Amity Street, and later on at Fordham. There was now a great deal of curiosity about Poe. His domestic tragedy was interesting, and his association with Mrs. Osgood the theme of much gossip. [page 545:]

The legend of “Israfel,” “The Raven” and all the rest, was already well under way. The story about Mrs. Osgood and Poe, and how Virginia was ill, and Mrs. Clemm was forced to borrow money, and that Dr. Griswold was in love with Mrs. Osgood, etc., etc., went around and about the town, as such stories do. “But Poe had a rival in her affections in Dr. Griswold, whom she transformed for the moment into an impassioned poet,” says Stoddard. The remark is not without significance in view of the Doctor's obituary style after Poe's death. Mrs. Osgood, after a while, gave up seeing the “Raven.” The exact time of her decision is somewhat obscure. In the meantime there were doubtless a good many who remembered the lines addressed To F—— , and cherished a clipping from the Broadway Journal —

Rufus Wilmot Griswold came frequently to Mrs. Oakes Smith's soirées, and at other times. She describes him:

Despite the accusation of a certain canine strain by another acquaintance, the strong feline characteristics of the Reverend Doctor Griswold are here plainly manifest. The same lady noticed that, like Poe, Dr. Griswold had “a lonely soul.” It was not one that could forgive criticism, or forget jealousy. Griswold also knew that Poe was preparing an anthology. This afterward seems to have fallen into his hands, and it doubtless contained reversals of his own judgments, and criticisms which were perhaps hard to stomach. Griswold could neither like, nor forgive Poe his superior gifts and airs. There is something cat-like in his playing and flattering while Poe lived and was to be feared, and something equally feline in the swift pounce upon him as soon as he died. For a time the daws remained hidden in the soft, swift paws.

Through all this busy self-important life of the literati, one catches intriguing little glimpses of a defunct but, withal, fascinating enough time. Willis, bearded like a pard, and extremely youthful, is seen entertaining lavishly, far too lavishly, at the Astor House, with the fairy-like little Imogen by his side. Poe and Mrs. Osgood meet there. Horace Greeley comes tramping in, trousers half tucked into his boots, a dingy white coat, and affectedly uncouth manners. For some years he had been a vegetarian, but the hasty pudding and milk that his wife, who “abhorred dress and fashion,” set before him at breakfast, had caused him to return to flesh to supply the tremendous energy which he poured out into the columns of the Tribune. His conversation always dealt with timely isms that might further his political hopes. “His stock in trade was truth, honesty, and human equality.” Greeley was kindly enough to sign notes for Poe, and too hard-headed ever to forget their having gone to protest. Margaret Fuller, who was the literary critic of the Tribune from 1842 to 1845, lived with the Greeleys, and was one of the best critics of her day.

Parties are also to be glimpsed at Marcus Spring's, a New York merchant of literary proclivities. There Poe saw Lydia Maria Child, a New England novelist, one of Spring's protegees. There were other affairs at the residence of James Lawson, a Scotch merchant with whom Poe [page 547:] was anxious to be on good terms, for the prosperous Scotchman was fond of the society of authors, and knew many booksellers. Thomas Dunn English, Hart, the sculptor, Mary Gove Nichols, Mrs. Embury, and Mary Hewitt were all much about in the evenings and afternoons from house to house. It was not such a large town then, and intimacies were bound to be intimate. Mr. Poe, in some quarters, began to find it very intimate indeed. Across the town is to be traced the invisible web of correspondence, which the letters, that Griswold afterward allowed to be destroyed, began to weave about Poe, — letters to Mrs. Osgood, Mrs. Ellet, Margaret Fuller, and a half dozen others — and their replies. These accumulated in the rooms at Amity, Street, and they were read by Mrs. Clemm, as it will appear later.

Virginia's health was bad, much worse! Eddie was consequently despondent, much shaken and agitated by society, provided with no regular employment, and yet writing and corresponding frantically. It is a rather vivacious picture of Poe that one gets in the drawing-rooms of the literati, but once out in the darkness, tramping the streets, his face seems to have fallen back into the old lines as his brain and feet traveled again and again the familiar, ever-present grooves of despair.

The recollection seems to apply about this time, i.e., shortly after the Broadway Journal had failed, perhaps in the Fall of 1846.(756)

Poe's social experiences among the writers of New York in 1845-46, his knowledge of the opinions in which they were held by their own contemporaries, through his personal contacts, and in conversations among them, were now turned to professional use in a series of papers that began to appear in Godey's Lady's Book in Philadelphia with the Spring of 1846.

Since November, 1845, Godey's Lady's Book must have been the main source of his livelihood. He had contributed criticism to every number since the month mentioned, in which Bryant, W. G. Simms, Mrs. Osgood, Mrs. Hewitt, Mrs. Seba Smith, and Mathews had been [page 548:] commented upon. In addition to this, Graham's had carried some of the Marginalia in March, 1846, and The Philosophy of Composition in April. This last contained the so-called analysis of how Poe wrote The Raven.(757) The series in Godey's, which had already appeared, was now followed by another series of papers dealing with thirty-eight writers, men and women, then resident in New York, and known to Poe.

These papers, known as The Literati, began to come out in Godey's Lady's Book in May, 1846, and continued through the November issue. As we have already seen, Poe was preparing an anthology, The American Parnassus, that was to have rivaled and superseded Griswold's. He is known to have been busily engaged upon it as late as December, 1846, and later.”(758) The papers, which now began to appear in Godey's, probably represented what would now be called the advance magazine publication of that section of the projected anthology dealing with New York authors. Combined with this was some material included and incorporated from former book reviews.

In considering these sketches, it must be remembered that they were not the critical judgments of Poe himself, but for the most part merely his obiter dicta, and his record of the current impression of an author's importance at the time. The critical judgments, which creep in, will be found for the most part to have been taken from his previous book reviews, where a more formal evaluation of the writer's work had been attempted. These papers on the literati, because of the contemporary stir which they provoked, have been only too often confounded with the more serious part of Poe's criticism, and quoted against him. The truth is, they were hastily done, frankly journalistic sketches meant for contemporary consumption, and to make a noise. They were to fill the author's purse, and the pages of an anthology. This book was to sell by force of the personal interest of the writers included, and their friends, like other anthologies.

The series, from the standpoint of contemporary discussion and excitement, was an immense success. Poe treated the subjects of his sketches with an alarming degree of candor, and a personal knowledge that, in some cases, was felt to amount to a betrayal confidences. Naturally enough, the interest leaver heat. There was no telling who might be the next to the elevated or gridironed, or what remarks made to Mr. Poe by somebody about anybody might not appear cunningly incorporated in the next number of Godey's, with consequent necessity for explanations or denials. Hence the series was [page 549:] an immense hit from the standpoint of the circulation manager, while the author was automatically elevated to the throne of judgment — with no appeal. For there was no other critic whose pen marched with so great authority and reputation for savage candor. There was a great flutter in all the hen roosts of the coteries.

For the most part, Poe's judgments, such as they were, have been sustained. Such songsters as Willis, Halleck, Margaret Fuller, and Mrs. Embury were justly evaluated, and their now forgotten reputations discussed as they deserved. The too-current idea that these papers constituted a general and jealously caustic attack on his fellow writers, is entirely unjust to Poe. A great deal ol praise is generally wisely distributed, as any critic must do when considering living authors from a contemporary standpoint. On the other hand, the clipping of wings amid the Plymouth Rocks and bantams, who essayed the eagle's flight, was salutary. Unfortunately, particularly for Poe, there were several exceptions in which the spleen of his personal grudges was allowed full sway. Briggs, against whom Poe certainly had no just complaint, but whose attitude during the episode of the Broadway Journal was anathema to Poe, came in for a tremendous doing-up, as did Lewis Gaylord Clark, the editor of the Knickerbocker. This magazine, not being hospitable to Poe, was therefore included by him with the North American Review as in a category beyond the pale. Clark was now repaid in full with compound interest.

