Text: Henry Curwen, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Sorrow and Song: Studies of Literary Struggle, London: Henry S. King & Co., 1875, pp. 93-166

[page 93:]

EDGAR ALLAN POE.

OUR present study bears us to an entirely New World, as unlike the old as may be. A nation eager for material prosperity, and mad for the sudden acquirement of wealth; no trust in genius; no thought of culture; no aristocracy trained by long descent to encourage æsthetic tastes; no one capital city, not even the sorry companionship of a time-honoured Grub-street, where men of letters and artists of all grades might throng together, and together find that mutual efforts and defeats are but so many spurs to urge them onward. Nothing here acknowledged at this time but a struggling race of men, whose equality or inequality was measured by the “Almighty Dollar.” And in the midst of a people like this, we have to follow the feverish career of one solitary, weakly foundling — from birth to death altogether alone; nurtured by the bounty of strangers till his slightest whim seemed law of heaven; then suddenly outcast with his individual wrongs and hopes and cravings. We have, year by year, to watch him as his genius develops, and his stubborn self-will grows stronger, drifting aimlessly from town to town, uselessly hurling himself against a wall of living precedents; [page 94:] feeling that there is genius in him, but never able for two moments to give his mind free play; battling with no encouragement, no fellowship; wearing himself out incessantly with the wretched “ hack-work “ that should bring in a petty weekly pittance, till he tries to revive his dead illusions and his shattered hopes, to stay his unrelenting hunger and his oozing courage, by using alcohol, as Coleridge and De Quincey much about the same time used opium. Well! he suffered as he sinned, and his fellows were not slow to tell us of it; but, as Hannay says, “let solid excellence of the epitaph description remember, that perhaps all its parlour virtues are not worth one hour of Coleridge's remorse.” If we do not all of us love our friends rather for their failings than their virtues — and to what mother is her weakliest child not dearest? — there are few at all events in whom, on a thoroughly close and intimate knowledge, we cannot find something to admire and love. Here, then, in this sketch of a most pitiful history — “much about a broken heart, all about unhappy things” — hiding nothing, extenuating nothing, we would fain set the man down in his true colours, more durably, more forcibly than if we had either power or will to whitewash his strange career with all the cardinal virtues.

The family of Poe was not only one of the most reputable in Baltimore, but, like many other of the Southern houses, came from a good old English stock. In former days one of the Poes had been court- physician to Queen Elizabeth, and even at present another branch belongs to the best county families in Ireland. The [page 95:] poet's great-grandfather married a daughter of Admiral Macbride, famous in our naval history, and their son, the founder of the American house, became Quarter-master General in the Maryland army, at the time of the revolution, and acquired the special friendship of Lafayette. His fourth son, David Poe, while a law-student in Baltimore, fell violently in love with Elizabeth Arnold, an English actress, more remarkable for personal charms and vivacity than for histrionic power, who was then starring through the States. His friends interfered, with a threat of withdrawing his allowance; to this he retorted by throwing up the bar altogether, and running away withthe young English beauty. He informed them immediately of his marriage, and was disowned by the whole family.

With beauty on one side, and adventure on the other, the penniless couple imagined that the whole world lay at their feet; and, to bring their destinies still more intimately together, David Poe betook himself to his wife's profession. For six or seven years they travelled restlessly from theatre to theatre throughout the States, but they had neither of them any real fitness for the stage, and they sank by degrees into a state of listless misery that was broken only, but not in anywise alleviated, by the birth of three children. Then, sick of life, starving, despondent, and wretched, they died of consumption, within a few weeks of each other.

EDGAR ALLAN POE, their third child, was born at Baltimore, in January, 1811, and if, as he himself says, “the spirit of romance — a spirit sinister and stormy,” [page 96:] ever presided at a birth, it was certainly at his. Suckled on misery, borne about in long clothes from booth to theatre, already a little social pariah, the pet and plaything of the poor women in the green-rooms, he was nevertheless a beautiful child, with a precocious wit, and an odd genius for unlucky scrapes, when the death of his parents cast him naked upon the world, a puling, nameless, little mortal of three years, with not a relative who cared to own him. Happily, however, Providence has many caresses for motherless children, and a Mr. John Allan, a wealthy merchant and a kindly man, but childless, adopted the young orphan, and undertook the charge of his education and future life.

Like most adopted foundlings, the boy was thoroughly spoilt. He was christened, a rite his family seem to have forgotten, Edgar Allan Poe, the second name commemorating the second parents. His prattling words were household laws; Mrs. Allan became, in very truth, a mother to him, and it would have been strange, indeed, if this sudden transition from absolute poverty to all the luxuries and refinements of wealth, had not exercised a potent influence upon the formation of his character. He was sent to a dame's school, and when the poor old mistress attempted to punish him, according to the laws of the establishment, for some petty breach of discipline, Mr. Allan proceeded thither, and, before all the pupils lectured her upon the enormity of the insult. Thenceforward, the wayward little boy would submit to no laws. but the laws of his own will.

In 1816 Mr. and Mrs. Allan came to England for a [page 97:] few months, and their young charge accompanied them over the most interesting portions of Great Britain. When they returned to America, they determined, spite of their feelings, to leave him behind, to reap the advantages of an English education.

The school where he spent five of the most impressionable years of his life was kept by the Rev. John Bransby — better known to the boys as Dr. Bransby — lecturer or curate to the old parish church, Stoke Newington. The house is still standing in Church Street, and may be found by any one who enquires for the “New Manor House.”*

Poe used always to assert, that in the powerful tale of “William Wilson,” he had given an exact account of this school-house, and his boyish life there — of course we must take both as from the standpoint of a boyish memory — that, indeed, by William Wilson he meant only [page 98:] a second, a better self, and that by murdering him he slew his own thwarted and stifled conscience: —

“My earliest recollections of a school life, are connected with a large, rambling, Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all the houses were excessively ancient. In truth, it was a dream-like and spirit-soothing place, that venerable old town. At this moment, in fancy, I feel the refreshing chilliness of its deeply shadowed avenues, inhale the fragrance of its thousand shrubberies, and thrill anew with undefinable delight, at the deep hollow note of the church-bell, breaking, each hour, with sullen and sudden roar upon the stillness of the dusky atmosphere in which the fretted Gothic steeple lay embedded and asleep. It gives me, perhaps, as much of pleasure as I can now in any manner experience, to dwell upon minute recollections of the school and its concerns. . . .

“Let me then remember. The house, I have said, was old and irregular. The grounds were extensive, and a high and solid brick wall, topped with a bed of mortar and broken glass, encompassed the whole. This prisonlike rampart formed the limit of our domain; beyond it we saw but thrice a week — once every Saturday afternoon, when, attended by two ushers, we were permitted to take brief walks in a body through some of the neighbouring fields — and twice during Sunday, when we were paraded in the same formal manner to the morning and evening service in the one church of the village. Of this church the principal of our school was pastor. With [page 99:] how deep a spirit of wonder and perplexity was I wont to regard him from our remote pew in the gallery, as, with step solemn and slow, he ascended the pulpit! This reverend man, with countenance so demurely benign, with robes so glossy and so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast, could this be he who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian laws of the academy? Oh, gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution! At an angle of the ponderous wall frowned a more ponderous gate. It was riveted and studded with iron bolts, and surmounted with jagged iron spikes. What impressions of deep awe did it inspire! It was never opened save for the three periodical egressions and ingressions already mentioned; then, in every creak of its mighty hinges, we found a plenitude of mystery — a world of matter for solemn remark, or for more solemn meditation. The extensive enclosure was irregular in form, having many capacious recesses. Of these, three or four of the largest constituted the play-ground. It was level, and covered with fine hard gravel. I well remember it had no trees, nor branches, nor anything similar within it. Of course it was in the rear of the house. In front lay a small parterre, planted with box and other shrubs; but through this sacred division we passed only upon rare occasions indeed — such as a first advent to school or final departure thence, or perhaps, when a parent or friend having called for us, we joyfully took our way home for the Christmas or Midsummer holidays. But the house — how quaint an old building [page 100:] was this! — to me how veritably a palace of enchantment! There was really no end to its windings — to its incomprehensible subdivisions. It was difficult at any given time to say with certainty upon which of its two storeys one happened to be. From each room to every other there were sure to be found three or four steps either in ascent or descent. Then the lateral branches were innumerable — inconceivable — and so returning in upon themselves, that our most exact ideas in regard to the whole mansion were not very far different from those with which we pondered upon infinity. During the five years of my residence here, I was never able to ascertain with precision in what remote locality lay the little sleeping apartment assigned to myself and some eighteen or twenty other scholars. The school-room was the largest in the house — I could not help thinking, in the world. It was very long, narrow, and dismally low, with pointed Gothic windows and a ceiling of oak.

“In childhood I must have felt with the energy man what I now find stamped upon memory in lines as vivid, as deep, and as durable as the exergues of the Carthaginian medals. Yet in fact — in the fact of the world's view — how little was there to remember. The morning's awakening, the nightly summons to bed; the connings, the recitations; the periodical half-holidays and perambulations; the play-ground, with its broils, its pastimes, intrigues; these, by a mental sorcery long forgotten, were made to involve a wilderness of sensation, a world of rich incident, an universe of varied emotion, of excitement the most passionate and spirit-stirring. ‘Oh, le bon temps, que ce siècle de fer!’. . . .. [page 101:]

“In truth the ardour, the imperiousness of my disposition soon rendered me a marked character among my schoolmates, and by slow but natural gradations gave me an ascendancy over all not greatly older than myself.”

This English education powerfully influenced Poe's genius, and probably gave him as a child that distaste for democratic principles which afterwards procured him so many enemies.

