Text: Richard H. Stoddard, “Reminiscences of Poe,” New-York Tribune (New York, NY), vol. XLV, whole no. 14,049, May 3, 1885, p. 8, cols. 1-2

[page 8, column 1:]

“So you knew Poe?” said Lorettus, as he leaned back in his easy chair, and glanced up at me with his soft, sharp eyes.

“Hardy,” I replied. “Say I was acquainted with him, and you are not far wrong.”

“Tell me all about him; I have half an hour to spare.”

I seated myself, lighted a cigar, and began: “When I was in my twentieth year I was under the delusion I could write poetry. I belonged to the School of Keats, though I was only in the infant class. Something that I had read suggested an Ode to a Grecian Flute, and I wrote one, or tried to, which is not precisely the same thing. I made a fair copy of the effusion, and sent it to the great Mr. Poe, who was then editing The Broadway Journal. It was published in Clinton Hall, not far from where Temple Court is, and The Manhattan is not. I waited patiently two or three weeks, at the end of which time, the immortality of print being, denied me, I took a day and went down to the office of The Broadway Journal. Mr. Poe was not there, but I obtained his address and retraced my steps. I found the house which he lodged. It was on the southerly side of East Broadway, probably in the neighborhood of Clinton-st. I was directed to his rooms, which were in the second story. He was dressed in black, I remember, and was very courteous to me. The Ode should appear next week. I thanked him, and rising to leave I saw that his wife, who was also in black, was lying asleep on a bed, — a fragile gentlewoman, whom I pitied, for I felt that she had not long to live. I saw her mother at the same time, and she too was also in black. I bowed to her, and departed. Of course the Ode appeared next week? No; but there was a reference to it in the corner devoted to Correspondents. The editor doubted the originality of my verse, and declined to publish it unless he could be assured of its authenticity. I was startled, but complimented, for had I not written so well that Poe suspected I was a literary thief? You wrote well, my vanity asserted. Yes, said common sense; but you wrote so ill, likewise, that Poe should have known the stuff was your own. I was hurt, but I was flattered and bettered, for I was no longer afraid of the poet's criticism. The matter ended there? I took another forenoon; a week later, and went again to the office of The Broadway Journal. It was broiling day, still, I think, in June. The editor was not in his chair, but was expected to return soon. I walked up and down the hot streets and hotter park, in danger, I dare say, of sun-stroke. When, at the end of an hour, I returned, I was informed that Poe was in, and was shown into his room. He was in black, as before, and was sound asleep in his chair. The publisher wakened him. ‘What do you want?’ he snapped out. ‘I have come, Mr. Poe, to assure you of the authenticity of the “Ode on a Grecian Flute.”’ He glared at me, and without waiting to hear what I had to say, declared that I was a liar, and consigned me to instant perdition. Then he rose surlily, and threatened to demolish me if I did not get out. I saw what was the matter, and departed; he was cross with drink.”

“And you never saw him again!”

“Lorettus, you anticipate. I did see him again. It was in the fall of the same year, and the day had been a rainy one. It was in the afternoon, and I was going up town. I met him at the northeast corner of Chatham and Pearl sts., standing under an awning. He was a little seedy, but, so far as I could judge, sober. My impulse was to offer him my umbrella, and to go home with him if he would allow me to do so. I did neither, for which I have never forgiven myself. I see him still, waiting there in the rain, a melancholy figure in black, wild-eyed but pleading, — gentleman and man of genius.”

“And that ended your acquaintance with Poe?”

“You are impetuous, my friend, not to say rash. We know many the things which we have not seen ourselves, and some of the things which we know best we have seen eyes of others. And as with things, so with persons. You have forgotten I told you that I knew most of Poe's contemporaries, foes as well as friends, and they were always communicative with me respecting him. I will not speak yet (or not much) of Dr. Griswold, whom I knew intimately, but of men like Bayard Taylor and John R. Thompson, and women like Mrs. Kirkland and Mrs. Osgood. What he thought of Mrs. Osgood, and what she thought of him, all the readers of Poe will remember. Griswold was acquainted with the state of feelings toward each other, and was too well acquainted with the state of his own feelings toward both. For, like Edgar, Rufus was enamored of the once fair Fanny. If any proof of this were needed, it would be found in The Knickerbocker Gallery, where, in ‘Love Supreme,’ an extract from an unpublished poem, he bewailed her after her after he death in the worst manner of Mrs. Browning's verse. It is rubbish to us now that a generation has flown, but it was anguish to him when he wrote it. Poe celebrated this lovely invalid, but wasted no feeling on her, though he put some pretty conceits into the elaborate Valentine in which he concealed her Initials. They figure again at the head of two pleasant stanzas, which were originally written in honor of another young person, while he was editing The Southern Literary Messenger.”

“But all this while,” began the wily Lorettus, “you have — ”

“Not in the least forgotten what I meant to have told you before, and what you are dying to question me about. I promised not to say much about Griswold; but this I will say, that he was never Poe's enemy, open or secret, though he had many reasons for disliking him. He never cared for the money that he loaned Poe, for to lend was to give away with him. He had just reasons for disliking Poe, who alternately cajoled and bullied him about his ‘Poets of America,’ and his ‘Female Poets,’ which volumes he, nevertheless, declared ,were — if not good, quite good as anybody else could have made them. It was the lady in the case which was the offence, and, no doubt, the two ladies whom I saw in Poe's room in East Broadway, and two or three more of the literary sisterhood, whom I will not name, as they are now living or very lately dead. I never heard Griswold say one unkind word of Poe, dead or alive, nor of any other human being. He was not as veracious as he meant to be, but, within his limitations, he was strictly truthful. He was the kindest gentleman I ever knew. He praised Poe; he gave of him money, and he wrote, with lightning speed a memoir, of him which, with all its errors — and they are many — will die only with the language in it is written. He gave me a manuscript of Poe's, — the sonnet beginning, ‘ “Seldom we find,” says Solomon Don Dunce,’ and I straight way gave it away to a clergy man of Boston, after writing on its back another sonnet in praise of Poe. Griswold was no more the enemy of Edgar Allan Poe than I was, or am here and now, in this slipshod, oft-hand chatter with you, my elderly young friend.