This was not so pleasant as it might have been, but one can recover from being compared to an apple or a pumpkin. With the article on “Thomas Done Brown,” there were no vegetable comparisons. The animal kingdom, in the person of a long-eared equine, was drawn upon, and Mr. English's personal appearance held up to ridicule:

In addition to this, English was held up to the world as an ignoramus who could neither spell, nor write grammatically. Poe as a matter of fact, as we have seen, knew him well, too well in fact to feel comfortable. English knew a great deal about Poe's life in Philadelphia. Lane, who lived with English, and had assisted in getting out the last number of the Broadway Journal, says that when the poet was inebriated, English drove Poe frantic, probably by making fun at him. In Philadelphia, English had quarreled with a number of people and, on several occasions, been worsted in encounters, notably by Henry Beck Hirst (sic). It seems, he had taken some of the castigations rather tamely. Hence Poe dubbed him “Thomas Done Brown,” and wrote him up in a manner vindictive, remembering his own humiliations when he was helpless. No man, who was not dead-alive, could have refrained from replying.

The truth is, English was a bit of a cad. In descending to meet him on his own ground, Poe had done himself a great wrong, and forgot that Thomas was not done so brown but that he might give Mr. Poe's goose a hot turn on the spit. He soon did so — and with telling affect — of which more hereafter.

The upshot of The Literati was that, in one way or another, Poe was one of the most talked of men among literary circles in the United States. Unfortunately, all this kind of thing had nothing to do with what real fame rests upon, i.e., contributions to imaginative literature. The Raven had made Poe famous; The Literati had rendered him notorious. Mr. Godey felt called upon to issue a card in which he refused to bow to blandishments or threats. But the editor of the Lady's Book did not, we may be sure, care very much for the rôle of the fearless editor which had, thus gratuitously, been thrust upon him. In the meantime Poe existed, and did little more than that, on the proceeds of his articles.

Behind all of this apparently facile social and literary activity, went on the private and momentous physical and imaginative. life of the man. There was a growing melancholy, and a good cause for it. The curious cast of his temperament, which thrust upon him a growing and ever more overshadowing conviction of impending disaster, was now forced to behold its darkest forbodings being rapidly fulfilled in the ever hastening dissolution of Virginia. Her health during the last months of 1845, and the Winter of 1846, gave somber symptoms of the rapid approach of her death. Moving feebly through the rooms, or sitting weakly coughing in a chair by the man who so glibly characterized the literati in Lady's Book paragraphs, was the dying girl-wife, suffering, gasping, sweating, and bleeding.

The little rooms at 85 Amity Street, where Mrs. Clemm and Virginia lived, and the curious literati came to call, and then went away to gossip, were rapidly becoming intolerable. To Poe, there was something almost morbidly sequestered about his home. To admit strangers into the [page 551:] precincts, was to reveal to them, and to prying feline eyes, the rapt secrets of his inmost life. Poe could not bear it Mrs. Clemm. loved nothing better than her own house — and Virginia needed the bracing help of country breezes, and the soothing quiet of country air. Remembering the blessed solitude of the summer at Bloomingdale, where he had written The Raven, Poe once more made arrangements with the Brennans to take Mrs. Clemm and Virginia to the farm for a few weeks.

Sometime in April, 1846, Poe made a trip to Baltimore, the events of which are obscure. There was probably another lecture there, after which, upon his return, the family went to the country. There they remained until sometime later in the Spring, before removing to the vicinity of Turtle Bay. It was a good five-mile walk to the Brennans’, or a long ride. Bus or steamboat fare was not always forthcoming, and it sometimes happened that Poe was unable to return at night to his fast sinking little wife. This seems to have been the great drawback to the sojourn on the farm, and at Fordham later on. Of Poe's consequently somewhat lonely life about New York during the Spring of 1846, only a few glimpses can be recaptured.

There seem to have been a good many calls upon Mrs. Osgood. Mrs. Mary Louise Shew was also resorted to, then, or later on, for hospitality, and sympathy. Mrs. Shew, who had great sympathy for Poe, had been a nurse for many years with hospital experience. She, more than anyone else, seems to have realized his true physical condition, She became the Poes’ good angel at Fordham, and, in town, made her house a haven of refuge and rest. She was well known to able physicians, Dr. Mott, and John Wakefield Francis, M.D., whom Poe had commemorated in an article, on account of the Doctor's contributions to medical magazines. Dr. Francis was later called in to attend Poe, and frequently met him at the different salons of the literati. He was genial and liberal in his tendencies, and included, in his life of wide interests, an enthusiasm for literature, and the conversation of authors. Poe was helped by him at times of need, and has left a rather intimate and exceedingly cordial sketch of him in the papers of The Literati:

It is quite possible that this genial and wise old doctor, “whose professional duties and purse are always at the command of the needy,” was called upon to give advice and help in the hopeless case of Virginia Poe. It is certain he did so in the case of her husband.(760)

Poe, now much talked about, because of the papers on the literati, and unfortunately, too, on account of his sick wife and Mrs. Osgood, was also to be found occasionally at Frank's Place “on Barclay Street where a convivial company gathered.” In the early Winter of 1846, we hear of a dinner at the old United States Hotel on Fulton Street attended by Henry Ward Beecher, Dr. Francis Lister Hawkes — whose sermons Poe was now at some pains to proclaim boresome — and others.

February brought the last Valentine Day which Virginia was to know. At 15 Amity Street she received an envelope addressed in a well-known hand.(761)

Poe was now getting farther into the clutches of Mrs. “Estelle” Lewis of Brooklyn, who decorated her studio with a bust of Pallas presided over by a stuffed raven. She was known as “Stella.” Her husband was a fairly prosperous lawyer, who indulged his wife in the funds necessary to purchase fame, and to run a salon in Brooklyn.(762)

Sometime in the early Spring of 1846 — the second stay at Bloomingdale was a short one — Poe again moved his wife and Mrs. Clemm to another secluded boarding place, then situated in a country district at the foot of Forty-seventh Street on the East River, in a section known as Turtle Bay.(763)

This change again brought Virginia and Mrs. Clemm nearer to town, and, at the same time, enabled Poe to walk conveniently to the city for what calls he had to pay, or the slack business he had to transact. Poverty, a dire pennilessness, was now once more oppressively bearing down [page 553:] upon him. The papers in Godey's could have done little more than pay the board. What the Poes contrived to live upon, how Mrs. Clemm provided medicines and the necessary dainties for Virginia, is a mystery of which only she knew the ramifications.

With Turtle Bay began that period of sickness, calamity, delirium, and desire for sequestration from the world, which lasted from the Summer of 1846 through the Fordham episode, up into the Winter of 1848. It would seem as if Poe had withdrawn as much as possible from gratuitous human contact in order to spend the last days with Virginia, to see her through the inevitable last agony, to nurse his own jangled nerves, and to ponder upon the primordial nature of the universe! Such was the strange mélange of the experiences and events about to follow. Yet he was by no means able to suffer, recuperate, and ponder undisturbed. The period of hermitage at Turtle Bay and Fordham was intruded upon by some of the most lamentable and belittling episodes of the poet's life.

He was, indeed, helplessly in the clutch of psychic and worldly circumstances, half crazed at the thought of losing Virginia. Nevertheless, the inevitable immediate presence of the shadow on his threshold warned him of the release to come, and of the implications which must follow. In a short while, she, who had at once his despair and consolation, would be no more. The writing in all its glowing and shadowed characters was even now being traced on the wall. He was greatly attracted by Mrs. Osgood. Of that there can be no doubt. Yet Mrs. Osgood was married. With the passing of Virginia, he would be released only to confront a new problem. One to which, no matter who the person was that embodied it, there seemed to be no solution. Then, too, he craved comfort, rest, and sympathy, the peculiar spiritual comradeship and understanding which he found only in women.

It is not hard to understand why this ma.n, tinder all of these strange pressures and long continued stresses, — the slowly stretching wires of inmost being that were tightened and tightened as the years went on, that every turn of the screw made more vibrant and brought a little nearer the breaking point, — it is not hard to understand why he sometimes felt himself to be going mad. Indeed, it is more difficult to understand why he did not go entirely insane. That, from time to time, he attempted to relieve the stress on the now nearly snapping cords and harp strings, by reverting to drugs and alcohol, seems now, if it ever could be, to have been excusable. Never was there a more delicate or more tormented being that had cried out so long, and so unsuccessfully for surcease, that had longed for companionship and found none.

