[page 30:]

CHAPTER III.
 
WANDERINGS.

POE made his way at once towards Boston, and there in the spring tried to make a good start in the world by publishing his youthful verses. He persuaded Calvin F. S. Thomas, a poor youth of nineteen, who had just set up a shop at 70 Washington Street, to undertake the job, and in due course he saw the first and unacknowledged heir of his invention in the shape of a small, thin book, mean in appearance and meagre in contents, entitled “Tamerlane and other Poems.”(1) This volume, the only venture of Thomas in the book-trade, was published about midsummer; its receipt was advertised by the leading magazines,(2) and two years [page 31:] later, although the edition was small and obscure, it was still sufficiently known to find mention in the first comprehensive work on American Poetry.(1)

It passed into circulation such as is indicated by these contemporary notices, and in view of that fact Poe’s statement that it was suppressed for private reasons counts for little. It may as well be confessed at once that any unsupported assertion by Poe regarding himself is to be received with great caution. In this case, as will presently be seen, his circumstances give no plausibility to his story.

There is, perhaps, more color of truth in the claim put forth in his boyishly affected preface that this volume was written in 1821-22. As that was the time when his mind would naturally rapidly unfold, and, as the statement agrees with the tradition of a manuscript volume shown to Master Clarke by Mr. Allan, in order to obtain the for mer’s advice respecting its publication, it is prob able that some of the poems at least were then drafted; but from the passages that reveal the de pressing influence of his own home and imply his experience of love and death, as well as from what is recorded of his habits at the University, it is clear that they were re-written, and really rep resent his genius at the stage it was in when they were printed. The precocity of the verses is [page 32:] parked, but it is a full-grown youth, not a child of thirteen, who has been bitten by the Byronic malady; and, indeed, striking as they are, their relief is mainly due to the light flashed back on them from Poe’s perfect work.

“Tamerlane” in its first form shows more poetic susceptibility, if less literary power, than in its present one. In the story itself there is little difference between the two versions. In both the great conqueror relates to a conventional friar how, in his boyhood, among the mountains of Taglay, he had loved a maiden, and stirred alike by his ambition for her and for himself had one day determined to go away and seek the empire which the prescience of genius assured him would be his. In pursuit of this plan, he says, without giving any hint of his departure or its purpose, he left her asleep in a matted bower; and naturally enough when, after the fulfillment of his hopes, he returned to seat her on “the throne of half the world,” he found his destined bride had died in consequence of his desertion. Hinc illæ lachrymce.

Neither in this tale, nor in the nine fugitive pieces of a personal character which followed it, was there anything to command public attention, especially as the style and spirit were distinctively imitative, the constructions involved, the meaning dark, and the measure as lame as the old Tartar himself is fabled to have been. The interest of the volume now lies partly in its plainly autobiographical [page 33:] passages, such as those which describe how conscious genius takes its own impulse for the unerring divine instinct, or express the poet’s naive and slightly bitter resentment on finding himself not a prophet in his own household; and partly in the subtler self-revelation afforded by the reflection of passing poetic moods, which it may be remarked are surer signs of promise than poetic ideas, be cause, although they may as easily become conventional, they cannot be so successfully appropriated from others by patience and art, nor can their language ever ring true except numine præsenti by the very breath of the indwelling Apollo. Slow, confined, and stammering as is their expression in these, earliest poems, they show that, however affected by the artificiality and turgidity, the false sentiment, the low motive, and the sensational accessories of the Byronic model, the young poet turned naturally to his own experience, and could write from his heart.

In particular, two characteristics come out as primary in Poe’s nature. He was one of the proudest of men, and from many expressions here it is plain that he cultivated pride, even in boy hood. He thought it the distinctive manly quality. He declares with emphasis that every nobly endowed soul, conscious of its power, will ever

Byron had sown the evil seed, but it had fallen in [page 34:] very favorable soil. This personal trait, however, needs only to be glanced at in passing. The second characteristic belongs rather to his temperament, and affected his art more directly. The sight of beauty did not affect his aesthetic sense so much as it aroused his dreaming faculty. He looks out on the world as a vague and undefined delight; he notes only the broad and general features of the landscape; he does not see any object in detail; his imagination so predominates over his perceptive powers, he is so much more poet than artist, that he loses the beautiful in the suggestions, the reveries, the feelings, it awakens, and this emotion is the value he found in beauty throughout his life. The mood was a part of his ordinary experience. Some times he describes it: —