In 1822 he returned to the Allans, and then passed three years at an academy in Richmond, under the best masters of the town. It was at this time that he first met his cousin, Virginia Clemm: —

Now that the son was heir presumptive to a large fortune, his relatives chose to overlook the father's misalliance, and the two cousins were constantly thrown together, nay, even for a time he seems to have lodged in his aunt's house. This childish passion awakened the spirit of poetry in his heart, and some of his published productions actually date from his fourteenth year. There were, as he describes in Eleonora, which he alleges to have been autobiographical, wanderings, hand in hand, by the resonant seashore, by the river, and through the valley — a boyish fairyland invested by their young imaginations with the attributes of mystery, and the titles of romance; for to them the river was the “river of silence,” creeping noiselessly for centuries over the selfsame pebbles, and the valley, the “valley of the many-coloured [page 102:] grass,” carpeted all by soft green verdure, and besprinkled with the yellow buttercup, the white daisy, the purple violet, and the ruby-red asphodel; and, here and there, like wildernesses of dreams, sprang up groves and clumps of huge-leaved trees, bathed each noontime in the glamour of a tropic sun, with a flood of every shade of gold and green and silver. The great fact in Poe's youth is his marvellous precocity; like Byron, his sentiments, his feelings, his very passions, seem to have been freely awakened at a period when other lads were playing marbles or leap-frog, and his verse speaks of his life again when he urges that, though they were children both,

These halcyon days, probably the happiest in his stormy life, did not last long, for in 1825 he entered at the University of Charlottesville, then chiefly noted for the recklessness and wildness of its students.* [page 103:]

The lad fresh from a country school, full of eagerness for all new experiences of life, and with but little rule of conduct, threw himself in with the worst set, and outvied even the oldest. If we might place credence in his unfriendly biographers there was not a vice in the whole catalogue of human sins that this boy-student of fourteen or fifteen did not hasten to commit; and yet with all these he was in the first rank for scholarship, had a wonderful aptitude for the physical and mathematical sciences, much skill in drawing, and was, too, the readiest declaimer there — dividing his time, as Powell says, “between lectures, debating societies, rambles in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and in making caricatures of his tutors, and the heads of the colleges.” If he really did waste his nights over cards and wines and worse things, it is somewhat startling to find that he not only more than held his own in the class room, but that he was expert at fence, and widely noted for feats of strength and activity. One of these feats takes a leaf from Byron's wreath, for Poe on a hot June day swam from Richmond to Warwick, seven miles and a half, against a tide running probably from two to three miles an hour. When, in his lifetime, the news-papers questioned the truth of this statement, the following certificate was published by a distinguished gentleman of Virginia: —

“I was one of several who witnessed this swimming feat. We accompanied Mr. Poe in boats. Messrs. Robert [page 104:] Stannard, John Lyle (since dead), Robert Saunders, John Munford, I think, and one or two others, were also of the party. Mr. P. did not seem at all fatigued, and walked back to Richmond immediately after the feat — which was undertaken for a wager. “ROBERT G. CABELL.”

Rake, scholar, wit, caricaturist, and athlete notwithstanding, he had another claim to the notice of his fellow-undergraduates, for he was already a poet, writing verses that in their purity, simplicity, and daintiness have rarely been surpassed. How, putting on one side all question of marvellous precocity, how did this young devil-me-care, battledored, as they would have us believe, from one evil passion to another, come to write such beautifully pure lines as these to a girl? — yet they were certainly penned before he left Charlottesville: —

“TO HELEN.

In spite of all the follies he undoubtedly did commit, he was regarded by both dons and students as likely to graduate with the highest possible honours. His allowance had been amply generous, and yet, shortly before the final examination, it was discovered that he had gambled extravagantly beyond his means, and he was suddenly expelled. Alma Mater, no matter when or where, never seems to have been a tender mother to poetic genius, and few there are who have acquired a really wide renown in poetry who ever left the university with a graduate's degree. Why even now, and for more than a dozen years, one of the greatest, probably, and certainly the most inspired, of living English singers, has headed the roll of those who should be honoured at his college — and has, as far as the University goes, headed it in vain.

Mr. Allan received Poe with a not unkindly feeling, considering the painful circumstances, but this was gradually altered to a stern displeasure as draft after draft representing the lad's gambling debts came due; till, outworn in patience and tried in purse, he declined to honour any further presentation of the gaming bills. Poe, with something more than his usual impetuosity, left a cutting and satirical letter behind, and, quitting an ungrateful country, took ship for the Mediterranean to free the Greeks from Turkish tyranny — a precious undertaking truly for a dashing young poet of barely seventeen! What led him to this strange step, whether he was, again like Byron, fired by a generous enthusiasm, or whether, as so many other poets of this century, he [page 106:] was irresistibly attracted by the legendary fascinations of the East, we know not; neither do we in any way know what he did there. We may, however, imagine that these travels to the sun-lands gave a new splendour to his talents, and that to this journey he owes something, at all events, of those glowing colours that sparkle through his writings as a blaze of many-hued fireworks flashes against a summer evening's sky. “I like,” says Hannay, “ I like to think of Poe in the East. With his passionate love of the beautiful — in ‘ the year of April blood,’ in a climate which has the perpetual luxury of a bath — he must have had all his perceptions of the lovely intensified wonderfully.” And yet without this internal evidence of later writings, whether he did ever reach the Mediterranean would be doubtful, for his European history is a blank, and the Life Letters and Adventures long announced for publication by Mr. T. C. Clarke have never yet appeared. All we are told, and of this we are half sceptical, is that he eventually turned up as far from his destination as might be, at St. Petersburg, without a passport, and that, being compromised in a scrape of some sort, whether a political plot or a mere drunken riot has been much disputed, he was compelled to appeal to Mr. Middleton, the American Minister, who obtained his liberty and forwarded him forthwith to his friends in Virginia.

Mr. Allan received the runaway with a very natural coolness. For eighteen years he had been lenient to a fault, and now that the lad was growing up in all the wilfulness of a singularly erratic disposition, he was [page 107:] becoming somewhat sick of his self-imposed charge. However, Mrs. Allan, ever a tender mother, and the only being besides Virginia Clemm whose opinion Poe really valued one iota, lay on her death-bed, and for her sake the breach between the two was apparently bridged over; and when in February, 1829, she died, her husband, for her sake still, endeavoured to do his duty to the reckless youngster, and as Poe, chiefly because there was little peace at home, expressed a preference for a military career, he used his influence to obtain a scholarship at West Point Military Academy.

Here, as before, Poe was distinguished for ability and attainment, and became a prime favourite with officers, professors, and comrades, startling them all somewhat by publishing a volume of poems, which at once riveted the attention of all critical America; and yet he was only eighteen, for the volume bears upon its title-page Baltimore, 1829,” many of the pieces having been written three or four years previously. Some few of them even had been issued in a tiny tome in 1827, which, from its almost absolute rarity, appears to have been printed privately for friends — not for circulation.

While this juvenile volume exhibited, almost necessarily, evident signs of contemporary writers, and while the poems had but little spiritual feeling or human emotion, “there was already for all who could feel and appreciate English poetry that calmness of melancholy, that delicious solemnity, which characterize the mastersingers.”* Each verse has a dreamy, nebulous rhythm, [page 108:] each poem perfect in form, with an individual music of its own. And then, the wild flowers themselves were not purer, for, be his life what it might, Poe never penned a line in prose or verse that our hyper critics might stigmatize or defend as “sensual” or “sensuous.” We have had the good fortune to unearth one poem from this precious little volume, which has never in England or America been reprinted in any subsequent edition.*

“SPIRITS OF THE DEAD.

The praise this little volume obtained led him to believe that he might succeed in literature, and this again to a laxity in military discipline. Soon he not only neglected his duties and his studies, but broke out into all his old sins of gaming and dissipation.

The Americans have, perhaps, stricter and more primitive ideas in the conduct of their military colleges than has latterly been here exhibited, and in the beginning of 1830 the unfortunate youth was, for the second time, cashiered.

Burning with shame, and heavy at heart, he returned to Richmond, where, to his intense mortification, he found that Mr. Allan had already married again, and that a girl of eighteen was installed in the place of her whom for so many years he had known as mother. The situation was perhaps difficult, but Poe's conduct was certainly unjustifiable, for he sarcastically ridiculed the marriage, and refused to speak to the lady. Mr. Allan felt the insult like a blow, and heartily sick of the worries Poe had entailed — with the prospect now, too, of children of his own — turned him forthwith out of doors, declining to [page 110:] assist or even see him any more; thus hastily, but not altogether unnaturally, cancelling a debt of obligation that had lasted for some nineteen years. Poe's enemies afterwards tried to cast a deeper shadow upon the nature of the quarrel, but the story was never in any way endorsed by the only people interested, and may be added unheard to the many calumnies from which the unhappy author had through all his life to suffer.

Free at last to follow every inclination of his own, to achieve fame, perhaps fortune and happiness, with no other hydra in the way but a penniless purse, Poe determined to adopt that literary career which had lately so often dazzled and attracted him — in fact no other career was possible. The present might be gloomy, but the future of hope gleamed brighter than the past of patronage. Great critics had told him that his first volume was full of the promises at all events of a genius altogether higher than America had yet produced. With a credential like this he imagined that journals would open their columns to him, and publishers their arms. Poor little thin octavos! What disillusions are there before the world sees anything of worth between your sorry boards of green and purple! And yet almost every writer of note, more or less unsuccessfully, begins his literary life with such a volume, for poetry is the old and sacred language in which the masters of all eloquence have babbled out their early dreams — expressing far more readily, more naturally, than prose, the desires, the joys, the griefs of youth, for “poetry is winged, and youth has wings.” [page 111:]

A kindly critic, remembering perhaps his own struggling years, says a word of praise; a dozen friends purchase, not altogether unreluctantly, a dozen copies, and our young tyro has drifted off into the stormy sea of authorship. He attacks editors and publishers with volleys of manuscripts, written each as his brain and heart had prompted; and he is told, if indeed any reply be vouchsafed, that such things are very nice in their way, mere luxuries not at all in demand — “toothpicks, I calls ‘ em,” said the late Mr. Hotten to an ingenuous young poet — and is recommended, if he really wishes to become a money-making man of letters, to write on pig-iron, sewage, or what not; compile indices, “do the police-courts,” or concoct “blood and thunder stories.” Now it happened that Poe could write “blood and thunder stories,” as they had never been written before, and after trying this, that, and the other, he tried them, but even here he found that an apprenticeship had to be gone through, a reputation of some sort attained.