The Summer of 1846 was one of the hottest that had ever been known. As the sweltering May and June days settled down upon Turtle Bay, and over the steepled town about the lower end of Manhattan, — the [page 554:] dusty roads, baking brick side-walks, awnings, and the sleepy rumble of clumsy busses that was then New York, — the literati began to withdraw to their several summer pagodas. Mr. Poe was left more and more alone with his agonies and cogitations, while the heat lightning flashed, and the distant thunder rolled.

The Poes, at Turtle Bay, boarded near to the farm of a Mr. John L, Miller, a large, shaded farmhouse, and its environs of several acres planted with orchards that stretched along the shores of the East River. Here in the Spring days, Mrs. Clemm, impeccable as ever, neat, but sad, desirous of sharing her troubles with sympathetic gossips, came to sit in the parlor, or upon the verandah, to watch the Sound steamers go by, and to tell her troubles, very real ones, to Mrs. Miller. Poe sometimes came with her. Virginia was generally too feeble to go out. Sarah, Mrs. Miller's little girl, remembered.(764)

This personification of placidity and domestic order, this epitome of dameliness and respectability, from which the burdens of Promethean sorrows wrung reluctant tears, is one of the enormous contrasts, one of those almost ghostly enigmas which fate seems to have thrust, in a spirit of sardonic mischief or ironical sympathy, into the life cycle of Edgar Allan Poe. During his youth, he had been impossibly linked with the strongest guardian that ever a poet had; in later life Maria Clemm had, as if in compensation, been mercifully provided. She remained the only constant factor of all the years of Poe's manhood. Despised, deprecated, and sometimes ridiculed, a poor, boresome, tet saintly old woman, she continued her devotion of a lifetime by her domestic epilogue and eulogy when he died.

All who saw Mrs. Clemm during Poe's lifetime, men, women and children, were impressed by an orderliness, an intense cleanliness, a preternatural neatness in her appearance, which, as the record is assembled and grows, becomes spiritual rather than in its implications. [page 555:] It was she who introduced into the career of this man, whose life had been a chaos of passion since his birth, that essential quality of orderly continuity, and cleanly comfort without which he must soon have perished miserably, or existed more pathetically than Lazarus himself. When the imagination and toil of genius were insufficient to wring from obstinate hands and pockets even the paltry coppers that fall willingly to the blind man's whine, Maria Clemm went forth with her basket and returned sadly but triumphantly to place the proceeds of her noble beggary before her fainting son and dying daughter.

It is impossible to exaggerate the majestic, because invisible, abnegations and ministrations of Mrs. Clemm. At evening the fields have seen her, armed with a spade, digging in the twilight among the turnips which fanners had planted to feed to cows in the winter-time, filling her basket with humble, earthy loot to make soup for her wonderful Eddie and her poor Virginia. At Fordham, even this resource failed, and she was seen in the very early mornings by the neighbors, walking down secret country lanes, culling the yellow dandelions to make a salad, or a mess of “greens” for Edgar Allan Poe.

In the immense and catholic scheme of things, which requires and insists upon the widest possible variations in the scale of human character, Edgar Poe and Maria Clemm, although spiritual hemispheres apart, were brought together, yoked as it were, by Virginia, into an effectual, though astonishing team. Under the occasional lyric ecstasies and majestic dirges that her son-inlaw caught up, from time to time, in poetry or prose, behind the harmony that he wrung magnificently out of conflict and chaos, is the inaudible but fundamental monotone of “this woman's cherishing affection.

Yet she must not be regarded as some simple saint, blindly devoted to the devastating ideal of unintelligent self-sacrifice. She was always, it seems, doing the most comnon-sense thing under the circumstances, or finding the only way that there was out of a difficulty. In the Spring of 1846, both the condition of Virginia's health and Israfel's difficulties and misfortunes made some removal to a more remote scene desirable, Mrs. Clemm must have longed for a place where her daughter could die in peace, and her son might live with some dignity — where their poverty would not be spied upon, and their tragedies be made the theme of idle gossip. In all this Poe would have heartily concurred. Sometime, about the end of May, 1846, they moved to the Fordham cottage. Little Sarah Miller remembered the Poes leaving Turtle Bay, and her visit to Fordham soon afterward. The cherry trees were in bloom —

This dinner with the Turtle Bay Millers, — little Sarah, wide-eyed and smiling on a box — is one of the first glimpses to be had of the Poes at Fordham. One cannot help wondering what Poe thought, looking at the child sitting at the table where there had never been any necessity to provide high-chairs for children. The cat was there; we hear of her shortly afterward, lying upon Virginia's hollow bosom. Some puzzles cannot be given away. Poverty, for instance! A bed had been left behind at Turtle Bay in lieu of board. And one wonders, too, just how they did furnish the cottage.(765)

It was a very pleasant, a humble, but a beautiful little place. It would have been an ideal setting for a pastoral. There was the rose-embowered, the blossom-showered cottage of a poet; chimes from a neighboring monastery sounding across the fields; cloudy woods and distant, sun-flashing waterways; the lulling sound of cowbells nearing home at twilight.

The stage setting for the great American tragedy was enormously, almost cosmically ironical. The corpse-like Virginia, and the pale brow of madness were about to be wreathed in honeysuckle and roses. Through the months of her gasping, and above the busy noise of her husband's occasional delirium, sounded the soothing boom of greedy bees. The contrast of the psychic drama and the physical scenery could only have been conceived by that exquisite lord of tragedy, Reality.

Shortly after the removal to Fordham, Poe departed on a business trip which ended in bitter disappointment. Then the fitness of the bucolic scenery was completely complemented by the arrival from Richmond, on a family visit, of the eccentric and slightly childish sister, Rosalie. Rosalie was a great trial to Mrs. Clemm. She was childish, and wilful, and yet possessed of a certain shrewdness, so often conferred upon such children of the moon, as if by way of compensation. She observed, she talked; and Mrs. Clemm feared her tongue. Rosalie, on her part, did not care very much for “Aunty Clemm.” She preferred [page 559:] to sit chattering idly by the bedside or near the chair of Virginia(766) while Poe was in town.

Of some unsuccessful business interview and of the high hopes aroused in vain, this, the only letter known to have been sent by Poe to Virginia, is a memorial:

The attempt to show that this letter was written just prior to an interview with Mrs. Osgood is not borne out by the order of events that followed. The reference, in the letter itself, to “substantial good” is palpably one of financial import.(768) The real interpretation is the obvious one. It is one of grief, anxiety and affectionate solicitude in ink.

Mrs. Clemm had to send money to Poe for his return. He was scolded, says Rosalie, and then put to bed for a night of delirium. He was in a terrible way; he cried out, and demanded morphine. One catches other glimpses of him about New York, trying to place articles, or writing again about the Stylus — always unsuccessfully.

Yet, that Poe forecasted and ever dramatized the departure of Virginia, there can be little doubt, for it was at the time of this early Summer visit, in 1846, that we hear from Rosalie of Annabel Lee. She definitely remembered having heard it read. After Poe's death there were a host of lady candidates, each claiming in a long, tedious, angry, and jealous correspondence with Poe's English biographer, Ingram, to be the only genuine and original “Annabel.” In so far as any of Poe's vague heroines can be traced to any definite personality of the [page 560:] world of reality, it may be said, in passing, that his wife Virginia is more closely shadowed forth in the poem than anyone else. “I was a child, and she was a child,” and “our love — it was stronger by far than the love of those who were older than we — of many far wiser than we” — seems to refer beyond cavil to the strange incidents of his marriage to a child, and the opposition of relatives. In this poem is the long dirge of the waves of Sullivan's Island during the years he walked its beaches alone, and the death of Virginia at Fordham. In the Summer of 1846, all of this was in his past, or in the near future by inevitable implication. It was a magnificent, and lyrical rendering, a dirgelike expression of his own and Virginia's tragedy.

Sixteen miles from the city was no barrier at all to the visitations of curiosity. There were trains on the Harlem Railroad, stages, and various of the starry sisterhood possessed well-to-do husbands and carriages. Callers were not infrequent. Many ware desirous of favorable reviews or criticism from Mr. Poe. From some of these women, Mrs. Clemm had borrowed money, so little favors from “Eddie” were now in order.(769) One could also appear gracefully by bringing a basket for that poor darling, Mrs. Poe — and Mrs. Clemm, who was lonely, did like to gossip. Great trouble for Poe ensued.