Sometimes he expresses it (and in the lines is heard the first whisper of “Ligeia”): —

This exaltation is continually the object of his regrets and of his longings; he ascribes to it a symbolic spiritual meaning, and even a moral power, as being something

This value, whether true or false, which he gave to such emotional moods, is the significant thing in his poetic life, and shows that the dreaming faculty was a primary element in his genius. Sometimes, it is true, the real scene remains prominent in his mind; but even then, although it does not fade away into mere emotion, it is not unchanged; it ceases to be natural, and is removed into the preternatural. In two of these early poems — “The Lake” and “Visit of the Dead” — is this the case, and it is noticeable that Poe retained both among his works, as if he perceived that of all in this collection they alone have his peculiar touch. In the latter, especially, the treatment of landscape is wholly his own; crude as its expression is, it affords the first glimpse of that new tract of Acheron, as it were, which he revealed “out of space, out of time:” —

Such imaginings — the vision of the throned stars with averted faces, the identifying of the outer fascination of an ill-omened nature with the mortal [page 36:] fever within, the dissolving of the spell as the red orbs flee far in the streaming eastern light — might well portend in poetry a genius as original as was Blake’s in art.

The abundant alloy in the substance of the work, however, and the rudeness of its execution justly condemned the volume to speedy oblivion. It brought neither fame to the poet nor money to the printer, and shortly after its publication the dis appearance of Poe, which had already occurred, was followed by the removal of Thomas to New York. Neither in his stay in that city nor during his later life in Buffalo, N. Y., and Springfield, Mo., did Thomas, who lived until 1876, ever mention, either to his own family or, so far as is known, to his friends or associates, that his first venture in the book-trade was Poe’s verses. In view of this fact,(1) in connection with the general publication of reminiscences by all who were ever well acquainted with Poe, and the special interest of this obscure portion of his life, it may be safely inferred that Thomas never identified the first au thor he knew with the famous poet who wrote “The Raven.” The obvious conclusion is that Poe lived in Boston under an assumed name.

Whether this were so or not, a few months had sufficed to exhaust Poe’s resources, and he now found himself, a youth of eighteen, poor and friendless [page 37:] less in the city of his birth, and without means of self-support. In this extremity he took the readiest way out of his difficulties, and on May 26 enlisted at Boston in the army of the United States as a private soldier, under the name of Edgar A. Perry.(1) He stated that he was born at Boston and was by occupation a clerk; and although minors were then accepted into the service, he gave his age as twenty-two years. He had, says the record, gray eyes, brown hair, and a fair complexion, and was five feet eight inches in height. He was at once assigned to Battery H, of the First Artillery, then serving in the harbor at Fort Independence; on October 31, the battery was ordered to Fort Moultrie, Charleston, S. C., and exactly one year later was again transferred to Fortress Monroe, Va. The character of Poe’s life during this period can now be but imperfectly made out, since the officers under whom he served are dead; but from papers presently to be given, it appears that he discharged his duties as company clerk and assistant in the commissariat department so as to win the good will of his superiors, and was in all respects a faithful and efficient soldier. On January 1, 1829, he was appointed Sergeant-Major, a promotion which, by the invariable custom of the army, was made only for merit. [page 38:]

At some time after reaching Fortress Monroe he is said to have made his situation known to Mr. Allan. It is not unlikely that his officers, becoming acquainted with his ability and education, and being interested in his character, urged his endeavoring to enter West Point (the only way by which he could rise in the service), and advised his applying to his foster-father for aid. How Mr. Allan received this news cannot, unfortunately, be determined; but as he apparently did not move in the matter until after the mortal illness of his wife, there is ground for the inference that he recalled the wanderer in compliance with her dying request. At all events, it seems to have been some days after Mrs. Allan’s death, which occurred February 28, 1829, that Poe returned to Richmond on leave of absence granted by his colonel on Mr. Allan’s application. The result of his visit is told in the following letter, which betrays a surprising inaccuracy in some of its details: —

The official reply to this application was an order, dated April 4, in accordance with which Poe was discharged, by substitute, April 15. Before leaving his post he obtained the following letters from his officers, which show conclusively [page 40:] that he had already formed the plan of entering West Point, and indicate that this entered into the understanding on which Mr. Allan took Kim into favor: —

Of more interest than all these, however, is Mr. Allan’s own communication: —

The coldness of feeling with which Mr. Allan here classes the boy he had brought up almost from infancy with the objects of his general charity might lead one to believe that possibly he did not intend to make Poe his heir, but on the contrary thought to be honorably rid of the burden of further patronage by having paid a sum of money for a substitute in the army, and helping to open a career for his proté gé in his self-chosen profession. Such a letter must have been galling to Poe’s pride. He presented it with the others to the Secretary of War in person.