It is doubtful at this time whether he even obtained the insertion in some impecunious print of any of his manuscripts, but it is scarcely matter of doubt that he never touched one cent of honorarium. How he managed to drag on life at all we cannot tell; probably some poor souls gave him of their poverty; at all events, college chums and summer friends had utterly dropped the man who so recently had been a boon companion, a brilliant leader in every dashing frolic.

Yet, even at his worst, when he could not get payment for the veriest hack-work, he had the grim satisfaction of [page 112:] learning that his poems had successfully gone through a pirated edition in New York.

Edgar Allan Poe in some dismal Baltimore attic is scarcely a pleasant spectacle. Day by day he sat there, growing paler and thinner and hungrier, vainly trying to put his pen to paper as the ghosts of his dead hopes came up to twit him with the chances he had so misused, till he grew to hate his chances, hate his fellows, hate himself. And, night by night, the dose increasing as his prospects lessened, he tried to restore some power to his weary brain, to escape for a moment from his wretchedness, and hide again among the dear old illusions, with a draught from the hideous waters of forgetfulness, till every morrow, as he tossed on his straw pallet, he cursed himself as a drunkard as well as a misanthrope.

For some three months this lethargy of despair and starvation lasted; then, driven by sheer hunger, he bethought him that his military education would at least give him roof and bread, and he enlisted as a common soldier.

For a time this change after utter misery was pleasant. Like Coleridge he beguiled the tedium of military life by literary composition, but by degrees his hatred of all discipline returned; the companionship and commands of his coarse comrades became unbearable, and just as his friends, who had thought it time at last to track him out, were going to institute proceedings for his release, he took matters into his own hands, and quietly deserted, with a precious bundle of manuscript tales under his arm. [page 113:]

We soon find him back again at Baltimore, seeking a publisher for these tales, wherein he had exhausted that store of physical and mathematical science, for which at the University and Academy he had been so eminent. “Weird compositions are they,” says Baudelaire, “created to prove that weirdness is an integral part of the beautiful.”

Some little “hack-work” fell into his hands, and at last he found a publisher who, professing readiness to undertake the issue of the volume, kept the unfortunate author in a state of cruel suspense for more than a twelvemonth. All this time he waited and worked, leaving not a stone unturned, and at last a real chance came; for in reply to an advertisement in the Baltimore Saturday Visitor [[Visiter]], of two prizes, one for the best tale, the other for the best poem, he forwarded no less than six stories and a copy of verses. When the prize committee met, a Mr. Kennedy was tempted by the beautiful caligraphy to dip into a little bundle of MSS., and it was decided, without further consideration, to give the premium to “ the first of geniuses who had written legibly.” The prize tale, when the mottoes in the envelope betrayed the secret, proved to be Poe's MS. [[MS.]] Found in a Bottle; the prize poem, Poe's Coliseum — only one prize, however, was awarded — and the result was published in October, 1833.

Mr. Kennedy learnt enough from the publisher to become interested in the young author, who was accordingly brought to his office. “Thin and pale,” says Griswold, “even to ghastliness, his whole appearance [page 114:] indicated sickness and the utmost destitution. A well-worn frock-coat concealed the absence of a shirt, and imperfect boots disclosed the want of hose. But the young man's eyes were luminous with intelligence and feeling, and his voice and conversation and manners all won upon the lawyer's regard.” Kennedy, moved and touched, at once accompanied him to a clothing store, and left him at a bath, “ from which he returned with the suddenly regained style of a gentleman.”

The three members of the committee resolved to find their protégé an opportunity of utilizing his literary abilities, and put what little work they could in his way. In 1834, a Mr. White established the Southern Literary Messenger at Richmond, and applied to Kennedy for an article. Kennedy advised Poe to forward something, and he followed up his advice with a kindly letter of introduction: —

“He is very clever with his pen — classical and scholar-like. He wants experience and direction, but I have no doubt he can be made very useful to you. And poor fellow he is very poor. . . . . This young fellow is very imaginative, and a little given to the terrific. He is at work upon a tragedy, but I have turned him to drudging upon whatever may make money, and I have no doubt you and he will find your account in each other.”

This fact White soon discovered, for in the very next number he announces that the editorial department has been submitted to a gentleman “of approved literary taste and attainments,” who would “devote his exclusive [page 115:] attention” to the work. However, [[in]] spite of this “exclusive attention,” or rather of its announcement, Poe continued to reside at Baltimore until September, 1835, when he eagerly accepted an offer to remove to Richmond: —

“You ask me if I would be willing to come on to Richmond if you should have occasion for my services duting the coming winter. I reply that nothing would give me greater pleasure. I have been desirous for some time past of paying a visit to Richmond, and would be glad of any reasonable excuse for so doing, Indeed I am anxious to settle myself in that city, and if, by any chance, you hear of a situation likely to suit me, I would gladly accept it, were the salary even the merest trifle. I should, indeed, feel myself greatly indebted to you if through your means I could accomplish this object. What you say in the conclusion of your letter, in relation to the supervision of proof-sheets, gives me reason to hope that possibly you might find something for me to do in your office. If so, I should be very glad — for at present only a very small portion of my time is employed.”

Accordingly, at the age of two-and-twenty, he found himself at Richmond as sole editor of a review, the entire destinies of which depended upon his personal efforts. Speedily, indeed, he established its prosperity, and for two years he enthralled his public with the marvellous energy with which he poured forth tales and poems, of a mystery all his own; reviews, whose cutting sarcasm raised enemies far and near; and articles discussing literature and science in their every branch — and [page 116:] for these and for the weary editorial duties he received five hundred dollars per annum — something over a hundred pounds. Yet he writes gratefully to White — “You ask me if I am perfectly satisfied with your course. I reply that I am — entirely. My poor services are not worth what you give for them.” A fair measure this of his former misery.

Now that he was earning a competence, definite though scanty, he dared again to seek out his boyhood's love, that cousin Virginia, whose childish remembrance he had treasured as something sacred through the troublous years of follies and wretchedness. He had left her a child, he found her now a woman, still “artless and innocent as the brief life she had led among the flowers.” They went again through the old walks, at first half shyly and not “ hand in hand,” till the old thoughts came back with the richer meanings of maidenhood and manhood, till involuntarily one evening their lips met, and they sat down, —

“Locked in each other's embrace, beneath the serpent-like trees, and looked down within the waters of the river of silence at our images therein. We spoke nowords during the rest of that sweet day; and our words, even upon the morrow, were tremulous and few. We had drawn the god Eros from the wave, and now we felt that he had enkindled within us the fiery souls of our forefathers. The passions which had for centuries distinguished our race, came thronging with the fancies for which they had been equally noted, and together breathed a delicious bliss over the valley of the many-coloured [page 117:] grass. A change fell upon all things. Strange, brilliant flowers, star shaped, burst out upon the trees where no flower had been known before. The tints of the green carpet deepened; and when, one by one, the white daisies shrank away, there sprang up in place of them ten by ten of the ruby red asphodel.”

With feelings like this in his heart, Poe declined utterly to listen to the monitions and warnings of his friends — he had not consulted them — ever holding advice of that kind at its cheapest; his passionate love, his wilful spirit, were too strong for sober calculations as to how far a beggarly stipend would support a wife and family, and then — as always — the future lay before them. He and his cousin wished to marry, and to them that was argument enough.

At the time of his marriage Poe is said to have been singularly handsome, though his whole being was marked with an indefinable stamp of melancholy, the beauty of the face consisting above all else in that characteristic delicacy belonging only to genius or high blood. The forehead massive and very white; the eyes large, of an indecisive dark colour approaching violet, full of depth yet brilliant; the mouth though slightly smiling very sad; the chin and lower portion of the face soft and indecisive; the complexion pale, not unhealthily, but of that clear, dark pallor beneath which intense energy and life so often lie concealed; in body, below the middle height, slight and wiry, rarely adapted for all physical exercise, yet with the feet and hands of a woman; everything about him was characteristic — physiognomy, walk, [page 118:] gesture. “He was,” says Baudelaire, “one of those men whom Nature, in expectation of great things, has endowed with an energetic temperament, just as she gives a strong vitality to the trees which stand as symbols of grief and mourning; for these men with an outward appearance sometimes almost pitiable are built as athletes, good for orgie or for toil, quick to excess and capable of astonishing sobriety.”

We have little record of his early married life. We know that his wife, and even his mother-in-law, who from the first was one of the family, idolized him, and that they were very kind and gentle to his failings; and sore need there was for kindliness and gentleness, for the habit of drinking, contracted idly in the laughing hours of jovial fellowship, and continued as a vain solace in the moments of darkest despair, came back again at times with an irresistible madness. A mere boy he had lightly sold his soul to the devil of drink, and all the resolution of manhood could not redeem him from the compact. For weeks he would work hard and steadily without touching a drop of liquor until he imagined that he was strong enough to resist temptation, and then, cursing his poverty and his fate, he would be irresistibly carried away into a violent outbreak of intemperance that rendered him incapable of putting pen to paper. Mr. White, though cautious and parsimonious, had acquired genuine liking for his talented young editor, probably, knowing something of his value, and treated him with great consideration. Bearing date soon after Poe's arrival in Richmond we find the first kindly letter: — [page 119:]

“I am sorry to see you in such plight as your letter shows you in. It is strange that just at this time, when everybody is praising you, and when fortune is beginning to smile upon your hitherto wretched circumstances, you should be invaded by these blue devils. It belongs, however, to your age and temper to be thus buffeted- but be assured, it only wants a little resolution to master the adversary for ever. You will doubtless do well henceforth in literature, and add to your comforts as well as to your reputation, which it gives me great pleasure to assure you is everywhere rising in popular esteem.”