Mrs. Gove was an occasional visitor. Mrs. “Estelle” Lewis of the Brooklyn salon was frequently to be found seated in Mrs. Clemm's Fordham kitchen.(770) Her husband had given Poe “$100” to revise his wife's verses — the critical remarks which followed were, also expected, to be tempered by so salubrious a wind. All of this was exasperating. Mrs. Oakes Smith, it seems, had also used the lever of her hospitality, and probable favors to Mrs. Clemm, to extract an article from the “Raven” in which the two hundred verses of her poem on The Sinless Child were vaguely eulogized through a veil of gauzy irony.

The quotations, when removed from the context, were excellent. Mrs. Smith was, we learn, a child of nature. Birds lit upon her fingers. Her poem contained a sinless type of passion which intrigued Poe, who, between the millstones of his gratitude and specialized admiration, contrived to grind out of chaff the meal of praise, mixed with the broken glass of irony.

One day in June, Mrs. Clemm — Poe it appears was absent — was [page 561:] visited by an authoress, and poetess, a certain Mrs. Elizabeth Frieze Lummis Ellet. Mrs. Ellet had learned her gossip's trade in the most talented school for scandal on the continent. Her talk with Mrs. Clemm was evidently most pumping, alarming, and consoling, and Mrs. Clemm soon made the mistake of reading to her some of the sugar-and-spice letters of Mrs. Osgood. In New York, sixteen miles away, there was an explosion in the literary tea pot.

Mrs. Osgood became greatly alarmed, more alarmed than ever. She had, it seems, already ceased to see Poe, through fear of gossip, and the new outbreak was doubly unwelcome. A committee of the literati, headed by Mrs. Elizabeth Frieze Lummis Ellet, was commissioned by Mrs. Osgood, “about the time the cherry trees bloomed,” to call upon Poe and to demand her letters. Many of the starry ones, who had also written letters, must have been somewhat disturbed to learn that they were being read aloud to the sisterhood by Mrs. Clemm.

Mr. Poe was considerably nettled. He was not glad to see the commission of Mrs. Ellet, Margaret Fuller, and Miss Lynch, and evidently said so, hinting that Mrs. Ellet might be equally solicitous about her own correspondence. She was. The bundle of Mrs. Osgood's letters was returned instantly, and the committee withdrew bearing them back to New York. The talk went on, however.

After the irate committee left, Poe, who was sorry that his anger had led him to make an unchivalric remark to Mrs. Ellet, took her letters and left them at her door. There is no doubt that in in all this affair there was little else than gossip, and a genuine malignity on the part of Mrs. Ellet, who soon afterward denied that she had received her letters.

Mr. Lummis, Mrs. Ellet's brother, next appeared, demanding his sister's letters from Poe. He doubted, or did not know that they had been returned. Mrs. Ellet naturally remained reticent. Poe's sacred word was doubted, and many hard things said about Mrs. Osgood. Mr. Lummis was soon said to be going about New York, with his coat-tail full of pistols, looking for Poe. A duel, then not at all unusual in literary and political circles, was in order. Mr. Poe called upon Mr. Thomas Dunn English at his and T. H. Lane's apartment at 304 Broadway, in a very excited state, to ask Mr. English to be his second in the quarrel.

Poe was probably in debt to English for sums due upon the demise of the Broadway Journal, and English had also been held up to ridicule by Poe in Godey's in the sketches of the literati.(771)

In January, 1846, Poe, while intoxicated, had had a row with English, probably over the death of the Journal, in which violence had been resorted [page 562:] to. Lane says that English was entirely exasperating to Poe when the latter was in his cups. It was upon Mr. English whom Poe now called to do him the good offices of a friend! Strangely enough, John H. Tyler, who must have heard of similar singular scenes in Washington upon Poe's visit there, was present when Poe arrived. Mr. English's account follows.(772)

So much for Mr. English's statement of the case in the New York Mirror. Unfortunately for that gentleman, although justly exasperated, his statement was mixed with an alloy which lightens considerably the pure gold of truth. From other passages in his career, it is known that he was an insufferable cock on his own dung hill; that he enjoyed the vituperation of controversy, and shunned the incidents of a fair fight. He had long been friends with, Poe, who had helped to get out English's paper in Philadelphia when the latter was himself on a spree, and his statement of Poe's having been a poltroon was the exact reverse of the fact.

He might, therefore, have overlooked the episode in January. An old acquaintance shattered in nerves, hounded and pursued over a quarrel initiated by gossips, came to his house humbling his pride in his extremity, and holding out his hand. Mr. English accepted the apology [page 563:] but would not take the hand, and boasted of it in print. Poe was no doubt greatly shaken, and overrated Mr. Lummis; English would not involve himself where a real encounter threatened. He even refused, as a careful lawyer, to loan Poe a pistol.(773) In the quarrel which followed, he did not merely put Poe out of the door, but beat him up first, after having his own face pummeled in the encounter. Poe was led out by Professor Ackerman, and was in bed for some days afterward, in the usual state of collapse to which any kind of excitement, love, stimulants, or auger reduced him. He was, in fact, a complete nervous wreck. Dr. Francis, realizing his condition, carried a letter to Lummis, who by this time must have found out that his sister after all had her letters.

Mrs. Osgood went to Albany, and the affair was hushed up. “Poe,” says English, “fled the city.” This meant that Poe returned to Fordham, where he lived. Mr. English remained, only to make a necessary temporary exit later. He had received a very sharp and unmannerly peck from the beak of the “Raven” in Godey's, and now discovered, in his own replies, some of the qualities of the bill of the vulture. On May 30,1846, the New York Mirror had carried T. D. English's reply to the Literati paper in which he used the knowledge acquired during his intimate contact with Poe to sneer, not without considerable force, at Poe's own affectations of learning.

Through the stifling days of June and July, while the heat lightning continued to flicker, the stage thunder of the controversy rolled on. On June 23, in reply to some further proddings, the following appeared as a paid card in the New York Mirror:

As the matter contained in the last paragraph quoted above was libelous, the publisher, Fuller, tried to guard himself, by the introductory notice, a precaution which was futile. Poe replied in the Philadelphia Spirit of the Times on July 10, 1846:

The charge of forgery was completely denied. Park Benjamin had quoted the alleged remark of a New York merchant, Edward J. Thomas of Broad Street, to English who had rashly rushed into print. Poe dispatched a letter to Thomas who replied:

“These are the facts which, in a court of justice, I propose to demonstrate,” says Poe — and he did so. The New York Mirror was sued, for libel. The case came to trial February 22, 1847, before Justice Samuel Jones of the Superior (State) Court. English did not appear for the Mirror, and the verdict went to Poe who received $225 damages and costs. The total sum amounted to $326.48. Out of this, E. L. Fancher, Poe's attorney, received, it is said, a good fat fee. This was after the death of Virginia at Fordham.

The most unfortunate part of the whole miserable affair was, that largely due to unnecessary attacks on English in Godey's, the weaknesses of “Israfel” had been advertised to the world. It was the English controversy, more than any other, which tarnished Poe's good name. Had it not been for that, we should now hear very much less about “Poe's drinking.” The weaknesses of many another literary man, kept private, have been forgotten. The failings of Poe were trumpeted, and reprinted in a chain of little newspapers and magazines whose editors dealt out the vindictive journalistic personalities of an era when neighborhood gossip was news. It is hard now to get a perspective on the havoc which this kind of thing wrought upon so sensitive, and so easily irritated a nature as Poe's.

One can easily trace, in this, the germs of a conviction of persecution as this went on from year to year.

This estimate was made by Thomas Holley Chivers who knew Poe well, and who had visited him on July 8, 1845, at 195 Broadway. From Fordham, on July 22, 1846, Poe wrote Chivers a significant letter, only a small part of which is here given.

We also learn, in this letter, that Poe had not been contributing to the magazines since February, 1846, and that the money received from Godey had long ago been exhausted.(765)

Of the life led by Poe and his family about Fordham, of the contemporary conditions of the neighborhood, and of its appearance and the location of the cottage itself, many carefully authenticated documents, and much testimony remains.(777)

Fordham was a sleepy little village, in the 1840s, strung out along the Kingsbridge Road, the old stage line northward. The place dated from a New York manor, created in 1676. When the Poes moved there, it was just beginning to feel the influx of families from New [page 568:] York. The Lorillards and others already had summer homes in the neighborhood, and the Roman Catholic College of St. John had been built nearby on Rose Hill. A station had recently been constructed to take care of the two trains daily on the Harlem Railroad at Williamsbridge, a mile and a half to the north. There was not even a post office. Poe had to walk for his mail about a mile, to West Farms.