On this journey to Washington he made the closer acquaintance of his blood relations in Baltimore, where, pending his appointment as a cadet, he now determined to publish his second volume of poems, the fruit of his leisure in the army. He also entered into some obscure relations with William Gwynn, Esq., then editor of the “Federal Gazette and Baltimore Daily Advertiser,” and showed him the manuscript of “Al Aaraaf,” which was declared [page 44:] to be “indicative of a tendency to anything but the business of matter-of-fact life.“(1) For his introduction the poet was probably indebted to Neilson Poe, his cousin at the third remove, who was employed in Gwynn’s office; and possibly, as has been stated, it was at the suggestion of Neilson’s father, George Poe, that he also sought the critical advice of John Neal, who had resided in Baltimore some few years before, and was now editing the “Yankee” at Boston. In the correspondence columns of that periodical, in its issue for September, 1829, the following appeared: —

The tone of this indicates that Poe was not backed by any strong personal friend of the critic. He received the doubtful satire with good grace, however, and replied in a letter printed in the December issue, and prefaced by these editorial remarks: —

“The following passages are from the manuscript works of a young author, about to be published in Baltimore. He is entirely a stranger to us, but with all their faults, if the remainder of Al Aaraaf and Tamerlane are as good as the body of the extracts here given to say nothing of the more extraordinary parts, he will de serve to stand high — very high — in the estimation of the shining brotherhood. Whether he will do so however, must depend, not so much upon his worth now in mere poetry, as upon his worth hereafter in something yet loftier and more generous — we allude to the stronger properties of the mind, to the magnanimous determination that enables a youth to endure the present, whatever the present may be, in the hope, or rather in the belief, the fixed, unwavering belief, that in the future he will find his reward.” [page 46:]

The poet’s letter follows: —

After Poe’s quotations from this poem and “Tamerlane,” and from the verses now known in a revised form as “A Dream within a Dream,” the editor concludes: —

“Having allowed our youthful writer to be heard in his own behalf, — what more can we do for the lovers of genuine poetry? Nothing. They who are judges will not need more; and they who are not — why waste words upon them? We shall not.”(1)

The volume(2) which gave rise to this correspondence [page 48:] was published at the close of the year. It was a thin book, but respectably printed, with a pro fusion of extra leaves bearing mottoes from English and Spanish poets, and with liberal margins. “Al Aaraaf,” the leading poem, is generally regarded as incomprehensible. Its obscurity is largely due to Poe’s attempting, not only to tell a story, but also to express in an allegoric form some truth which he had arrived at amid the uneventful leisure of the barracks. In the rapid growth of his intelligence, beauty, which had been merely a source of emotion, became an object of thought, — an idea as well as an inspiration. It was the first of the great moulding ideas of life that he apprehended. Naturally his juvenile fancy at once personified it as a maiden, Nesace, and, seeking a realm for her to preside over, found it in Al Aaraaf, — not the narrow wall between heaven and hell which in Moslem mythology is the place of the dead who are neither good nor bad, but the burning star observed by Tycho Brahe, which the poet imagines to be the abode of those spirits, angelic or human, [page 49:] who choose, instead of that tranquillity which makes the highest bliss, the sharper delights of love, wine, and pleasing melancholy, at the price of annihilation in the moment of their extremest joy. At this point the allegory becomes cumbrous, and the hand ling of it more awkward, because Poe tries to imitate Milton and Moore at the same time. By the use of incongruous poetic machinery, however, he contrives to say that beauty is the direct revelation of the divine to mankind, arid the protection of the soul against sin. The action of the maiden in whom beauty is personified begins with a prayer descriptive of the Deity, who in answer directs her, through the music of the spheres, to leave the confines of our earth and guide her wandering star to other worlds, which she should guard against the contagion of evil, —

In obedience to this mandate she chants an incantation in which she calls upon her subjects, and especially her handmaid Ligeia, the personified harmony of nature, to attend her. At this point the allegory terminates, and the story begins. It now appears that among the inhabitants of Al Aaraaf are two, Angelo and Ianthe, who cannot hear the summons because of their mutual passion, and so in reminiscences of the past and dreams of the future, unmindful, the lovers

Here, with singular abruptness, the poem concludes.

