[page 135, unnumbered:]

POE left Baltimore in midsummer, apparently without regret, for he owed little gratitude to that city, nor did he ever return to it to live, although there he was destined to die and be buried. He went directly to Richmond, to the scene and associates of his boyhood, to the MacKenzies where his sister Rosalie still lived, and to other friends and houses of his past; nor did he doubt that, in spite of the changes in his lot, life there would be pleasant to him: he may have thought that his literary position would compensate for his loss of social pretension and the consideration that attaches to wealth, or even that his old acquaintance would be advantageous to him. Before his departure from Baltimore a plan had been made by which the family of which he had long been one should be kept together and have its home with him in new surroundings. He may have feared that separation would cast him back into that despondency from which he had lately arisen, though he had fallen into it when they [page 136:] were by, and in making a new start he may have craved their encouragement and protection, in view of his own temptations and dangers. Virginia had idolized him from childhood, and Mrs. Clemm had no one else to look to for support. It was proposed to keep the family united by a marriage of Poe with his cousin, and it was so determined.

He entered at once on his duties as “an assistant to Mr. White, in the office of the magazine he was not nominally an editor until later at a salary of ten dollars a week. It was not high pay, but the position he held was a good opening, and well adapted to his talents. He had been highly praised for his tales. Kennedy cheered and spurred him; Paulding had called him “decidedly the best of all our young writers,” and added, “I might add all our old ones, with one or two exceptions”; and others, who were the literary autocrats of the day, paid their passing tribute. The Southern press welcomed him loudly, with here and there a word of protest, which represented one phase of public taste, against the “Germanism” of the early tales, by which he was becoming known. His fortunes, however regarded, were in bright contrast to his immediate past; but a few weeks after his arrival [page 137:] all this was as naught. An obstruction arose in his engagement with his cousin, and he lost his place through intemperance. He had suffered, from whatever cause, a characteristic nervous breakdown.

The engagement between Edgar and his cousin Virginia had come to the ears of his relative, Neilson Poe, who, himself a third cousin to both, had recently married her half-sister, also his third cousin; and, led by his wife, who thought Virginia too young to marry (as indeed she was, having been born August 15, 1822,(1) and consequently hardly turned of thirteen years), he offered to Mrs. Clemm to take the child into his family and care for her until she should be eighteen, when, if she desired to marry Edgar, she would be free to do so. It does not appear what disposition was to be made of Mrs. Clemm. Poe, to whom the offer was communicated, wrote(2) to Mrs. Clemm, August 29, imploring her not to consent to separate him from Virginia, and appealing to her pity for himself in such terms that his sincerity [page 138:] cannot be questioned. Some days later he wrote to Mr. Kennedy as follows: —

To this painful letter Mr. Kennedy replied: —

It was, apparently, while this correspondence was going on that Poe lost his place, and he may not have received this last letter when he left Richmond and arrived at Baltimore. There he pleaded his suit in person, and on September 22 took out a license in that city for the marriage.(2) It has been said, on the authority of Mrs. Clemm's conversation taken down in shorthand, that the ceremony was performed by the Rev. John Johns, at Old Christ Church, and that the next day Poe returned to his duties.(3) If this was actually the case the matter was kept very private. There is no complete legal proof of the marriage; but this is not conclusive against its having taken place, as the marriage records of Old Christ Church were badly kept and are very [page 144:] defective. It is certain, however, that Poe so far succeeded in his entreaties that the proposal of Neilson Poe was rejected; it may never have been seriously considered.

Poe now wrote repentantly to Mr. White, but nothing more is known of this incident than is contained in this reply: —

Poe returned with Mrs. Clemm and Virginia, and the three boarded together at the same house. The publication of the magazine had been temporarily suspended, but after its reissue in December, instead of being known simply as an assistant, he had editorial charge; he was thus spurred to his utmost, in the company of his own, and surrounded by friends and goodwishers. The happier state of affairs was soon reflected in his correspondence with Kennedy:

The next persons of literary reputation who together with Kennedy were now taking a friendly interest in Poe were Beverley Tucker, of Virginia, the author of “The Partizan Leader,” and John K. Paulding of New York. Their interest was called out by Poe's work in the magazine. The letters of Tucker are long and leisurely, and are here abridged by the omission of the less personal passages in which the ways of publishers and the decay of taste are the prominent topics. Those of Paulding are more fully given, as the matter is of biographical interest. Other writers, especially Mrs. Sigourney, wrote to him in a similar strain.