The cottage occupied a triangular plot of ground of about an acre where the Kingsbridge Road began to turn east up to Fordham, at present marked by the line of East One Hundred Ninety-second Street. It was not a “Dutch Cottage” as it has so often been described, but a simple, frame, workman's dwelling built when the colonial influence still prevailed, some time after the Revolution, as the hand-cut laths, and nails, and the mud plaster employed in its construction show. It seems to have been erected a little previous to 1816. The property in 1846 was owned by a neighboring farmer, a member of the Fordham Dutch Reformed Church, who, in the Spring of 1846, leased it to Poe.

The little house had broad paneled doors and small-paned windows. There were four rooms, two on each floor, a kitchen with an open fireplace, added soon after the building was erected, and a cow-shed lean-to.

In front, there was a small porch. Poe himself describes “the pillars of the piazza, enwreathed in jasmine, and sweet honeysuckle — the numerous pots of gorgeous flowers, the vivid green of the tulip tree leaves that partially overshadowed the cottage ... the large, flat, irregular slabs of granite ... imbedded in turf not nicely adapted, but with velvety sod filling frequent between the stones (leading) hither and thither from the house.” In the poet's day the entire dwelling seems to have been covered with the broad, dark-pine shingles, then common.

The main room on the ground floor was the parlor where Poe wrote. “The more substantial furniture consisted of a round table, a few chairs (including a large rocking chair) and a sofa or rather settee ... its material was plain maple painted a creamy white slightly understriped with green.” Poe also speaks in Landor's Cottage, evidently from life, of a vase of blooming flowers on the parlor table and “the fireplace nearly filled with a vase of brilliant geraniums.” There were more flowers, vases on the shelves and mantel, and clustered violets about the windows. Such was the room in which he wrote in the summer days. The family evidently ate, after the manner of rural dwellers, in the kitchen.

Next to the parlor was a cubby-hole of a bedroom which Mrs. Clemm at first occupied, but into which Virginia was brought to be nursed later. Here she died. The two garret rooms were evidently Poe's and Virginia's. The east attic room was, at first, occupied by Virginia before the cold weather came, as her bedstead now shows the knobs cut off on [page 569:] one side, in order to allow it to fit under the low eaves. Poe's own room was next to Virginia's in the garret, “a low, cramped chamber, lighted by little square windows like portholes.”(778) The furnishings were poverty stricken, but, as always, Mrs. Clemm was able to make the place gleaming and spotless. The walls were not papered, but covered with a lime wash. A little winding staircase led to the rooms above, and there were broad, plain, scoured, plank floors.

The surroundings were in keeping. The house itself stood facing west, close to the road, with a little dooryard filled with lilac bushes, and a large cherry tree. A few blue flagstones led from the gate to the porch. There was a wood, and an apple orchard just north — across what is now Poe Park. The hill doped away to the south, almost from the verge of the porch, dipping down into Mill Creek Valley. To the south, down a slope of lawn, there were wide, sweeping views over the farms of the Bronx. The most living, contemporary description has been given by Mrs. Gove Nichols:

One must remember that fame was the only reward that he could expect, in compensation for a life that had been spent in toil and devoid of any apparent reward. Yet this outburst shows to what an exalted point the ego had attained. It was only a year before Eureka was written, when the climax of self exaltation was achieved.

This outburst from the hidden depths of the man's nature, reveals a more than rational ambition. Fame had become the craving, the morbid thirst of a soul condemned to solitary confinement. To be universally upon all lips, even after death, would somehow, he felt, identify him with men and bring them closer. Life had been a dream. His children were only dreams. To make them live, was to survive, in part, himself. “No man lives unless he is famous!” — glory would be his only immortality. One wonders — Mrs. Gove's recollections were published in the Six Penny Magazine!(777)

The presence of so marked a character as Mr. Poe did not pass unnoticed in the annals of so quiet a neighborhood. The visitors from town, the suffering of his wife, and the various shifts to which hew as put by his obvious poverty were, no doubt, the of much rural gossip. Mrs. Clemm was forced occasionally to borrow a shilling from some of the neighbors to get Eddie's mail when he was unable to walk to the West Farms Post Office, and the priests and students at St. Johns College remembered meeting Poe, from time to time, walking along the lanes, often at nightfall, muttering, lost in his dreams, a lonely and mysterious figure.

He occasionally walked out the Kingsbridge road to visit the Macombs, or down to the village of Tremont, where he had struck up an acquaintance with the resident physician at a home for incurables. The Valentines were also good and kind neighbors; their name recalled boyhood memories to Poe, a fact which would have been of considerable import to him, for he was almost superstitious about such associations. It was probably the deciding reason for his having rented the cottage from them! Virginia and Mrs. Clemm were especially good friends with the neighbors on the Van Cott farm nearby, and, from a Miss Susan Cromwell, another neighbor, comes a particularly tragic anecdote.(778) [page 572:]

Miss Cromwell lived a little beyond the Poes. In the Spring of 1846, as she was passing by the cottage up the Kingsbridge Road, she noticed Poe up in the cherry tree gathering the red, ripe fruit, and tossing it to Virginia, who caught it in her lap, laughing and calling back, as she sat dressed in white on a green sod bank beneath. Poe was standing on a branch above her, about to toss another bunch of cherries into the bright red pile already gathered in Virginia's apron, when white and crimson suddenly became one in the tide which leaped from her lips. Poe sprang from the branches, clasped Virginia in his arms, and vanished with her fainting in his arms, through the door of the little cottage. “They were,” said the literal Miss Cromwell, “awful poor.”

Through all the years, Poe had retained his West Point cloak or overcoat, for during the Fordham episode, we hear of it several times. It was stolen from him once, after he had left it in a tavern near the Harlem Railroad Station, but seems to have been recovered through a warrant issued by his friend Justice Lorillard. So marked a garment, in so small a neighborhood, was not hard to trace down. It was this same cape or coat which played such a tragic rôle in the Winter that followed.

From a family by the name of Bushby nearby, comes the information that, while at Fordham, Poe was sponsor at the baptism of a child named for him. Significantly enough, he did not desire the boy to bear his middle name, and the namesake was baptized “Edgar Albert.”(779) It was also noted that the Rector of the Episcopal Church at West Farms paid some visits to the cottage, and that Poe became friends with one of the priests in the seminary nearby.

Far from being a restful, and a quiet retirement, Fordham, in 1846, was to Poe a place of confusion. There was, of course, Virginia. He was torn between his pride, and the trammelings of poverty. His health and unstrung nervous condition precluded any work, except intermittently, perhaps upon a few poems. The ideas of Eureka must, in spite of everything, have already been taking shape. These dreams had been disturbed by his domestic tragedy, the henpecks of the literati, and the annoying affair with English. Rosalie had returned to Richmond in July.

During all this time, the usual active correspondence of a prominent literary man had been underway.(780) It was, under the circumstances of his health, a considerable tax at that time upon him. The most intimate, [page 573:] and sympathetic letter of 1846, belongs to the correspondence with Thomas Holley Chivers. In July, Poe received a whole bundle of his letters, which the landlady at his former lodging, 195 Broadway, had neglected to forward. He hastened to reply. The intercourse of the two was most illuminating and intimate, Chivers afterward prepared a life of Poe.(781) At the beginning of the year, and continued throughout, there was an interchange of letters between Duyckinck, and Poe. The former was now acting as Poe's literary agent, having published his poems and tales. Poe was anxious to get out another collection of his tales giving a fuller selection, and in January, 1846, he had sent the proposed collection to Duyckinck, proposing that Mr. Wiley advance him $50 for the copyright. About the same time he wrote to Griswold asking him to further the plan. He was dissatisfied with the narrow range of his stories in the published edition.