Of course, as serious work it was a failure. After “Queen Mab,” “Heaven and Earth,” or even “The Loves of the Angels,” it was pardonable only in a boy. The obscure allegory, the absence of any structural relation between it and the brief romance, the discordant influence of other poets who had broken Byron’s ascendency over Poe’s mind, and finally the style itself, with its long and ill-timed parentheses, its inconsequential pursuit of image into image and thought into thought, until all consistency in the meaning is lost, and other analogous defects of youthful composition, combine their separate elements of confusion to make the poem seemingly unintelligible. In fact, it seems as if Poe had stopped without completing his original conception; as if he found his constructive power too weak, and broke off without trying to unify or clarify his work. Nevertheless, it shows a gain of both mental and literary power; it has, too, a lively fancy, a flowing metre, and occasionally a fine line, that place it above “Tamerlane” as a product of crude genius. In particular, the characteristics oi Poe, the attempt to seize the impalpable, to fix the evanescent, to perceive the supersensual, are strongly marked, and although the management is in general as much Moore’s as that of “Tamerlane” is Byron’s, and there is nothing original in its substance except the symbolization of the pervasive [page 51:] music of nature in Ligeia, it proved that the author had a poetic faculty, and, if he could break from his masters and learn the clear use of words, was well starred. Poe’s experience in this effort was probably one premise of the conclusion which, helped by Coleridge’s dictum, he soon made, and held firmly ever after, — that a long poem is a contradiction in terms, and hence impossible.

The remainder of this pamphlet-like volume is, biographically, of little consequence. “Tamerlane,” wholly rewritten, has gained in rhetorical effectiveness, though it has lost in spontaneity, and in its present form is as clever and uninteresting an imitation of Byron as was ever printed. In some of the personal pieces, too, in which Poe takes the traditional attitude of the Pilgrim toward his past bliss and present desolation, Byron’s influence continues strong. The ruling genius of the hour, however, was plainly Moore, who in his poems supplied a model to be imitated, and in his prefaces and notes information to be either worked up into verse, or transferred bodily to the foot of the new pages. In the annotations to “Al Aaraaf ,” it must be noticed, Poe began the evil practice, which he continued through life, of making a specious show of learning by mentioning obscure names and quoting learned authorities at second hand. Among the sources used by him, besides Moore’s notes, Chateaubriand’s “Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem” is of most interest, since that author afforded [page 52:] suggestions for later work. On a line of the last page he himself comments with a sort of bravado: “Plagiarism — see the works of Thomas Moore — passim;” but, curiously enough, this occurs in the only one of the new poems which bears the mark of his originality. It is “Fairyland,” the sketch of the mist lighted by the moon, — the broad, pallid glamour descending at midnight on the vaporing earth, drowsing all things into deep slumber be neath its elfish light, and at noon soaring like a yellow albatross in far-off skies. There is a unique character in this imagery that makes it linger in the memory when the crudities of its expression are forgotten.

On the issue of this volume Poe returned to “Richmond, where, on the second evening after his arrival, he met a companion of his school-days, to whom he told some of his adventures, and gave carte blanche for copies of his poems at the book sellers, to be distributed among his former friends. While “Al Aaraaf” was puzzling those to whom it came as a kind of Christmas gift, and was struggling against the private merriment of the young wits of Baltimore and the public gibes of the literary oracle of that city, “The Minerva and Emerald,” edited by John H. Hewitt and Rufus Dawes, on the latter of whom full vengeance was wreaked long afterwards, Poe waited for his commission probably with some anxiety, as he reached and passed the age of twenty-one, the legal limit within [page 53:] which he could be appointed. Mr. Allan, too, may have felt some sympathetic uneasiness, inasmuch as he was preparing to take a new and youthful wife, who might not find Edgar’s presence in the house desirable. Poe’s attainment of his majority was not regarded as an insuperable obstacle. It was as easy to grow two years younger now as it had been to grow four years older when he enlisted, and he had already made up his mind to this rejuvenation some months before, when he wrote to John Neal that he was “not yet twenty.” Relying on this fiction, he solicited the influence of Powhatan Ellis, a younger brother of Mr. Allan’s partner, and then United States Senator from Mississippi, who wrote to Secretary Eaton, March 13, recommending him not from any personal acquaintance, but on information(1) from others. This letter received immediate attention. Poe was forthwith appointed a cadet, and on March 31 Mr. Allan gave his formal con sent as guardian to his ward’s binding himself to serve the United States for five years. The die being cast, Mr. Allan furnished Poe with what ever was necessary, and he probably thought, as he turned to the enjoyment of his wedded bliss, that [page 54:] his duty by the child he had, adopted was finally done. Poe, after a second visit at Baltimore, during which he called on Mr. N. C. Brooks,(1) a young litterateur, and got a poem accepted by him for a forthcoming annual, went on to West Point, where he soon forgot all about the promised contribution.