Tucker made his approaches diplomatically through Mr. White: —

Poe wrote to him at once, and received a long [page 154:] and friendly reply, of which the first paragraph sufficiently indicates the spirit: —

Some of Tucker's criticisms, however, were thought by Poe capable of doing him harm with his employer, and in consequence Tucker again wrote to White: —

Paulding, the second new correspondent, was a leading literary light of New York, whose early praise of Poe has already been noticed.

It was natural, therefore, to turn to him with a suggestion that he should become the intermediary to present to the Harpers in New York the “Tales of the Folio Club,” still unpublished by Carey & Lea, with the hope of their issue in that city. Poe at the same time received back from Carey & Lea the manuscripts, of which one tale, not then recovered, was missing. Paulding reported the ill success of his mission to White: —

Paulding also wrote directly to Poe, who had apparently requested him to apply to some other New York house.

Harper & Brothers formally declined the vol ume of tales in a letter to Poe, June, 1836, on the same grounds alleged above.

Early in the year the family had entertained a plan to start a boarding-house, and with this in view Poe sent the following letter to George Poe in Alabama: —

George Poe sent the money, but nothing ap pears to have been done. The family history was continued by the public marriage of Poe with his cousin, May 16, 1836. Poe secured Thomas W. Cleland, the son-in-law of his former land lady in Richmond, as his surety, who gave a marriage bond as the law required; and Cleland was further obliging enough to take oath before the deputy clerk, Charles Howard, “that Virginia E. Clemm is of the full age of twenty-one years, and a resident of the said city.”(2) The ceremony was performed on the evening of- the same day at the boarding-house of the family, by the Rev. Amasa Converse, a Presbyterian minister, then editor of the “Southern Religious Telegraph.”(3) Mrs. Clemm, whom the minister remembered as “being polished, dignified, and agreeable in her bearing,” was present, and gave her consent freely; the bride, too, had a pleasing manner, but seemed to him very young.(4) The [page 164:] party then called their friends into the room, where wine and cake were served, and the marriage announced, to their fellow-boarders. Virginia was slightly under fourteen. Poe was twenty-seven.

The boarding-house plan was renewed, under different auspices, in connection with the marriage, and its fortunes are disclosed in the fol lowing letter to Kennedy:

Whether or not Kennedy acceded to his re quest, the little family took up their abode together, and were temporarily at least well provided for.

Poe's work during these months was brilliantly successful. He contributed personally a large amount of matter. A considerable portion of this had been written before he came to Richmond, especially the tales and poems; he published nearly all his tales, including those that had appeared elsewhere, in the “Visiter,” “Godey's,” and “The Gift”; and of his old poems he reprinted, in forms more or less revised, “Irene,” “A Paean,” “The Valley Nis,” “To Helen,” “To Science,” “Israfel,” “The City of Sin,” from the New York volume; “The Coliseum,” a fragment of “Politian,” from the “Visiter”; and “To —— ,” from his tale in “Godey's.” The new poems were five scenes [page 167:] from the drama “Politian,” the “Hymn” in “Morella,” “To Mary,” “To Eliza,” “To Zante,” and the “Bridal Ballad.”(1) Besides “Politian” he had written but six new poems in six years.

The paucity of Poe's creative work after leaving Baltimore may be laid partly to his lack of leisure; but the first impulse in romance was spent, and his poetic vein was not steadily productive. He never wrote poetry except in seasons of solitary musing, and even in prose his creative faculty was quiescent for long periods. He was an editor now, and largely employed in the correspondence and routine business of the office, or in simply furnishing copy, or attracting public interest by attention to the topics of the hour, especially in noticing books; he was a not less diligent than facile reviewer. In fact, his genius had entered on a new phase.