Neither Dr. Griswold nor Mr. Duyckinck agreed, and nothing further came of the matter. In April, Poe received the letter from Elizabeth Barrett which so pleased him. With Duyckinck there was also, in April, further correspondence about the anthology upon which Poe seems to have worked spasmodically at Fordham, and in June a short note concerning the reply to English, and a review of Poe's Tales to be written up at the suggestion of Martin Farquhar in the Literary Gazette.

In April, Poe had been chosen by a concurrent vote of the literary societies of the University of Vermont, as the poet for an anniversary celebration in August. He was unable, on account of ill-health and poverty, to go, but he wrote to Duyckinck asking to have the invitation given publicity. He also offered to sell that part of his correspondence containing the autographs of “statesmen,” to Wiley & Putnam. Much of the correspondence of the Summer deals with the miserable English controversy.

There were letters to Willis, Godey, Duyckinck and William Gilmore Simms. Simms’ reply — he was then in New York — on July 30, 1846, is one of the best advised that Poe received. Poe had asked Simms to aid him in the English controversy.

— all of which was most excellent advice. Amid the pot pourri of Poe's correspondence, against the emotional confusion of his nature, and his growing egotism, such letters availed little. What he more desired was admiration and sympathy. This was liberally supplied to him, in the letters from Philip Pendleton Cooke, another poet, whose nature, judging from the passages in the works of Poe which he most admired, was in peculiar sympathy with Poe's. Miss Lynch continued her kindly interest in the family at Fordham, and, despite Poe's despairing letters to her, wrote, cheering him, and was of great charitable assistance. Poe was hardly in town at all at this period. One of the few references to his appearances in New York is contained in an undated letter from Miss Lynch (Mrs. Botta) in which his reciting a poem, perhaps Ulalume, at a Tuesday evening party is mentioned.(783)

Poe did little literary work at Fordham in 1846. In a letter to Chivers, in July, he notices the fact, and, on December 15, he writes:

Part of this business was loose ends, left over from the Broadway Journal. Some of the correspondence of the period was with G. W. Eveleth, a Maine man, who read Poe's work with admiration, took a keen interest in him personally, and has left some excellent contemporary criticisms of Poe.(784) June had brought a letter from Nathaniel Hawthorne, then at Salem, about Mosses from an Old Manse written on the seventeenth. He says: [page 576:]

During the Summer and Autumn, by hook or crook, the inmates of the cottage at Fordham had managed to exist As the Winter closed down upon them exceptionally cold (as the Summer had been unusually hot), poverty dire and inescapable, hunger and lack of clothing were now made doubly intolerable by extreme cold, There was a little stove in the kitchen, and an open fireplace in the parlor. The only cheerful recollections of the entire Winter came from the Catholic priest, who dropped in sometimes of evenings to spend a few hours before the fire with Poe, and engaged him in metaphysical conversation. As the Winter advanced, fuel was scarce. It became impossible to heat the little garret upstairs, and Virginia was moved down into the tiny bedroom next to the parlor. She was now unable to leave bed often, the end was so near. The Bathhursts, some kindly neighbors, sent food and fuel. In the snow-drifts the visits of the literati had ceased, and Poe and Mrs. Clemm were left alone to listen to the wolf howling at the door, and the whines of the winter wind that swirled the snow down the Kingsbridge Road. Mrs. Clemm alone ventured out, to “borrow” a few eggs or potatoes.

Virginia lay on a straw mattress, wrapped in Poe's cloak, for there were no blankets, hugging the cat to keep warm. In the little bedroom Poe could see her faint breath, as he bent over her holding her hands or feet to keep them from aching with cold. There must have been days, when even the spring was frozen solid, and fuel was low; dark, winter afternoons and long, terrifying nights as Virginia fluttered down into the abyss, when it seemed as if all three must inevitably perish. Through it all persisted Mrs. Clemm's unceasing nursing of her two children, and the pride of “Israfel” and “Lucifer.” Only the neighbors knew, pitied, and mercifully helped.

By what seems to have been a special dispensation, Mrs. Gove Nichols was impelled to make a visit to Fordham, apparently early in December, 1846. Poe and Mrs. Clemm were battling to keep Virginia alive.

Mrs. Shew, for it was to her that Mrs. Gove Nichols had appealed, sent “a feather bed and an abundance of bed-clothing and other comforts.” She also headed a subscription among friends, and brought Mrs. Clemm $60 the next week, after which her visits and ministrations were untiring. The whole affair started a great deal of talk among the literati and in journalistic circles, now to a more humane and admirable tune. Indeed, in this matter, all the natural kindliness of the good but foolish women who had surrounded Poe, and of the editors, and his social friends, comes out with a clear and merciful light. All the bigotries of literary cliques were temporarily forgotten, and natural human kindness came to the fore.

Mrs. Osgood received a letter from Mrs. Hewitt, written December 20, which informed her of Poe's bitter plight.

Mrs. Osgood was touched, and undoubtedly helped materially. Site also spread the news, and wrote to her sister-in-law, Mrs. Locke, at Lowell, Massachusetts. Mrs. Locke sent Poe some verses mid More substantial help. Mrs; Hewitt had undertaken to get up a subscription for the Poes among editors, so the matter got into print. “I fear it will hurt Poe's pride to have his affairs made so public.” Soon afterward, greatly to Poe's own chagrin, this paragraph appeared in the New York Express:

N. P. Willis was much moved by this notice, and with his characteristic kindness, gentleness, and tact, published in the Home Journal, which he was then editing, an appeal and a touching eulogy of Poe. In this, under the guise of an appeal for his former editor, he advocated a house of refuge for authors. This was enclosed to Poe with a kindly note. [page 578:] Poe was shocked that his affairs had thus been noised abroad, and replied, thankfully, but guardedly, saying that he had many private friends to whom he could have appealed, but that he deprecated public charity. The upshot of the whole matter was, that largely through the efforts of Mary Louise Shew, the Poe household was saved, and Virginia enabled to die at home surrounded by a few primary comforts.

Behind it all is the ghost of this poor little sufferer, seeming to revive at times, for her natural temperament was childishly merry, when little gifts were brought her, and she was surrounded for a while by the voices and kindly faces of friends. She had been married as a child to the loneliest and most ambitious man in the world. She seems to have dung to him pathetically, knowing him as no one else could. All attempts to present her real character must be forever baffled. What she was to others, she remains to us, an immature, sweet, and trusting, but scarcely visible girl-‘ wife and invalided woman, caught by fate in the net of a tragedy, the strength of whose meshes she could no more glimpse than a fish seized upon by the trawler in dayless submarine valleys. Alxmt her there was, it must ever be remembered, the strange dignity of suffering and unfulfillment that requires, and yet mocks at tears.

Even at this desperate pass, we catch a glimpse of Poe at work in the little “parlor” at Fordham, the day before Christmas:

Christmas Day, 1846, was passed with Virginia hovering upon the verge. During the last days of the year, Poe seems to have been working on the pages of his anthology while Mrs. Clemm, between intervals of nursing Virginia and receiving Mrs. Shew and others, went to get the mail, and scanned the papers eagerly for any mention of Eddie. The many reports about the family, and the echoes of the English controversy [page 579:] had no doubt sharpened her eyes. The last hours of Virginia had been made more miserable by anonymous letters which were sent her, enclosing various reports circulated about the family's misery, and English's attack. Among the worst of these persecutors was the inveterate and ingenious Mrs. Ellet. Poe said that Virginia's end was hastened by Mrs.Ellet's pen.

Israfel was now somewhat cheered to learn from Mrs. Clemm's gleanings from the public prints that his work was being republished, and attracting attention in England, Scotland and France. The sight of Poe writing and corresponding, while Mrs. Clemm used her shears on the newspapers before the fire in the living-room, with Virginia dying in the little room scarcely twenty feet away, is a curious but yet natural one. The wife's illness had became the familiar condition of the household for many years. Catarina walked about the cottage, her tail in the air, sometimes perching upon Poe's shoulder, or lying upon Virginia's bed. Mrs. Shew or Mrs. Gove Nichols dropped in, bringing dainties and comforts from the town.

On December 30, Poe wrote his guarded and carefully calculated reply to Willis, and another letter to Duyckinck enclosing the news of his French republication, and the letter from Stonehaven, Scotland. The clock ticked on, and 1846 glided into 1847.