He entered the Military Academy on July 1, 1830, and settled at No. 28, South Barracks. His age is recorded as being then nineteen years and five months, but to the cadets he seemed older, and it was jokingly reported among them, much to Poe’s annoyance, that “he had procured a cadet’s appointment for his son, and the boy having died the father had substituted himself in his place.”(2) His room-mate, who tells this anecdote, recalls his expression as weary, worn, and discontented, and his conversation on literary topics as without exception carping and censorious. The three occupants of the room, it is added, gave it a bad reputation; and Poe, in particular, besides joining his two fellows in the consumption of brandy, totally neglected his studies. The features of this sketch, notwithstanding its being drawn by one of the actors, are too grim. On others of his classmates he left a more agreeable impression. One of them, Allan B. Magruder, Esq., writes of him as a fellow [page 55:] “of kindly spirit and simple style,” and continues his brief reminiscences as follows: —

This account is supported by the official records, which show that at the examination at the end of the half-year Poe stood third in French and seventeenth in mathematics, in a class of eighty-seven members; he was not in arrest, however, before January, and whether he incurred minor academic censure for neglect of his military duties cannot be determined, as the books were destroyed by fire in 1838. His life at West Point, so far from being the long-continued college prank that it has been represented, did not differ from his course at the University, except that his predominant literary taste, which found expression only in talk about the poets and pasquinades [page 56:] on the academy officials, isolated him among his associates, while the custom of the place and his own lack of means forbade the excessive gambling in which he had formerly indulged. He was the intellectual, self-absorbed, exclusive young fellow that he had been, but older, and consequently more discontented and unsettled. As before, he bore his share in the school-boy follies of his mates, and his greater neglect of routine duty may be ascribed in part to its increased irksomeness to him after his year of freedom from such restraints.

After the first six months had passed he made up his mind to leave the service. Whether he was merely tired of the profession he had voluntarily chosen, or felt that the recent marriage of Mr. Allan, which took place at New York, October 5, cut off his expectation of an inheritance, and threw him on his own resources, or whether he was convinced that literature was his unavoidable career, makes little difference. Mr. Allan, as was to be expected, refused to sanction his alleged resignation, and consequently he had to employ indirect means to accomplish his purpose.(1) On January 5, 1831, a court-martial was convened at West Point, to try offenders against discipline, and after a short sitting adjourned until January 28. For the two [page 57:] weeks preceding this adjourned meeting Poe neglected practically all his duties as a cadet, and was consequently cited to appear before the court and answer to two charges of two specifications each, to the effect that he had absented himself from certain parades, roll-calls, guard duty, and academical duties, and in the course of this remissness had twice directly disobeyed the orders of the officer of the day. He pleaded guilty to all, except one specification, and as it was the one alleging the most patent of his offenses — his absence from parade, roll-call, and guard duty — he thus shut the gates of mercy on himself. The court found him guilty, and passed a sentence of dismissal, which, however, in order that his pay might suffice to meet his debts to the academy, they recommended should not take effect until March 6; on February 8, 1831, the Secretary of War approved the proceedings of the court, and ordered the sentence to be executed in accordance with the recommendation. On the morning of March 7, consequently, Poe found himself as free as he had been in Boston, four years before, when he first entered the service, and apparently as penniless, since only twelve cents remained to his credit.