Letter after letter follows, with more of encouragement than reproach. But at last, after a week's intoxication, White dismissed his editor. Poe wrote imploringlypiteous letters; friends intervened, and the proprietor answered with a most judicious consideration: —

“My dear Edgar-I cannot address you in such language as this occasion and my feelings demand: I must be content to speak to you in my plain way. That you are sincere in all your promises I firmly believe. But when you once again tread these streets, I have my fears that your resolutions will fail, and that you will again drink till your senses are lost. If you rely on your strength you are gone. Unless you look to your Maker for help you will not be safe. How much I regretted parting from you is known to Him only and myself. I had become attached to you; I am still; and I would willingly say return, did not a knowledge of your past life make me dread a speedy renewal of our separation. If you would make yourself contented with quarters in [page 120:] my house, or with any other private family, where liquor is not used, I should think there was some hope for you. But if you go to a tavern, or to any place where it is used at table, you are not safe. You have fine talents, Edgar, and you ought to have them respected, as well as yourself. Learn to respect yourself, and you will soon find that you are respected. Separate yourself from the bottle, and from bottle companions, for ever. Tell me if you can and will do so. If you again become an assistant in my office, it must be understood that all engagements on my part cease the moment you get drunk. — I am your true friend. “T. W. W.”

A new contract was entered into, but again and again Poe, in his miserable weakness, broke out into his old irregularities, and in January, 1837, he was compelled to say farewell to the readers of the Messsenger, as far, at least, as editorial capacity was concerned, for its columns were never closed to him, and he always exhibited a kindly feeling for the journal which had given him his start in life, and from time to time he sent them some of his best productions. Long after this, the Messenger undertook the defence of his memory, and, at a time when friendly tongues were silent, gallantly paid him a well-earned tribute: —

“Thanks to him, no similar enterprise ever prospered so largely in its inception, and we doubt if any, in the same length of time, even Blackwood in the days of Dr. Maginn, ever published so many shining articles from the same pen poems, fantastic tales, criticism merciless and slashing; and these latter, though gaining subscribers [page 121:] for the review, did not certainly gain friends for the critic. Here began the opposition that followed him throughout his life, and that pretended to ignore his genius while even the Athenæum and the Revue des Deux Mondes were warmly appreciating him.”

There is probably only one parallel to Poe's editorship of the Messenger, and that was the more recent conduct of the Overland Monthly by that other American genius, Bret Harte.

From Richmond Poe went to Baltimore: always in his most wretched plights he appears to have returned thither — as a young fox hard pressed invariably makes for the hole where he was born — or perhaps he went for the consolation that comparative thoughts of still deeper misery afforded. Henceforward his future life was similar to the past, and we watch him striking his tent like a nomad of the desert and carrying his light penates hither and hither throughout the Union — “an orbitless planet,” rolling incessantly from Richmond to Baltimore, from Baltimore to Philadelphia, from Philadelphia to New York; and everywhere, amid fits of starvation and depression, editing reviews or contributing to periodicals.

At Baltimore he was tolerably successful; a long article was accepted by the New York Review, and the story of “Arthur Gordon Pym,” which had been commenced in the Messenger, was, before its conclusion there, printed in full by the Harpers. This volume narrates the incidents of a voyage to the South Pacific and the pretended discovery of new land in the extreme Antarctic [page 122:] regions. The appearance of its inhabitants as differing from all other known races of men, the peculiarities of climate, the novelty of the plants, the strangeness of the animals, the singular formations of the rocks, are all minutely and scientifically described in the very words of an eye-witness. Scrupulously correct as to technical nautical terms, it exhibits a surprising accuracy of detail — evidently based upon “Robinson Crusoe” — which is its greatest charm. To crown the verisimilitude of the sketch the hero dies — after having consented, for the sake of seeing his discoveries published, that Poe should issue the work as a story of his own — the concluding pages of the manuscript are supposed to be lost, and thus all means of detecting the imposture cut off. As Poe's longest and most sustained effort, the book is worth attention, though we confess it strikes us as flat and tedious. Years ago, however, in the pages of some Boys’ Magazine it enthralled us for months, and this is perhaps a not unfair test. Pecuniarily the volume was not successful, but in London a publishing firm were hoaxed, and actually commenced arrangements for republishing the work as a bonâ fide history of travel before its real character was discovered — and even then thought fit to persevere.

In 1838, Poe settled in Philadelphia, trusting for existence to the precarious chances of a “free lance” magazine contributor. For some months he was un-successful, and maddened by despair, when his wife and mother were starving, he committed a most serious literary misdemeanour by printing as his own work, [page 123:] with prefatory thanks to certain gentlemen for scientific assistance, a text-book on Conchology, that was originally written, precisely as republished, by Captain T. Brown, and issued at Glasgow in 1833. Poe actually took out a copyright, but in a second edition his name was omitted and his initials affixed only to the introduction. The fraud was not discovered for many years, and, disgraceful as it was, certainly injured no one but himself.

In a short time he attracted general notice by his articles in the Gentleman's Magazine, then owned by Burton, the comedian; and, in 1839, he was appointed editor, receiving ten dollars per week for two hours’ work a day — an arrangement that left him time not only for regular critical contributions to the Literary Messenger and the Literary Examiner, but for the production of some of his most characteristic tales. Happier now than he had been for years past, for his prospects seemed assured, his work regular, interesting, and appreciated, his fame increasing, he writes to one friend that he “ has quite overcome the dangerous besetment,” and to another that he is “a model of temperance and other virtues.”

In the autumn he collected all his prose stories then penned, for republication in two volumes under the title of “Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque” — “a title,” says a critic, “ remarkable and intentional, for both repulse the human figure, and in most respects the works of Poe are extra or superhuman.”

Considering the tales generally — those published after as well as before this period, as now found in the complete American edition — we see that out of a total of [page 124:] seventy, more than half are based upon the sentiment of horror; twenty-two out of thirty-one in the first volume describing death in some unusual or appalling shape. He delights in employing the fascinations of mystery or terror, in telling the exceptions of human life, in rendering madness logical, in fathoming the impossible, in poising the imponderable. In its love for the eccentric and grotesque, in its triumphs over difficulties and enigmas — the most stupendous or the most puerile — his genius is distinctly American. Every entry into a subject is at once attractive; we feel that something awful is at stake, for his solemnity of manner keeps the reader's mind perpetually on the watch; and, while the shadow of mystery influences our imagination, the closeness of reasoning, the minuteness of detail, compel our common sense to follow. There is probably nothing so well calculated to rivet attention as this tranquilt one, these quiet observations, so thorough as to be almost scientific, when applied to a fact altogether monstrous, to a hypothesis of which no man had even dreamed before. And then his prose has also the unusual merit of form — graceful, highly polished, compact, yet very varied. There is scarcely anything of human feeling in his tales, but a sort of fatalistic despair; no trace of the influences of vice or virtue, no conscience, no remorse, no love, for even in Ligeia and Eleonora the main idea upon which they hinge is quite other. Human, however, they certainly are, insomuch as they reproduce constantly, incessantly, inevitably, the life that Poe individually led — the life of his dreamful as well as his waking hours, with all the wealth of his imaginations [page 125:] and aspirations, all the miseries of his despondencies and despairs. His hero, following his own proudest idea, is always the luckless scion of some luckless house of lofty lineage; his accessories always gorgeous; his scenery teems with a splendour and magnificence partly oriental, but partly due to an excited and stimulated imagination, which sought in alcohol what other dreamers found in opium. Borrowing, again, the eloquent words of Baudelaire: —

“The characters of Poe, or rather, the character of Poe, the man with sharpened faculties, the man with nerves relaxed, the man whose ardent and patient will bids a defiance to difficulties, whose glance is steadfastly fixed, with the rigidness of a sword, upon objects that increase the more, the more he gazes — this man is Poe himself; and his women, all luminous and sickly, dying of a thousand unknown ills, and speaking with a voice resembling music, are still himself; or, at least, by their strange aspirations, by their knowledge, by their incurable melancholy, they participate strongly in the nature of their creator.”

The grotesque tales are certainly the least powerful, but he was not himself inclined to claim merit for one class at the expense of the other. He insisted that they could only be judged as a whole: —

“In writing these tales, one by one, at long intervals, I have kept the book unity always in mind — that is, each has been composed with reference to its effect as part of a whole. In this view, one of my chief aims has been the widest diversity of subject, thought, and especially tone [page 126:] and manner of handling. Were all my tales now before me in a large volume, and as the composition of another, the merit which would principally arrest my attention would be their wide diversity and variety. You will be surprised to hear me say that (omitting one or two of my first efforts) I do not consider any one of my stories better than another. There is a vast variety of kinds, and in degree of value, these kinds vary — but each tale is equally good of its kind. The loftiest kind is that of the highest imagination — and for this reason only ‘Ligeia’ may be called my best tale.”

For more than a year Poe remained with Burton gaining at this time — for not even the Tales were pecuniarily successful — “almost enough money to support life;” but so liable was he still to sudden relapses that the actor was never with confidence able to leave the city. Returning on one occasion after the regular day of publication, he found the number unfinished, and his editor incapable of duty. He left remonstrances to the morrow, prepared the “ copy “ himself, and issued the magazine, and then to his astonishment received a letter from his assistant, the tone of which may be inferred from Burton's answer: —

“I am sorry you have thought it necessary to send me such a letter. Your troubles have given a morbid tone to your feelings which it is your duty to discourage. I myself have been as severely handled by the world as you can possibly have been, but my sufferings have not tinged my mind with melancholy, nor jaundiced my views of society. You must rouse your energies, and if [page 127:] care assail you, conquer it. I will gladly overlook the past. I hope you will as easily fulfil your pledges for the future. We shall agree very well, though I cannot permit the magazine to be made a vehicle for that sort of severity which you think is so successful with the mob.’ I am truly much less anxious about making a monthly ‘sensation’ than I am upon the point of fairness. You must, my dear sir, get rid of your avowed ill feelings toward your brother authors. You see I speak plainly: I cannot do otherwise upon such a subject. You say the people love havoc. I think they love justice. . . . . But I wander from my design. I accept your proposition to recommence your interrupted avocations upon the Maga. Let us meet as if we had not exchanged letters. Use more exercise, write when feelings prompt, and be assured of my friendship. You will soon regain a healthy activity of mind, and laugh at your past vagaries.”