New Year's brought the shadow to the door. By the close of January it had reached to Virginia's bedside, and the end was at hand. On the twenty-ninth of January, 1847, the relatives and friends had begun to gather at Fordham. Among those who arrived on that day was Poe's “Mary,” his old Baltimore sweetheart, to whom Virginia had carried notes as a little girl. To her surprise she found Virginia sitting up.

One can see the poor, little, wasted body with the still plump face sitting propped up in the chair, gazing into the fire, with Poe and Mary on either side, thinking not of herself , but of what the future was to bring to her husband. She felt he needed friends. Mary went back that afternoon to New York, and Mrs. Smith (Miss Herring), the Poes’ and Clemms’ . Baltimore cousin, arrived.(593 and 614) Towards evening, Virginia evidently began to sink rapidly, for Poe wrote to Mrs. Shew a letter that must have been delivered by a friend.

Mrs. Shew came out the nest morning. On the way to Fordham on the stage, she met “Poe's Mary” also bound for the cottage, and as they drove along through the bitter cold, they talked about Virginia.

Virginia was now lying again in her little cubby hole of a bedroom on the ground floor. During the afternoon, she was still rational, and there was a final gleam. Mrs. Shew and Mrs. Smith were sitting by her bedside when Virginia took from beneath her pillow a picture of Poe, and the jewel case which had belonged to Mrs. Poe, the poet's mother, and gave them to Mrs. Shew. She also asked for two letters from Mrs. Allan which she had read to Mrs. Shew.(40) These, it appears, had been written to him after his running away from Richmond in 1827, were couched in affectionate terms, and begged him to return. They exonerated Poe from blame for the troubles in the Allan household. The letters, then or later, fell into the hands of Poe's cousin, Mrs. Smith. Eliza White also remembered having seen these letters. Could they be found, they might constitute an important piece of evidence in the story of Poe.(787)

Mrs. Shew said that Poe had denied himself many necessaries, and had suffered both cold and hunger to provide food and medicines for Virginia. At the time of her death, he was very ill. Virginia's passing must have had, for him, all the imaginative attributes of the mystic horror with which he regarded death, and her tiny bedroom have become the chamber where “Ligeia” strove fearfully to enter the corpse of “Rowena.” Nothing was spared him. After nightfall apparently, Virginia smothered to death.

About all the tragedies that dogged the career of Israfel there was a complete, an ironically artistic, and certainly a Poesqueness that made them inimitable. After the death of Virginia, it was remembered that [page 581:] there was no picture of her which the family possessed. Accordingly, while she still lay dead, propped up in her bed, a water color sketch of her was hastily made by one of the ladies present, showing her after she had succumbed, with her eyes closed. The sketch was apparently afterward retouched in its reproductions, and the eyes of the dead woman opened. It is this picture of Virginia with which the public has become familiar, through infinite reduplication. About it, is all the air of tragedy and mortality, a certain creepiness which is associated with the popular legend of Poe.

Mrs. Shew provided a beautiful linen dress in which to bury Virginia, and she and Mrs. Clemm were assisted in their last ministrations by Mary, the adopted daughter of John Valentine, the owner of the little cottage.

On the day of the funeral, Virginia's coffin lay on the writing table before the windows in the little parlor. Some of the neighbors, the Valentines, and others came in. N. P. Willis, solicitous, and kindly to the last, came out from the city with G. P. Morris, his partner. It was very cold. Mary remained at the house. Poe, wrapping himself in the cloak which had but lately been used to keep Virginia warm, followed her to the grave. Mrs. Shew had hidden it but he had nothing adequate to wear, and the day was cold and grey. Virginia was borne down an alley of funereal trees, and left in the burial vault of the Valentine family in the graveyard of life Fordham Dutch Reformed Church, in the presence of her husband, Mrs. Clemm, Mrs. Shew, Mrs. Ann S. Stephens, and a few others.(788) Poe returned to the house where he was in a state of numbed collapse for some weeks afterward. Mrs. Clemm, in the desperation of poverty, tried to sell Virginia's gold thimble to Mary Devereaux before she left. Mary was too poor to buy it. Thus ended a long and haggard chapter of suffering. The tragedy of Israfel was about to enter upon its final phase.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 535:]

734.  Sumner, page 54.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 536:]

735.  It must be remembered that the written speech of the time was the reverse face of the situation, the attempt to be refined and genteel. Americans were greatly troubled by the criticisms of English travelers and authors of the time, who laughed at the accent and use of words which were inherited from English grandfathers. North American English early began to go its own way, in vocabulary, spelling, and syntax. See the remarks of Noah Webster in his early dictionaries. Also The American Language, Mencken, and Professor Krapp's and Lounsberry's comments in their various articles and books. The effect of the hardy Scotch and Scotch-Irish immigrants, and of the Irish and German immigrants upon the language spoken in the United States, has seldom been given full credit for its virile and enriching contributions.

736.  In rhyming Poe occasionally was inconsistent with the terminal “r.” In John Allan's household it would have been rolled; in Virginia neglected.

737.  The anti-slavery propaganda content of New England's literature was largely the cause of its contemporary popularity in the North, and its present eclipse.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 537:]

738.  Americans in the 1840s had a blind faith in the form of their own government as the “best” for all peoples.

739.  By turning to the Congressional Record of 1845-49 any number of similar bombastic manifestos may be enjoyed ad lib. Many of the speeches by contemporary Congressmen would now lead to an interchange of notes, and the withdrawal of ambassadors, especially by South American countries.

740.  “This disconcerted us so greatly that we thought it advisable to vary the attack to Metaphysics. We sent for a copy of a book called the ‘Dial’ and read out of it a chapter or two about something which is not very clear, but which the Bostonians call the ‘great Movement Of Progress.’ (The Dial is now published in New York.) The Count merely said that Great Movements were awfully common things in his day, as for Progress, it was at one time quite a nuisance,” Poe in Some Words with a Mummy. Italics supplied.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 538:]

741.  See Poe's poem on his own idea of “Eldorado” written at the time of the Gold Rush, Chapter XXVI, page 801.

742.  At “Economy” on the Ohio River below Pittsburgh. These people being celibates, strange doings ensued. This and similar colonies are an interesting paragraph in American history.

743.  See Chapter XIX, page 345.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 539:]

744.  Myriad attempts in the literature of the day to be mysterious, and mystical can be found. They lacked the essential element of imagination.

745.  Arch Ramsay, Stonehaven, Scotland, to Poe, November 30, 1846. Poe replied “explaining,” and asking news of his Allan “relatives” in Ayreshire. Ramsay could not locate them.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 540:]

746.  Collyer to Poe, Boston, date given.

747.  Poe never entered the magic realm of the then 400 in New York. This centered about Coventry Waddell's Gothic Villa! — at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street. The contribution of this group to “American civilization” was the invention of policemen's uniforms by James G. Gerard at a fancy dress ball at the Villa where he appeared in “fun uniform.” The tattered “rattle watch” was forthwith a thing of the past Mr. Poe was denied the privilege of association with such intellectual giants, a fact which has recently been lamented in the public prints.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 541:]

748.  The sources for the descriptions of the salons and personalities of the literati are all taken from contemporary sources, — letters, diaries, magazines, prefaces to “works,” and old prints. Some of the most important are, Poe, Stoddard, N. P. Willis, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Godey's Lady's Book, the Home Journal, and files of contemporary newspapers. In order to avoid a senseless profusion of notes, the curious reader is referred generally to the grotesque literature of the time available at a public library — especially Poe's own papers on the literati in Godey's Lady's Book.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 542:]

749.  ☞“It is useless for others to pretend to give fashions, for Godey's Lady's Book is the standard that governs the female dress of this republic.”

