Text: John R. Thompson, “The Life and Character of Edgar A. Poe,” Southern Field and Fireside (Augusta, GA), vol. 2, no. 27, November 24, 1860, p. ?, col. ?

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”THE LIFE AND CHARACTER OF EDGAR A. POE.”

This was the theme of the lecture delivered before the Young Men's Christian Association of this city, on Thursday evening last, by Jno. R. Thompson, Esq. To say that it was an eloquent essay, admirably delivered, would be but faint praise, in which assertion we are sure the highly intelligent audience will coincide. The beauty of its proportions will long be remembered by the fortunate hearers. Mr. T., after a happily conceived preface, proceeded to speak of Edgar Allan Poe as the critic — the romancer — the poet — the outward and material man. Upon the last division, we venture to quote the gifted lecturer:

It has always seemed to me that the case of Poe called for the exercise of a larger and more liberal charity than is ordinarily extended to the infirmities of genius. For while he moved about on this planet, struggled, suffered, aspired here, owned an American citizenship, and was set down in the New York Directory as “Poe, Edgar A., editor, house Fordham,” he was at the same time an inhabitant of that shadowy realm of ideas in which the scene of his stories was laid, and where the music of his verses was borne on the wind. And it was the dreamy abstraction of his character, the indifference he ever manifested for the substantial objects that surround us, which involved him in such a multiplicity of vexations and troubles. There was a total incompatibility between his ideal and his bodily existence. *** He had extraordinary genius, but he lacked sympathy; he was not selfish, but he did not enter warmly into the affairs of others who were ready to befriend him; he was capable of generous and chivalrous actions, but a wayward impulse made him neglectful of the inexorable duties of life. *** The manner of his death was as painful as it was extraordinary. On his way through Baltimore to fulfil a literary engagement with a northern publisher, he gave way to his besetting sin. Adrift upon the streets of that large city, on the eve of an exciting election, he was seized by the lawless agents of a political club, imprisoned in a cellar for the night, and taken out the next day in a state bordering on frenzy and made to vote in eleven different wards. What a spectacle for enlightened America; what a humiliation for the heaven-endowed poet! Cast off at the polls by his vulgar and brutal tyrants of a day, he was humanely taken by strangers to the hospital, and in the city where be was born, he thus chanced miserably to die. It was the only spot in America where his remains could have mingled with kindred dust. In that little narrow burial ground in Fayette street in which stands the Westminister Church, the outcast lies by the side of his father and grandfather — three generations of the Poes in contiguous graves. ** Thus ends the drama of the life of the actress's son.