Three months afterwards, Burton again left town, and again found that during his absence not only had the Gentleman's Magazine been utterly neglected for a fortnight, but that Poe had prepared the prospectus of a new periodical, making use of confidential office-papers, and the current lists of subscribers for his own scheme. In indignation, Burton spent the evening seeking for his editor, and finding him at last at one of his usual haunts, began― “Mr. Poe, I am astonished: give me my manuscripts, so that I can attend to the duties you have so shamefully neglected, and when you are sober we will settle. . .” “Who are you,” interrupted Poe, “who presume to address me in this manner? Burton, I am — the [page 128:] editor of the Penn Magazine and you are (hiccup) — a fool!”

This, of course, closed his connection with Burton, but his retirement virtually put an end to the periodical, which was merged in Graham's Casket; but in November, 1840, the new series received the name of its proprietor, and as Graham's Magazine was again entrusted to the editorship of Poe, who, whatever his shortcomings in business life, was widely acknowledged by the public as one of the leading magazine writers of the day. For eighteen months he continued in this post, contributing many of his most trenchant criticisms, and some of his most brilliant tales; attracting, moreover, no little attention by his studies on cypher-writing, and the character of handwriting.

Two of the tales, the “Mystery of Marie Roget” — a minute transcription of the actual murder of a Mary Rogers at New York — and the “Murders of the Rue Morgue,” excited universal admiration; and the ingenuity with which he unravelled the mysterious intricacies of the latter, brought his name conspicuously before the law courts of Paris. A writer in the French journal, La Commerce, published the story as his own, while one of the staff of La Quotidienne furbished it up under a new title for the columns of that paper, whereupon the publisher of La Commerce prosecuted the publisher of La Quotidienne for stealing his literary wares. Upon the trial, however, it was clearly shewn that each had appropriated Poe's story without the least acknowledgment. In consequence of this, the Revue des Deux Mondes [page 129:] devoted a long article to Poe's tales, and this attracted the attention of Charles Baudelaire to the author. Himself one of the greatest of modern French poets, and with a genius singularly akin to Poe's, Baudelaire made the study of Poe's writings the love-labour of his leisure hours, and produced a translation altogether unrivalled. To his eloquent essays on Poe's life, character, and genius, we have had repeatedly to confess our indebtedness.

In 1842, Graham, like White and Burton, was compelled to seek another editor, and Poe was once more thrown into a condition utterly miserable. One of the dreams of his life was to have a periodical entirely under his own control, and at this time he made strenuous efforts to float a new venture to be called the Stylus, but though the publishers acknowledged his abilities as a writer, they were afraid of his infirmities, and for a year and a half his means of existence were wretchedly precarious, — his only success being a prize of one hundred dollars for the “Gold Bug.” It was at this period that he was first introduced to Griswold, who had succeeded to Poe's editorship, and it is a fair gauge of his poverty that he was driven to send the following petty request to his new acquaintance: —

It would be useless to deny the fact that Poe's poverty and misery were due, if not to himself, at all events to his infirmities. Willis and Mrs. Osgood both declare that a single glass of wine was sufficient to intoxicate him; Baudelaire urges that to a man so really solitary, so profoundly unfortunate, one who considered modern society as an atrocious paradox — “as principally composed of villains” — the delights of forgetfulness, to be found in the flagon, were not unnatural, that, too, his intoxication was a mnemonic means, a method of work, a method energetic and fatal, but appropriate to his passionate nature. . . . he could not resist the desire of finding again those visions marvellous or awful, those subtle conceptions which he had met before in a preceding tempest; they were old acquaintances which imperatively attracted him, and to renew his knowledge of them, he took the road most dangerous but most direct, till the works which give us so much pleasure to day, were in reality the cause of his death.” Again, with troubles weighing heavily upon him, with misery, and bitterness, and shame, is easy to see how Poe with his peculiar temperament might have imperceptibly drifted towards alcohol as a solace and an antidote — a vain antidote maybe, for he was like that sorry quack, who died with the elixir of life in his pocket. Drink, at all events, gave him what he longed for, the means, though for ever so short a time, of setting the Fates themselves at defiance: — [page 131:]

Be the diagnosis of the disease what it may, it must for those who loved him — his young wife, his tender mother have been fairly heart-rending to watch their darling, a man of soft and winning nature, a gentleman of birth and perfect breeding, a writer of brilliant promise and performance, of whom so many things were prophesied to watch him start each day in vain search of the wretched hack work that should merely give them bread and life; — to watch his disconsolate return each evening, when spite of all his affection for them, of all his purposes and resolutions, he would steal to the bottle for forgetfulness, or for dreams happier than the present; — to watch him week by week, as he became degraded and besotted, his eloquent face losing all its intelligence and beauty, his flashing eyes growing dull and leaden, his hair sparse and grey, his limbs more and more enervated, his speech full of bitterness and rancour to all humankind save them. “What malady,” he cries, in an outburst of despair, “is comparable to alcohol!”

At last life at Baltimore was insupportable, was, indeed, no longer possible, and in the autumn of 1844 he migrated to New York — a step which he should have taken in his early manhood. Now at last he was in a metropolis where there was something like literary [page 132:] brotherhood, and where society was beginning to be appreciative of artistic worth — and to the choicest circles of this society his reputation as author of “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque” at once gave him the entry, while the charms of his manner and conversation soon made him a universal favourite. His conversation, indeed, was as excellent as his writings. Detesting conventialities his eloquence was essentially poetic, and while on the one hand a vast knowledge, an acquaintance with many tongues, a familiarity with many cities, many countries, made him a powerful teacher, on the other an imagery borrowed from the worlds unseen, with at once all that was most delicately beautiful, all that was gloomiest and grandest, held the hearer enthralled till he himself chose to dissolve the spell, and to demolish his spiritual fancy by some sudden brutal cynicism, or petty vulgar jest. “As he talked,” says Griswold, “his voice was modulated with astonishing skill, and his large and invariably expressive eyes looked repose or shot fiery tumult into theirs who listened, while his own face glowed or was changeless in pallor, as his imagination quickened his blood or drew it back frozen to his heart.”

Soon after his arrival in New York, Poe published the Raven. He did not, like Byron, awake one morning to find himself famous, but on the very afternoon of the day of issue the words rang through the city, and while at the street corners, the ladies’ drawing-rooms, and even the exchanges, busy men and women paused in their labours to quote one to another some lines of its mystery, [page 133:] the poet himself came reeling down Broadway miserably intoxicated. He was, alas! as those who knew him felt the

In one of his essays,* Poe professes to disclose the secret genesis of the Raven, and to ingeniously prove that “the whole work proceeded step by step to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.” This essay is very interesting, almost unknown here, and is well worth a page of abbreviated quotation. He begins by feeling “the necessity of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste and be universally appreciated.” The first question is that of length. “I hold,” he says elsewhere, “that a long poem does not exist” — being at all events “merely a succession of brief ones,” and that the limit of a single sitting, if it may occasionally be overpassed in prose, can never properly be exceeded in a poem.” Again, “the brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect,” a certain degree of duration being, of course, absolutely requisite for the production of any effect at all. With this in mind, “I reached at once what I conceived to be the proper length for my intended poem — a length of about one hundred lines.” It is in fact one hundred and eight, the eight consisting of two stanzas afterwards added. Next came [page 134:] the effect to be conveyed. “Beauty,” he repeatedly insists, “is the sole legitimate province of the poem,” and “beauty of whatever kind in its supreme development excites the sensitive soul to tears; melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.” The “length, province, and tone” determined, he desires a “key-note,” or pivot, upon which the whole structure might turn. Naturally the refrain occurs to him, but he determines to depart from the general rule, and while rigorously preserving the monotone of sound to produce continually novel effects by varying that of thought. For this purpose a single vowel seems the best, and as the refrain forms the close to each stanza, it must necessarily “be sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis. . . . . and these considerations inevitably led me to the long o as the most sonorous vowel, in connection with r as the most producible consonant.” Searching for a word to embody this sound and yet in the fullest possible keeping with the melancholy “tone” the word “Nevermore” is the very first to present itself. It is difficult, however, to put this protracted and re iterated expression continuously and monotonously in the mouth of a reasoning being, and he selects first a parrot, but afterwards a raven — bird of ill omen — as equally capable of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone. Returning again to the subject he argues that death, the most melancholy of all topics, is most poetical when allied to beauty; the death, therefore, of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world; and the lips best suited for such topic are those of [page 135:] a bereaved lover. Combining now the two ideas, of a lover lamenting his deceased mistress and a raven continuously repeating the word “nevermore,” he sees that to vary the application duly he should make the first query to which the raven should reply commonplace, the second less so, the third still less, and so on till the lover, moved from his nonchalance is at last “excited to superstition, and wildly propounds queries of a far different character — queries whose solution he has passionately at heart — propounds them half in superstition and half in that species of despair which delights in self-torture.” He now selects the form of versification, the “first object being as usual originality,” and this originality he obtains by choosing lines which taken individually have been used before, but which have never previously been combined into stanzas. The rhythm,” he pedantically tells us, “is trochaic, the metre octameter acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic, repeated in the refrain of the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrameter catalectic. (1) At this stage, then, the poet first puts pen to the paper in the composition of the last stanza — the culminating point: —

Nothing now was left but to bring the raven and the lover together, and though the woods or fields might seem the most natural, he feels that a close circumspection of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated [page 136:] incident, and determines to place the lover in a chamber rendered sacred by bygone memories. With all the materials well in hand, nothing, according to Poe, was easier than to produce a masterpiece “universally appreciable.”