750.  Powhatan; a metrical romance in seven cantos, by Seba Smith (husband of Mrs. Smith), New York: Harper and Brothers, 1846. Poe remarked of this author, “We doubt whether he could distinctly state the difference between an epic and an epigram.” — Literati.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 543:]

751.  Stoddard had warmed his hands before shaking hands with his hostess!

752.  Italics supplied — one of many such remarks by persons who knew Poe.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 544:]

753.  This description is a little earlier than 1846, but holds substantially true for Poe's time in New York.

754.  In the late 1860's that is.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 545:]

755.  Broadway Journal, I, 17. One of Poe's poems frequently republished since July, 1835, with some eight or nine revisions, “going the rounds of the press.” There were a number of other items published for Mrs. Osgood by Poe in the Broadway Journal.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 547:]

756.  R. H. Stoddard Memoir, 1874, page 81. A most untrustworthy compilation, except in regard to the author's own personal recollections of Poe.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page ??:]

757.  See Chapter XXII, page 490.

758.  For Poe's own description of this projected critique on his contemporaries, see Poe to George W. Eveleth, New York, Deember 15, 1846, Poe-Eveleth Papers, Prof. J. S> WIlson, Alumni Bulletin, University of Virginia, January, 1924, page 10. See Poe to Ticknor, December 34,1846, — from Fordham, text reproduced, page 578.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 549:]

759.  “Thomas Done Brown”; Poe's article on English in The Literati. English was a doctor, lawyer, editor, poet, controversialist, and finally — a Congressman.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 552:]

760.  Poe, in his reply to English, speaks of Dr. Francis as having intimate knowledge of the reasons for his (Poe's) drinking, and by Inference, of Virginia's illness.

761.  Century Magazine — October, 1909.

762.  “Estell's” real name was Sarah Anna. She scorned this baptismal handicap in the literary race for fame, and even persuaded her husband to pay Griswold to make the alteration in a complimentary article. An acrostic written by Poe to “Sarah Anna” did not produce tie desired effect upon “Stella.”

763.  The Brennans at Bloomingdale seem to have had something to do with recommending the Poes to former friends, both at Turtle Bay and Fordham, Mrs. Brennan and her daughter Martha drove Mrs. Clemm about the country a good deal.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 554:]

764.  Bulletin of the North side (Bronx) Board of Trade for January, 1909, — Poe Memorial Issue.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 556:]

765.  Kindly attempts by biographers to furnish the Fordham cottage in May, 1846, with funds received from the libel suit settled in February, 1847, are hardly ingenious, to say the least. The opinion of the author is, that the cottage was not in any sense “furnished,” until Mrs. Shew gave the Poes the articles contributed by charity, in December, 1846, and after. See Mrs. Weiss for the description of articles pawned by Mrs. Clemm.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 559:]

766.  The character of Rosalie Poe has been greatly misunderstood by several biographers, who have fastened upon her the names of “idiot,” “imbecile,” and so forth. Rosalie was a little eccentric — undeveloped. This was later made worse by misfortunes sufficient to turn the head of many a normal old woman. She wrote a fair letter, taught writing in a school in Richmond, and understood, far too well, what was going on at Fordham, to please Mrs. Clemm, In 1846, Rose was still living with the Mackenzies in Richmond. Mrs. Clemm put her to sewing while she stayed at the cottage. See Mrs. Clemn's letters to Rosalie, also Mrs. Weiss, Home Life of Poe.

767.  Ingram, — from the Griswold Collection, also published by Woodberry and Harrison.

768.  See Mrs. Weiss, Home Life of Poe, for a doubtful interpretation of this letter.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 560:]

769.  It must be remembered that Mrs. Clemm was haunted by the horror of going to the poor-house, a fate which she escaped by going to a church home. She mentions the poor-house in letters to Rosalie, in 1846.

770.  From later correspondence between Mrs. Houghton and Mrs. Whitman, it is quite evident that “Stella” got hold of Poe through Mrs. Clemm, and that he, at first, detested her. Poe also spoke bitterly to Mrs. Gove of the reviews wrung from him by lucre, and his terrible misery.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 561:]

771.  Poe denied his being in debt to English in the reply in the Philadelphia Spirit of the Times, July 10, 1846.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 562:]

772.  The text of the original articles in the New York Mirror is here used by the courtesy of John T. Snyder, Esq., who supplied the author with the originals in his possession.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 563:]

773.  See also English writing October 29, 1896, in the Independent. “One word led to another and he [Poe] rushed toward me in a menacing manner.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 566:]

774.  Printed in Poe's reply to English in the Spirit of the Times.

775.  Thomas Holley Chivers, quoted by Prof. Woodberry in the Century Magazine, February, 1903.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 567:]

776.  Prof. Woodberry publishes the whole letter in the Century Magazine for February, 1903.

777.  Descriptions of the cottage and the life led at Fordham by Poe and his family come from Transactions of the Bronx Society of Arts, Sciences and History, vol. I, part V; The Poe Cottage at Fordham, R. G. Bolton; reminiscences attributed (correctly) to Mrs. Gove Nichols, the Sixpenny Magazine, February, 1863; Items: New York Sun, October 3, 1915; Church Records of Fordham and West Farms. “Poe's Mary,” see note No, 422; pamphlets and material available at the Poe cottage at Fordham; Boston Herald, January 20, 1009; Appleton's Journal, July 18, 1874; the Book Buyer for January, 1903; maps, street plans, and several clippings and letters loaned the author by collectors, not available for reference; bill for the widening of the Kingsbridge Road, New York State Archives; Petition of the Poe Memorial Association to the Legislature and Governor of New York, April 8, 1896, etc., etc. Also obviously autobiographical descriptions in Landor's Cottage, and other stories by Poe. Also letters of Mrs. Shew in the Ingram Correspondence at the University of Virginia. Personal visits to the Poe cottage.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 569:]

778.  Prof. Woodberry, 1909, vol. II, page 213.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 572:]

779.  Poe is known to have signed his name Edgar Allan Poe, only twice. (News of a letter said to belong to the early Baltimore period (sic) so signed, has recently been rumored to be in a collector's hands in Berlin.) Griswold was responsible for using the full name habitually. Poe evidently desired to suppress it. Poe, in his works, frequently refers in a disguised way to his middle name, and the reason for it. See Three Sundays in a Week, The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq., etc., notes 191 to 197.

780.  Griswold, Miss Barrett, Eveleth, Duyckinck, Godey, Miss Lynch, Cooke, Ramsay, Willis, and a half dozen or so others engaged Poe's time in letters and replies in 1846.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 573:]

781.  For an account of this Life of Poe by Chivers see Prof. Woodberry's article in the Century Magazine for February, 1003, reference note 775 above.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 575:]

782.  Postscript omitted — Simms was in New York, and too busy with a book on the press to visit Poe at Fordham, for which he apologizes. Letter frequently reprinted The paragraphing has been supplied here. Letter in Griswold Collection, reprinted by Prof. Harrison and Prof. Woodberry.

783.  This seems to be the same recitation referred to by Mrs. Gove Nichols. See page 570.

784.  For the Poe-Eveleth correspondence see the Bulletin of the New York Public Library, edited by Dr. Thomas Ollive Mabbott. Also Prof. James Southall Wilson's The Letters of Edgar A. Poe to George W. Eveleth, Alumni Bulletin, University of Virginia, January, 1924.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 576:]

785.  See, for a full discussion, Poe's review of Hawthorne in Godey's Lady's Book for November, 1847, Harrison reprints, vol. XIII, pages 141-155.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 578:]

786.  Letter in the Justice Holmes Collection in the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. Courtesy of the Librarian of Congress, and the Honorable Justice Holmes.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 580:]

787.  This incident constitutes an important link in the Poe-Allan mystery. Though Mrs. Shew is also traced the miniature of Mrs. David Poe (see note 40), also Mrs. Poe's jewel box, given to Rosalie in 1811. Rosalie may have brought this with her to Fordham on the visit in 1846. It shows, at least, that Mrs. Poe's momentoes and, by inference, her letters (see note 41) were also still preserved. For a discussion of Mrs. Allan's letters see Complete Poems, by J. H. Whitty, Memoir, large edition, pages xxx and xxxi, Mrs. Shew says in her diary that the letters she heard read were from the second Mrs. Allan. This is an obvious mistake. It is impossible that the second Mrs. Allan should have written to Poe. It is known that she did not All authorities agree on this. The letters were from the first Mrs. Allan, Poe's foster-mother.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 581:]

788.  In 1875, owing to the destruction of the cemetery in which Virginia had been buried, the contents of the graves and vaults at Fordham were removed, or scattered. Virginia's remains were rescued by Gill, Poe's biographer, put in a box under his bed, etc., — and, after exciting considerable gruesome and nauseous curiosity as the “bones of Annabel Lee,” were finally taken to Baltimore and buried beside Poe, where they now rest. Thus fate was gruesomely consistent to the last.