“I knew Mrs. Lewis well in 1857 or ‘58, and was, with my wife, an occasional visitor at her house in Brooklyn. She practically adopted Mrs. Clemm after the death of Poe, and that elderly person, who still wore her widow's gown and an old lady's cap of white, was nominally her housekeeper. Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a boyish-looking gentleman of twenty-one, who had recently written ‘Baby Bell,’ accompanied us, and was introduced to Mrs. Clemm, who at once told him that she had heard her dear Eddy speak of him. She was mistaken, of course, for Mr. Aldrich never saw his own name in print until five or six years after the death of Poe. She mistook the younger poet, Thomas, for the elder poet, James, My turn came next. She had often heard her Eddie speak of me, which doubtless true. Then she grew imaginative. He was the best son in the world, only a cup of strong coffee, or single glass was wine, upset him. This Mrs. Lewis knew well. She was corroborated, and we were suddenly whisked away to Fordham, where her dearest Eddie wrote ‘Eureka.’ She told us how he wrote it, and how she sat up with him, listening to what he wrote or said, and how one starry night he walked her up and down the piazza of their little cottage until she was nearly frozen. Yes; he was the dearest, kindest, lovingest son in the whole wide world. She told me one thing more, which was that when her darling Eddie's autographs came to an end she went to work and wrote others. The good old lady thought it was all right, and as it put money in her pocket, — but was the readers of this must judge her for themselves, — I am no casuist. There was one but quality in Poe which no great poet ever possessed, but which has always dominated the lesser singers of the world, — a quality which was excessive in Chatterton and Byron, and impossible in Keats, — dexterity in lying. It stamped itself in every communication Poe made to Lowell and Griswold in regard to his age and the date of his early verses, and in every thing he said and wrote to women; and it has perpetuated itself in the statements of all who have undertaken to write about him. Mrs. Lewis believed that she was the heroine of ‘Annabel Lee,’ and Mrs. Whitman was certain that it was she and not her sister singer the poet had in mind while he was weaving that melodious moonshine. The latter lady told me, on paper the story of her attachment to Poe, and of his and alleged attachment to her, and sent me two of his long — and they were very long — letters to herself. They were pretty pieces of love-sick composition (Hamlet might have written them to Ophelia), the ring of which was so hollow that no man could have credited them for an instant, but which was as musical to this poetic widow peal of marriage bells.

“The son of players, he was an actor all his life. His voice was musical, and his eyes humid; he had the art of weeping at will, and he willed strongly to weep while he was penning his enamored epistles. All women were Helolses to this vagabond Abelard. I have proofs of his mendacity! Credulous sceptic, I have them by the dozen. Before Poe, a youth of eighteen, could enlist in the army at Boston, he had to increase his age four years, an he increased it. Before ho could enter West Point, he had he to decrease his age two years, and he decreased it. Before he could marry his cousin, Virginia, who was under fourteen, he had to and increase her age over seven years, and he increased it — she and her mother consenting — a fourth person who went as his surety on his marriage bond authenticating this transparent fiction. Truth was not an inheritance of the houses of Poe and Clemm. But let us be just. We misjudge each other because we understand only the temptation that are habitual to ourselves. In sitting in judgment upon our erring brother we must always remember that he was spoiled by his adoptive father and mother, spoiled [column 2:] by his childish residence at an English private school; by the vanity which applauses that greeted his clever boyhood developed in him; by his wild, reckless life at West Point and Charlottesburg [[Charlottesville]]; by drink, debt, opium. Worse than all, he was demoralized by intense. ambition as boundless as his egotism. This must be said in extenuation of his faults. Worst of all, he was wretchedly poor. My good friend Priestley — dead now, like so many of my good friends — told me that Poe was paid only ten dollars for ‘The Raven.’ I had a note of his, written in the year before his death, in which he offered to write Marginalia for two dollars per page, and wait for the money at that. His needs were such that he sold ‘Annabel Lee’ twice over, once to Sartain's Magazine, and again to The Southern Literary Messenger, neither of which periodicals had the first use of it; for Griswold had the manuscript copy, which he printed within a few days after his death, in THE NEW-YORK TRIBUNE. The time had come for him to die, and he died. He was a singular being, cursed with curious inconsistencies; savage, yet affectionate; brave at the wrong time, and in the wrong place. He should have lived in the days of Alain Chartier and Marie de France; have been the chief gondola of Tasso, lvoing Leonora in his stead; the sacristan of Petrarea, muttering love songs under his breath in the little chapel of Vaucluse; the copies of Lopez de Vega, — the page of Molière, — anything in a word other than he was. His intellectual descent was from Villon, and he has repeated himself in Swinburne. The truth of his portrait depends less upon the colors in which it is painted than upon what is mixed with those colors; the women who have painted him have mixed theirs with tears and lilies, and with their warm heart's. blood.”

R. H. STODDARD.