But, as Hannay well says, all these mechanical principles “surely presuppose the pure creative genius necessary to the conception.” Give the data as here stated in a university examination paper and see what a dozen first-class men will make of them. This Philosophy of Composition is, indeed, too thoroughly ingenious, and knowing that Poe was sometimes carried away by his pride in paradox — and here he distinctly wishes to controvert the idea that poetry is “composed by a species of fine frenzy, an ecstatic intuition” — it is difficult to avoid thinking that in part, at all events, the poem suggested the method, rather than the method the poem. He had, too, in regard to his works the same delight we have noticed in relation to his conversation — of bringing the reader back again, and suddenly, to earth, and this cynicism induced many contemporary writers to share opinions that even the kindly critic, Russell Lowell, felt justified in penning: —

Be the genesis of the poem what it may, the result to all time will be the same. In England it was quoted as eagerly and as widely as in the States; and here it introduced the author to the notice of our own singers. Miss Barrett (to whom afterwards as Mrs. Browning he dedicated all his poems) wrote enthusiastically, giving other authority than her own — “Our great poet, Mr. Browning, was struck much by the rhythm of that poem.”

To the fame thus suddenly acquired Poe soon added by the publication of his Mesmeric Revelation, followed by the Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. These pieces, even Griswold, tardy as he is of eulogy, says, “ were reprinted throughout the literary and philosophical world in nearly all languages, causing everywhere sharp and curious speculation, and, where readers could be persuaded that they were false, challenging a reluctant but genuine admiration.”

It might be thought that a writer so distinguished in two vastly different lines would have had the ball of Fortune at his feet, and indeed Poe had not been long in New York before he was engaged by Willis and General Morris as critic and assistant editor of the Mirror; but before this it is evident that he must have suffered, and severely, from one of his miserable attacks, for Willis graphically describes their early connection together: —

Our first knowledge of Mr. Poe's removal to this city was by a call which we received from a lady, who introduced herself to us as the mother of his wife. She was in search of employment for him; and she excused her errand by mentioning that he was ill, that her daughter [page 138:] was a confirmed invalid, and that their circumstances were such as compelled her taking it upon herself. The countenance of this lady, made beautiful and saintly with an evidently complete giving up of her life to privation and sorrowful tenderness, her gentle and mournful voice urging its plea, her long-forgotten but habitually and unconsciously refined manners, and her appealing and yet appreciative mention of the claims and abilities of her son, disclosed at once the presence of one of those angels upon earth that women in adversity can be. It was a hard fate that she was watching over. Mr. Poe wrote with fastidious difficulty, and in a style too much above the popular level to be well paid. He was always in pecuniary difficulty, and with his sick wife, frequently in want of the merest necessaries of life. Winter after winter, for years, the most touching sight to us, in this whole city, has been that tireless minister to genius, thinly and insufficiently clad, going from office to office with a poem, or an article on some literary subject, to sell — sometimes simply pleading in a broken voice that he was ill, and begging for him — mentioning nothing but that ‘he was ill,’ whatever might be the reason for his writing nothing — and never, amid all her tears and recitals of distress, suffering one syllable to escape her lips that could convey a doubt of him, or a complaint, or a lessening of pride in his genius and good intentions.”

Yet Willis bears testimony stronger than any now existing, that Poe was not the utterly helpless and degraded drunkard that so many American biographers have wished to depict him: — [page 139:]

“Some four or five years since, when editing a daily paper in this city, Mr. Poe was employed by us for several months as critic and sub-editor. This was our first personal acquaintance, with him. He resided with his wife and mother at Fordham, a few miles out of town, but was at his desk in the office from nine in the morning till the evening paper went to press. With the highest admiration for his genius, and a willingness to let it atone for more than ordinary irregularity, we were led by common report to expect a very capricious attention to his duties, and occasionally a scene of violence and difficulty. Time went on, however, and he was invariably punctual and industrious. With his pale beautiful, and intellectual face, as a reminder of what genius was in him, it was impossible, of course, not to treat him always with deferential courtesy. . . . It was by rumour only, up to the day of his death, that we knew of any other development of manner or character. We heard from one who knew him well (what should be stated in all mention of his lamentable irregularities), that with a single glass of wine his whole nature was reversed, and though none of the usual signs of intoxication were visible, his will was palpably insane which puts it very nearly upon the ground of a temporary and irresponsible insanity.”

An assured income now allowed the unwonted luxury of a quiet, peaceful home, at a pretty little cottage at Fordham, where, as he himself says, he could enjoy “the four elementary conditions of happiness — life in the open air, the love of a woman, forgetfulness of all ambition, and [page 140:] the creation of a new ideal of beauty.” As a pendant to Willis's account of the poet's business life we cannot refrain from quoting Mrs. Osgood's touching and graceful sketch of his domestic happiness during this rare interval: —

“It was in his own simple yet poetical home that to me the character of Edgar Poe appeared in its most beautiful light. Playful, affectionate, witty, alternately docile and wayward as a petted child — for his young, gentle, and idolized wife, and for all who came, he had, even in the midst of his most harassing literary duties, a kind word, a pleasant smile, a graceful and courteous attention. his desk, beneath the romantic picture of his loved and lost Lenore, he would sit, hour after hour, patient, assiduous, and uncomplaining, tracing in an exquisitely clear chirography and with almost superhuman swiftness, the lightning thoughts — the ‘rare and radiant’ fancies as they flashed through his wonderful and ever-wakeful brain. I recollect one morning, towards the close of his residence in this city, when he seemed unusually gay and light-hearted. Virginia, his sweet wife, had written me a pressing invitation to come to them; and I, who never could resist her affectionate summons, and who enjoyed his society far more in his own home than elsewhere, hastened to Amity Street. I found him just completing his series of papers, entitled ‘ The Literati of New York.’ ‘See,’ said he, displaying, in laughing triumph, several little rolls of narrow paper (he always wrote thus for the press), ‘I am going to show you, by the difference of length in these, the different degrees of estimation in [page 141:] which I hold all you literary people. In each of these, one of you is rolled up and fully discussed. Come, Virginia, help me!’ And one by one they unfolded them. At last they came to one which seemed interminable. Virginia laughingly ran to one corner of the room with one end, and her husband to the opposite with the other. ‘ And whose lengthened sweetness long drawn out is that? ‘ said I. ‘ Hear her! ‘ he cried, ‘ just as if her little vain heart didn’t tell her it's herself!’. . .

“During that year, while travelling for my health, I maintained a correspondence with Mr. Poe, in accordance with the earnest entreaties of his wife, who imagined that my influence over him had a restraining and beneficial effect. It had, as far as this — that having solemnly promised me to give up the use of stimulants, he so firmly respected his promise and me, as never once, during our whole acquaintanceship, to appear in my presence when in the slightest degree affected by them Of the charming love and confidence that existed between his wife and himself, always delightfully apparent to me, in spite of the many little poetical episodes, in which the impassioned romance of his temperament impelled him to indulge; of this I cannot speak too earnestly, too warmly. I believe she was the only woman whom he ever truly loved.”

He left Willis to take the lead in the Broadway Journal, in which, in February, 1845, he became possessed of a third interest. In March he appeared before the public for the first time with a lecture upon the “Poets of America,” and in the autumn accepted an [page 142:] invitation to read an original poem before the Boston Lyceum. At the time he was ill, over-worked, full of worry, and in despair, he wrote to Mrs. Osgood: — “You compose with such astonishing facility that you can easily furnish me, quite soon enough, a poem that shall be equal to my reputation. For the love of God I beseech you to help me in this extremity.” The lady promised compliance, but failed to finish her work in time. Poe's design was certainly cool, but his execution was cooler, for he gravely recited “Al Araaf [[Aaraaf]],” the weakest and most puerile of his juvenile efforts. The Bostonians, at first enraptured with the piece, were disgusted when they discovered the hoax. A very wordy war ensued, and Poe replied in sarcastic triumph: — “The poem they say is bad. We admit it. We insisted upon this point in our prefatory remarks, and we insist upon it now, over and over again. It is bad — it is wretched — and what then? We wrote it at ten years of age — had it been worth even a pumpkin-pie undoubtedly we should not have delivered it to them.” He was asked no more to Boston.

In October the Broadway Journal passed entirely into his hands, and at last he possessed what he so often longed for — the absolute control of a periodical. This magazine unfortunately was in anything but a favourable condition, and his own pecuniary means were, as usual, almost nil. In this strait he wrote round to his friends, and Griswold, in reply to the following note, sent the trifle required, but expressed doubts as to success: — [page 143:]

“MY DEAR GRISWOLD, — Will you aid me at a pinch — at one of the greatest pinches conceivable? If you will, I will be indebted to you for life. After a prodigious deal of manœuvring, I have succeeded in getting the Broadway Journal entirely within my own control. It will be a fortune to me if I can hold it — and I can do it easily with a very trifling aid from my friends. May I count you as one? Lend me $ 50, and you shall never have cause to regret it. — Yours truly, EDGAR A. POE.”

And the doubts were justified, for the first use to which he put the magazine was to attack his enemies at Boston; among these he somewhat wantonly included Professor Longfellow, whom he accused of gross plagiarism.* The public did not greatly care for these private quarrels, and after a few months’ flickering existence, the Broadway, in January, 1846, went the way of all impecunious periodicals. [page 144:]

Thrown again upon his wits for sustenance, he commenced a series of brilliant articles upon the “Literati of New York,” in the Lady's Book. Of all his critical writings these are probably the best. “Unerring,” says Willis, “in his analysis of dictum, metres, and plots, he seemed wanting in the faculty of perceiving the profounder ethics of art. His criticisms are, however, distinguished for scientific precision and coherence of logic. They have the exactness, and, at the same time, the coldness of mathematical demonstrations.” Personally and after some study of the subject, we have no very high opinion of Poe's critical method, full though it be of strange conceits and astonishing innovations; but whatever else they may be, they are certainly not “cold:” — he writes in this like Jeffrey or Johnson or Macaulay, not like Sainte-Beuve; and his “ reviewals,” as Yankees term them, are now chiefly valuable for the thorough personality they exhibit, and as records, flushed and glowing still, of zealous friendship or eager hate. Not for one moment does the critic cease to be Edgar Allan Poe; never trying his author by broad and general rules, never even by the narrower standard of the author's own talents and powers, but — as on that terrible bed wherein the Syracusan tyrant slept — all luckless victims must alike to be made, by hewing off or drawing out, to fit one fanciful and individual measure.