Funds for his journey to New York may have been provided from the subscriptions of the cadets (seventy-five cents, which the superintendent allowed to be deducted from their pay),(1) of which [page 58:] a part only was advanced, for a volume of his poems which he proposed to publish in that city. Mr. Elam Bliss, a reputable publisher, who is said to have come to West Point on the business, undertook the job presumably on the strength of the subscription. The book, which was entitled simply “Poems,”(1) purported to be a second edition of the Baltimore volume, from which it differed in many of its readings, and materially by the omission of six short poems and the addition of the first forms of “To Helen,” “The Sleeper,” “Lenore,” “The Valley of Unrest,” “The City in the Sea,” and “Israfel.” In the expansion of the earlier poems and of “Fairyland” in particular, Poe approached very near to the inane, but in the half dozen new ones, inferior as they are to the revised [page 59:] versions now known, his genius first became manifest both in the character of his poetic motives and in the fascination of some perfect lines. The first three are based on his own experience, and are essentially personal, — an imaginative amplification of the lines of the “Introduction:” —

Of these, however, “To Helen,” which has been overpraised, owes much of its finish to the slight changes since made in it. “Irene,” although impressive in conception and original in handling, is far too rude to be regarded as more than a poem of some promise, and the “Paean” is happily for gotten. The remaining three, which are developed from slight Oriental suggestions, are of a different kind. In these for the first time the strangeness and distance and mystical power of Poe’s imaginations are so given as to be henceforth identified with his genius. Two are landscape effects. In one, far down in the east, the Valley of Unrest dis closes its tremulous trees beneath the ceaseless flow of swift-motioned clouds, — a glow of deep color; and in the other, as far in the west, gleams the weird diablerie of that strange city lying all alone in its glare and gloom, shadowed in those black waves: —

The melodious monotone, the justness of touch in lines like these, are as artistic as the idea is poetic. But fine as is the substance of these two poems and excellent as is the execution at its best, neither rises to the rank of “Israfel,” in which rings out the lyric burst, the first pure song of the poet, the notes most clear and liquid and soaring of all he ever sang, that waken and tremble in the first inspiration not less magnetically because narrower in compass and lower in flight than in the cadences of the perfected song.

As his genius had developed, Poe had formed a theory of poetry, which he expressed, so far as he had made it out to himself, in the prefatory “Letter to Mr. ——.” In this, after some thin logic to the effect that pleasure instead of utility is the end of all rational human activity, and consequently of poetry, he subjects Wordsworth’s theories and practice to a very supercilious criticism, and asserts that poetry should be pursued as “a passion,” not as “a study,” since “learning has little to do with the imagination — intellect with the passions — or age with poetry;” at the end he sums up his creed in an article which shows the strong influence of Coleridge’s criticism, as follows: —

These crude generalizations, together with the incidental remarks that no one enjoys long poems, and that delicacy is the poet’s peculiar kingdom, are the fundamental ideas out of which he after ward slowly developed and finally perfected his poetic theory; to the canons thus laid down he submitted his own practice the more easily because they were consonant with his own genius.

For the present neither his statement of the poetic ideal nor his attempted illustration of it interested the world. The only notice his poetry received was from the laughter of the cadets, who were disappointed because the little green volume of dingy paper had not turned out to be a book of local squibs. He himself went South, but whether he returned to Mr. Allan’s house must be regarded as doubtful. He had not been a regular inmate of that home since he left it for the University, a boy of seventeen, over five years before; and in the mean time a Miss Paterson, aged thirty, had come to take the place of his foster-mother, and his own successor in the shape of a lineal heir was at hand. Poe remained but a short time, if at all, at Richmond. [page 62:] His own characteristic description of the rupture with the family was that, led by a chivalric feeling, he “deliberately threw away a large fortune rather than endure a trivial wrong; ”(1) but this statement is worth nothing as evidence. Mr. Allan plainly regarded him as ungrateful, reckless, and untrustworthy; and Poe’s conduct toward him, to say the least, had been that of a son who, since he wished his own will, ought to make his own way.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 30:]

1. Tamerlane and other Poems. By a Bostonian. Boston: Calvin F. S. Thomas . . . Printer. 1827, pp. 40. The volume contained, besides preface and notes, Tamerlane and nine fugitive pieces: 1. To —— ——. (“I saw thee on the bridal day”); 2. Dreams; 3. Visit of the Dead; 4. Evening Star; 5. Imitation; 6. No title (“In youth have I known one with whom the earth”); 7. No title (“A wilder‘d being from my birth”); 8. No title (“The happiest day the happiest hour”); 9. The Lake. Of these Tamerlane and the first, third, and ninth of the short poems are included in revised versions of Poe’s works. Vide Mr. Richard Herne Shepard’s [[Shepherd’s]] reprint, London, 1884.