The sarcastic personality, the outspoken boldness of the sketches, carried some of the numbers through three editions, but led to their premature conclusion, for among the many quarrels they instituted, a Dr. English resented [page 145:] Poe's remarks by publicly describing his life and character, alleging, of course falsely, that he had “on several occasions inflicted personal chastisement” upon the critic. The proprietor of the Lady's Book declined to print in extenso Poe's answer to these charges, and his irate contributor brought an action against English, and issued the communication elsewhere. Among much else he says: —

“The errors and frailties which I deplore, it cannot at least be asserted that I have been the coward to deny. Never, even, have I made attempt at extenuating a weakness which is (or, by the blessing of God, was) a calamity, although those who did not know me intimately had little reason to regard it otherwise than as a crime, For, indeed, had my pride, or that of my family, permitted, there was much — very much — there was everything — to be offered in extenuation.”

Misery and want of employment again drove him to the solace of the bottle, and in the autumn he and his wife were in a state of destitution beyond even the worst days of their youth. Living at Fordham, they were miles away from those who knew them; his wife lay on her death-bed, and he, too, was grievously ill. At last the newspapers drew the attention of the public to the pitiable condition of the poet's home, and some good souls, chiefly women, hastened to relieve him. Immediately Poe heard of it, which was on the last day of 1846, with a not unnatural pride, he disowned any connection with this appeal, even to publicly disclaiming any necessity for it: — [page 146:]

“That my wife is ill, then, is true; and you may imagine with what feelings I add that this illness, hopeless from the first, has been heightened and precipitated by her reception, at two different periods, of anonymous letters — one enclosing the paragraph now in question; the other, those published calumnies of Messrs ———, for which I yet hope to find redress in a court of justice.

“That, as the inevitable consequence of so long an illness, I have been in want of money, it would be folly in me to deny — but that I have ever materially suffered from privation, beyond the extent of my capacity for suffering, is not altogether true. That I am ‘without friends’ is a gross calumny, which I am sure you never could have believed, and which a thousand noble hearted men would have good right never to forgive me for permitting to pass unnoticed and undenied.

“I am getting better, and may add — if it be any comfort to my enemies — that I have little fear of getting worse. The truth is, I have a great deal to do; and I have made up my mind not to die till it is done.” The words had, however, been wrung from him in the bitterness of shame, for, in a short time, he writes again to one of those ladies who had lent their assistance: —

“I could not help fearing that should you see my letter to Mr. Willis — in which a natural pride, which I feel you could not blame, impelled me to shrink from public charity, even at the cost of truth, in denying those necessities which were but too real — I could not help fearing that, should you see this letter, you would yourself feel pained at having caused me pain — at having been the [page 147:] means of giving further publicity to an unfounded report — at all events to the report of a wretchedness which I had thought it prudent (since the world regards wretchedness as a crime) so publicly to disavow.”

For a few weeks they lived or starved upon the charity of strangers in such fearful plight that Mrs. Poe had to lie on a straw bed “wrapped in her husband's great-coat, with a large cat in her bosom;” and these her “only means of warmth except as her husband held her hands, and her mother her feet;” and then the patient, suffering wife, who, though long an invalid, had been the very mainstay of his struggles, died in the midst of their wretchedness, leaving her husband to miserably mourn —

On her death-bed, he swore to her, again and again, that never would he wed another woman, and then he returned to the gloomy solitude of the hateful days before his marriage, when he had never a hope or desire in the world. She left no children, and nothing now but memories remained.

For a whole twelvemonth he shut himself up in seclusion, seeing no one but Mrs. Clemm, who, as he himself says, was more than a mother. Very gentle and kind and tender she was; and as even his literary hopes had died out, she would wheedle him into composition, and then trudge painfully through the journal offices of [page 148:] New York to sell here an article, or there a poem. As Willis says: —

“She continued his ministering angel — living with him — caring for him — guarding him against exposure; and, when he was carried away by temptation, amid grief and loneliness of feelings unreplied to, and awoke from his self abandonment prostrated in destitution and suffering, begging for him still. If woman's devotion, born with a first love, and fed with human passion, hallow its object, as it is allowed to do, what does not a devotion like this — pure, disinterested, and holy as the watch of an invisible spirit — say for him who inspired it?”

It was at this period that he penned the following beautiful sonnet, glowing with the tenderest love: —

“TO MY MOTHER.

Time, as it passed, softened something of his sorrow. He was a man too full of latent energy to rest for ever [page 149:] paralyzed by misfortune, and in the January of 1848, we find that his early dream of establishing a new magazine — “when he should feel thoroughly at home” — was again coming uppermost. For eight weary years he had laboured with this one idea constantly in view, but had never once possessed the few hundred dollars that should give him the sorriest start. He now hit upon a plan involving nothing else but labour, and, commoner in America than England, not unlikely to be successful: —

The lecture was so far successful as to be attended by an eminently intellectual auditory,” but the subject was too broad, too lofty, too extensive, to attract popularity; and even when published in book-form, as “Eureka, a prose-poem,” the volume, though hailed as Poe's most ambitious effort, altogether failed to find readers.

“Eureka” is dedicated in the preface: —

“To the few who love me and whom I love; to those who feel rather than to those who think; to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities — I offer this book of truths, not in the character of Truth-Teller, but for the beauty that abounds in its truth: constituting it true. To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone: — let us say as a Romance; or, if it be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem.”

In Eureka [[Eureka]], Poe's subtlest and highest powers are to be found in their most perfect development. At the moment, at all events, he was thoroughly persuaded that all his arguments had legitimate bases and were true; but, judging the work only as an effort of ingenuity and logic, the book is almost unique, and is well worth consideration. It proves that Poe, though in much agreeing with the most beautiful of the old Brahminical tenets, has, like Novalis, a right to stand in the front rank of modern Pantheists.* [page 151:]

The central idea of Poe's general philosophy consisted in a belief that a universal ether fills all space, permeates all matter, and that this ether is in essence what is commonly understood by the term spirit, and is manifested in those subtle and inexplicable principles such as magnetism, light, vitality, consciousness, and thought; and that, to serve the purposes of this sentient ether — the only Godhead which he acknowledged — matter was created.

Now, in Eureka, he argues that this Divine Unity or Godhead, has exerted but one creative volition, when in the beginning of all things he willed matter into existence from nihility, and that this original matter was in the simplest form, a single, unrelated particle. Other and less energetic volitions divide this original uniform particle, producing separation, diffusion, and multiplicity; the divided matter being irradiated from a circle, not as rays, but in parallel strata. Unity, however, being the normal state, there is an inherent tendency in each atom to return to unity, and to counteract this, an antagonistic force, heterogeneity, is introduced. This essence, manifested as electricity, he holds however in overmuch awe to in any way discuss. But as unity is normal, and diffusion abnormal, he argues that the normal must prove the stronger, and that matter will return to that nihility from whence it came, and from which a new cosmogony may be evoked by a new volition: —

“A novel universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart divine. And this heart what is it? It is our own. In [page 152:] man the sense and general identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness. . . . the general sum of the separate sensations of created things is precisely the amount of happiness which appertains by right to the Divine Being when concentrated within himself.”

“Eureka,” as book or lecture, brought in very little money, and then he undertook a work which probably brought in less- the publication of a collected edition of his poems, “chiefly with a view to their redemption from the many improvements to which they have been subjected while going at random the rounds of the press.[[”]] “With me,” he writes, “poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion, and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not, they cannot, at will, be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations of mankind.” “He believes,” says Baudelaire, “true poet that he was, that the aim of poetry is of the same nature as its principle — that it ought never to have in view anything but itself. “ Elsewhere Poe himself tells us — “the origin of Poetry lies in a thirst for wilder beauty than earth supplies — that poetry itself is the imperfect effort to quench this immortal thirst by novel combinations of beautiful forms (collocations of forms) physical and spiritual, and that this thirst when even partially allayed — this sentiment when even feebly meeting response — produces emotions to which all other human emotions are vapid and insignificant. . . . and yet there are men who would mingle with the august theme the merest questions of expediency — the cant topics of the day — the doggrel æsthetics of the time — [page 153:] who would trammel the soul in its flight to an ideal Helusion by the quirks and quibbles of chopped logic.”*

These extracts show sufficiently for our space what Poe's idea of poetry really was, and the execution of his idea in his own poems has been previously discussed. “He wrote,” says Willis grimly, “in a style too much above the popular level to be well paid.” Had he received in his lifetime but one tenth of what ten publishers have since netted from his works, his days would have been more assured. As it was “events not to be controlled” made poetry the luxury of his leisure, and incessantly drove him to the veriest hack work that would bring in immediate cash. By this time, however, he had quarrelled with the conductors of the leading periodicals, and, though with a reputation perhaps higher than that of any other in New York, he writes to a friend in bitterness of heart upon the wretcheduncertainty of a literary career: —

“I have represented —— to you as merely an ambitious simpleton, anxious to get into society with the reputation of conducting a magazine, which somebody behind the curtain always prevents him from quite damning with his stupidity; he is a knave and a beast. I cannot write any more for the Milliner's Book, where T― — n prints his feeble and very quietly made dilutions of other people's reviews; and you know that can afford to pay but little, though I am glad to do anything for a a good fellow like — In this emergency I sell articles to the vulgar and trashy —— — — —— , for $5 apiece. [page 154:] I enclose my last, cut out, lest you should see by my sending the paper in what company I am forced to appear.”

Another letter, of about the same date, to Willis is scarcely less pitiful: —

“My dear Willis, — The poem which I enclose, and which I am so vain as to hope you will like, in some respects, has been just published in a paper for which sheer necessity compels me to write now and then. It pays well as times go — but unquestionably it ought to pay ten prices; for whatever I send it I feel I am consigning to the tomb of Capulets. The verses accompanying this, may I beg you to take out of the tomb, and bring them to light in the ‘Home Journal?’ If you can oblige me so far as to copy them, I do not think it necessary to say ‘From the —— , — that would be too bad: — and, perhaps, ‘From a late ——— paper,’ would do.”

I have not forgotten how a ‘ good word in season’ from you made ‘The Raven,’ and made ‘Ulalume,’ (which, by-the-way, people have done me the honour of attributing to you) — therefore I would ask you (if I dared) to say something of these lines — if they please you.”

In the very midst of this despairing misery there came to him another beam of hope. Years ago, at Boston, on the very night after he had read that luckless poem, “Al Araaf [[Aaraaf]],” he had strolled restlessly through the city, and through a garden gate he had seen a lady whose beauty made a deep and lasting impression, and this incident has given rise to one of his most exalted poems: — [page 155:]

At the time this was merely what Mrs. Osgood terms one of “the many little poetical episodes in which the impassioned romance of his temperament compelled him to indulge;” but, by a strange fate, he was, after his wife's death, thrown into contact with this lady whom he now discovered to be one of the wealthiest and most brilliant, as well as one of the loveliest, women in New England; and, moreover, an intense admirer of his genius. In the time of his trouble her womanly presence was most solacing; they became secretly engaged; his whole future seemed assured as a life of artistic luxury to be devoted to love and poetry. Such a happiness, however, would scarcely have fitted duly into the story of his stormy career.

The news, of course, was noised abroad, and one morning in New York he was greeted with the congratulations of a friend. Poe started — “It is a mistake. I am not going to be married!” And then, again himself, he interrupted her gossiping, “ Why, Mr. Poe, I understand the banns have been published” — with “I cannot help what you have heard, my dear madam; but mark me, I shall not marry her!” [page 157:]

From the lips of another the very mention of his marriage brought him back suddenly to the thoughts of that miserable death-bed, when he had tried to soothe his dying wife's last moments with promises of eternal faithfulness. “I shall not marry, I may not marry,” went surging through his brain, as a chorus, all day long, deadening every other thought, till, scarcely himself and irresistibly urged forward, he took the train to the town where his mistress lived, with no idea in him but of how best to break the engagement. Here, whether by chance or design, he adopted the very means which, in a drama popular in England and Germany, David Garrick is said to have employed. After walking in his cowardice for hours in the streets outside, he reeled into the lady's drawing-room — drunk! The disillusion was brutal but effective — almost as cruel to himself as the lady, for he could not now dare to be seen in New York.

Accordingly, in August, 1849, he fled away to Virginia. Halting at Philadelphia, he met many of his own boon companions, and, eager for oblivion at any price, he threw himself in with them, and was for days utterly abandoned to his worst cravings — drinking and making others drink till his scanty hoard was all exhausted. Those whom he had treated, however, supplied the wherewithal for a ticket to Richmond, and, once arrived, longing for a new life, but clutching at the veriest straw, he joined a temperance society!

Here for two months he clave to his pledge; and, reverting again to his old plan of lecturing, and so obtaining money enough to start the Stylus, he “starred “ through the principal towns of Virginia. [page 158:]

Everywhere the people welcomed with pride the man who had lived amongst them so poor, so forlorn, so young, and whose fame, but not misfortunes, had since been the theme of the country side. Overjoyed with this reception, Poe wrote to his friends that he had determined to end his days among the scenes endeared by the romances and realities of childhood.

It was, however, first necessary that he should return for a little while to New York; and on the 4th October, though suffering from weakness and shiverings he started. He reached Baltimore at six o’clock in the evening, and, still far from well, he stopped there for an hour or two. Time after time, he had gone back to the city in his troublous days, as one might go back to an unkindly home — now he thought he would see it once again when fortune was all smiling.

He strolled through the old streets, each one full of poignant memories; he met old faces, old friends; and as they talked the old times seemed to come back again — and he laughed with them and joked with them as they curiously regarded him as a famous man; and he felt his heart touched as they told him how this one of their set was married, and that one dead — till his vows were all forgotten, and the night was ended, like the nights of years ago, in the well-remembered corner of some rollicking old tavern — and then with jovial shouts and good wishes the comrades clasped hands and started for home.

Next morning, in the pale shadows of the early day, some policeman stumbled across a corpse lying by the roadside — a corpse? no! merely the body of a drunken [page 159:] man, but “marked already with the royal stamp of death.” They bore it to the hospital — no papers in its pockets, no name — “a drunkard suffering from delirium tremens,” said the students.

For two days longer Edgar Allan Poe lived on, unconscious of anything but the terrible phantasms that thronged his brain, and then on the 7th October, 1849, he died in the common ward of the hospital of his birthplace — unknown, unwept —

What stale moral verbosities shall we tag on to this pitiful life-story. Nay! if Poe sinned he suffered — suffered so bitterly that even the worst of Philistines — your Yankee Philistine — might have thought the tale sufficed. And yet what raising of pious hands was there; what howls of virtuous indignation before even the body was committed to the grave! — and after! “ Is there no law in America,” cries Baudelaire, “ to keep cur dogs from the grave-yards? “ One poor soul was heartbroken, and her single, disjointed letter is better testimony than the shoals of gushing articles for which the vampires of the press scrambled to claim payment:”

I have this morning heard of the death of my darling Eddie. . . .. Can you give me any circumstances or particulars. Oh do not desert your poor friend in this bitter affliction. . . Ask Mr. —— to come, as I must deliver a message to him from my poor Eddie.. I need not ask you to notice his death [page 160:] and to speak well of him. I know you will. But say what an affectionate son he was to me, his poor desolate mother.”. . . .

—————

APPENDIX.

POE's first volume of Poems was published by Hatch and Dunning at Baltimore, in the year 1829, and is now one of the rarest American books.

When he collected his poems he professed to reprint these Youthful Poems verbatim, but some of the more important pieces had undergone such a revision as to be entirely different.

The “Dream within a Dream,” now included among the later poems, appeared originally in this volume, but, with the exception of ten lines printed in italics, this first draft will be new to the reader.

“TO ————

A second edition, quite as scarce now as the first, was issued at New York in 1831, and from it we extract the original drafts of two poems. “The Valley Nis,” however, has nothing but the main idea in common with “The Valley of Unrest,” and is much longer. [page 162:]

“THE VALLEY NIS.

More curious still, as showing the germ of a much longer and more carefully finished poem, is the first draft of Lenore.

“A PÆAN.

The following first draft, differing considerably from the later lines to “One in Paradise,” at one time obtained a second circulation, and was in America widely attributed to Mr. Tennyson; and a correspondent in our [page 165:] Spectator for 1st January, 1853, accused the Poet Laureate of plagiarism, to which Mr. Tennyson in a succeeding number replied: — “I am not the author of the lines which he attributes to me; and I have no doubt that both the poems quoted are by the same author, Edgar Allan Poe.”

Among the many charges of plagiarism brought up against Poe after his death, there was one crowning piece [page 166:] of absurdity, which actually obtained considerable credence. Some wretched wag declared that The Raven, refrain and all, was merely a translation from the Arabic, and supported his assertion by publishing what he termed a prose translation of the original, but which actually was a prose transcription of Poe's poem, with the rhymes clumsily altered.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 97:]

*After much search in local histories and directories, old and new, we succeeded in identifying the house as one now occupied by a ladies’ school. Flushed with the discovery, we went straightway to Church Street, and, asking for the husband of the schoolmistress, broke the news to him as gently as possible, that a great man, one Edgar Allan Poe, had been educated there. In defence of the establishment, he curtly replied, “Many great men have been educated here, sir — and one alderman. Pray who was Edgar Allan Poe?” Impressed by our explanation, but not enlightened, he proceeded to point out in answer to questions, but somewhat too gleefully, how the old entrance-hall had been swept away, the famous old schoolroom turned into a young ladies’ dormitory, the boys’ former dormitory into a public-house, how this improvement and that had been inaugurated by him, and how a grand old archway in the play-ground was disappearing without his intervention at all, and concluded, chuckling, “next week they are going to pull down Fairfax's (?) house opposite!” The alderman, who is still alive, exhibits a like placid indifference to the memory of a famous poet, once his school-fellow.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 102, running to the bottom of page 103:]

*The year of Poe's admission here is rather apt to shake our confidence in the almost universally accepted date of his birth, for by this time he could only have been between fourteen and fifteen. But in the American Colleges the students probably entered at the same early date as at our English Universities a couple of centuries ago, and probably in the same intent-not many men were then able to waste more than their youth in college days; nor did the authorities care to receive students whom it was impossible to control. Poe certainly supplied this date to his biographers in the first place, and then certainly left it uncontradicted. There were two exceptions: once wishing to render his first volume more of a youthful marvel than it undoubtedly was, he wrote 1813 down as his birth-year; at another time, with probably an after [page 103:] wish of some sort, he states it as 1809. These two errors fairly cancel, and we are obliged to accept the unanimous testimony of all his biographers, in spite of the extraordinary precocity which this involves.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 107:]

*Charles Baudelaire.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 108:]

*See Appendix for the first drafts of some of the more famous poems — in themselves almost new poems to us — and for bibliographical notes.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 133:]

*The Philosophy of Composition.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 136:]

*Fable for Critics.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 143:]

*This accusation was of old date in relation to both German and American writers. On Poe's part the quarrel was very bitter. There was a marked similarity between Poe's “Haunted Palace” and Longfellow's “Beleaguered City;” the former was undoubtedly first published, but Longfellow convinced his friends that the “Beleaguered City” had been in private circulation even previously. After his unfortunate rival's death, Longfellow, forgetful of much, at a time when all literary America seems to have been grubbing up evil reports, wrote: — “I never knew him personally, but have always entertained a high appreciation of his powers as a prose-writer and a poet. His prose is remarkably vigorous, direct and yet affluent; and his verse has a particular charm of melody, an atmosphere of true poetry about it, which is very winning. The harshness of his criticism I have never attributed to anything but the irritation of a sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinable sense of wrong.”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 150:]

*For an admirable study on Poe's philosophy, see the North American Review, volume eighty-three, to which we are greatly indebted as elucidating the many mysteries of Eureka.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 153:]

*Essay on R. H. Horne's “Orion.”