2. The United States Review and Literary Gazette, ii. 399 (Aug. 1827); The North American Review, xxv. 471 (Oct. 1827).

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 31:]

1. Specimens of American Poetry, by Samuel Kettell. Boston: S. G. Goodrich & Co., 1829: iii. p. 405.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 36:]

1. Mrs. Martha (Thomas) Booth to the author, June 14, 1884.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 37:]

1. These statements are based on the papers relating to Edgar A. Perry, or Poe, now on file in the War Department, of which certified copies were sent to the author.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 39:]

1. There is no record of this furlough.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 40:]

1. Originally written Perry, but changed to read Poe.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 44:]

1. Works, i. cl.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 45:]

1. The Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette, iii. 168 (new series).

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 47:]

1. The Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette, vi. 295-298 (new series).

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 47, running to the bottom of page 48:]

2. Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, by Edgar A. Poe. Baltimore: Hatch & Dunning, 1829: pp.71. This volume begins with an unentitled sonnet, the first draft of To Science, continues with Al Aaraaf and Tamerlane, both nearly as now printed, and concludes with a Preface, now known, revised, as Romance, and nine miscellaneous poems: 1. To —— (“Should my early life seem”), forty lines, now printed, revised, as A Dream within a [page 48:] Dream; 2. To (“I saw thee on thy bridal day”); 3. To (“The bowers whereat, in dreams, I see”); 4. To the River; 5. The Lake. To —— ; 6. Spirits of the Dead; 7. A Dream; 8. To M —— (“I heed not that my earthly lot”), twenty lines, now printed, revised, as To —— ; 9. Fairyland, the lines entitled Heaven in The Yankee. Of these Tamerlane, of which the former edition is said to have been “suppressed,” is wholly rewritten, and the second, fifth, sixth, and seventh of the miscellaneous poems are from the 1827 edition, but revised.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 53:]

1. This may have been furnished by Judge Marshall and General Scott, whose wife was a cousin of Mr. Allan’s fiancée, but of their interference, first alleged by Hirst (Edgar A. Poe, Philadelphia Saturday Museum, 1843) and repeated by later biographers (Mr. Stoddard adds the name of John Randolph), there is no record. Hirst’s sketch, it may be remarked here, though resting primarily on Poe’s authority, is full of errors.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 54:]

1. Dr. N. C. Brooks to the author, June 3, 1884. All subsequent statements regarding the relations of Poe and Brooks are made on the same authority.

2. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, xxxv. 754 (Nov. 1867).

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 55:]

1. Allan B. Magruder, Esq., to the author April 23, 1884.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 56:]

1. This statement, which has no authority except Hirst, must have been originally derived from Poe. It is probably correct, although accompanied by the evident misrepresentation, repeated in all the biographies, that the reason why Poe determined to leave was the birth of an heir to Mr. Allan.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 57:]

1. Allan B. Magruder, Esq., to the author, July 1, 1884.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 58:]

1. Poems. By Edgar A. Poe. Second edition. New York. Published by Elam Bliss, 1831: pp. 124. This volume is dedicated to the United States Corps of Cadets, and opens with a preparatory letter to Mr. ——, dated West Point, 1831, and addressed “Dear B——;” it contains: 1. Introduction, 66 lines, an expansion of Preface in the 1829 edition; 2. To Helen; 3. Israfel, 44 lines; 4. The Doomed City, 58 lines, the first version of The City in the Sea; 5. Fairyland, 64 lines, an expansion of the poem of the same name in the 1829 edition; 6. Irene, 74 lines, the first version of The Sleeper; 7. A Pæan, 44 lines, the first version of Lenore; 8. The Valley Nis, 46 lines, the first version of The Valley of Unrest; 9. Al Aaraaf, slightly revised, and introduced as in the 1829 edition by “To Science;” 10. Tamerlane, again considerably revised, particularly by the insertion of The Lake in a new form, and of lines from To —— (“Should my early life seem”), from the 1829 edition. Each poem has a bastard title, and the volume is further pieced out by mottoes, to each of which a page is given.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 62:]

1. Poe to Mrs. Whitman, October 18, 1848. Ingram, ii. 171.