The real service that the “Messenger” did for Poe, in his development, was that in his work on it he discovered his critical capacity, just as in Baltimore in his garret he had discovered his [page 168:] imaginative genius for prose romance. Without depreciating either the novelty or effect of his sensational tales, or underrating their brilliant part in securing his reputation, it may be said that it was as a critic that Poe made the editorial hit which placed the new Southern monthly at once beside the “Knickerbocker” and the “New Englander” as a national magazine. The tales by themselves might not have done so. At all events, what was new in himself, and now ran its first course, was the power of the critic, and temporarily it monopolized his intellectual life. Through it he became at once notorious. While at Baltimore he had contributed a few slight book notices, but only when he was publicly known as editor did he, to use the expression of a contemporary, “fall in with his broad-axe.” Late in the autumn of 1835 there appeared the loudly-announced, much-bepuffed “Norman Leslie,” one of the popular novels of its day; it was ambitious, crude, and foolish, but its pretentiousness seems the particular quality which led Poe to single it out for an example. In the issue for December, 1835, he subjected it to such scrutiny as had never been known in our country before, and he did his task so trenchantly and convincingly, with such spirit and effect, that the [page 169:] public were widely interested; they bought, read, and looked for more. The Southern press with one voice cried on havoc; they were only too glad to find in their own country a youth with the boldness to rouse and the skill to worry Knickerbocker game; for the young author, Theodore's. Fay, was a pet of the metropolitan litterateurs and an associate editor of the “New York Mirror,” then the best literary weekly of the country. Even if Poe had not been applauded to the echo, he was not of a nature to hesitate in following up a predetermined line of policy; but he soon found a stand making against him. There was some show at first of closing the New York columns, with gentleman-like contempt, to any remonstrance against the insult; but at length the “Mirror,” after several insidious attacks, made one openly, to wit: —

“☞ Those who have read the notices of American books in a certain southern monthly which is striving to gain notoriety by the loudness of its abuse, may find amusement in the sketch, in another page, entitled The Successful Novel. The Southern Literary Messenger knows ☞ by experience ☞ what it is to write a successless novel. ☞”(1) [page 170:]

The sketch referred to was a clever squib in the style of Poe's “Lionizing,” and while satirizing his attention to the minutiæ of style and his readiness to cry plagiarism somewhat in a jackdaw manner, as if the word were his whole stock in trade, insinuated further that the Harpers had rejected Poe's longer, as the “Mirror” itself had his shorter, effusions. Poe replied with a flat denial: that he “never in his life wrote or published, or attempted to publish, a novel either successful or successless,”(1) — a statement which must be understood as relegating into nonentity the alleged early work of Poe, “An Artist at Home and Abroad.” This trivial incident drew from Poe a statement of the spirit in which he believed himself to be undertaking the reform of criticism, and the grounds of his action: —

“There was a time, it is true, when we cringed to foreign opinion — let us even say when we paid a most servile deference to British critical dicta. That an American book could, by any possibility, be worthy perusal, was an idea by no means extensively prevalent in the land; and if we were induced to read at all the productions of our native writers, it was only after repeated assurances from England that such productions [page 171:] were not altogether contemptible. ... Not so, however, with our present follies. We are be coming boisterous and arrogant in the pride of a too speedily assumed literary freedom. We throw off with the most presumptuous and un meaning hauteur all deference whatever to foreign opinion — we forget, in the puerile inflation of vanity, that the world is the true theatre of the biblical histrio — we get up a hue and cry about the necessity of encouraging native writers of merit we blindly fancy that we can accomplish this by indiscriminate puffing of good, bad, and indifferent, without taking the trouble to consider that what we choose to denominate encouragement is thus, by its general application, precisely the reverse. In a word, so far from being ashamed of the many disgraceful literary failures to which our own inordinate vanities and misapplied patriotism have lately given birth, and so far from deeply lamenting that these daily puerilities are of home manufacture, we adhere pertinaciously to our original blindly conceived idea, and thus often find ourselves involved in the gross paradox of liking a stu pid book the better because, sure enough, its stupidity is American.”(1) [page 172:]

These views were by no means novel or un shared. The periodical press was frequently weighted or padded with essays, reports of lectures, or editorial remarks, endeavoring to ex plain the feebleness of American criticism, and deprecating it. A writer in the “Knickerbocker” itself ascribes many causes, not confined to that period, such as the interests of publishers, the social relations of editors, the wish to encourage the young, the fear of being esteemed unpatriotic, and the like. What distinguished Poe was the audacity with which he took the unenvied post, and the vigor with which he struck. Undoubtedly his worldly fortunes were affected by the enmities he thus made. The New Yorkers never forgave him. Colonel Stone, of the “Commercial Advertiser,” and W. Gaylord Clarke, of the “Philadelphia Gazette,” denounced him, and in the house of his friends the “Newbern Spectator” was an envious foe. But the presumptuous young critic did not therefore withdraw his hand; and though at a time when Gifford and Wilson handed down the traditions of critical style he did not write with the urbanity that now obtains, though he was not choice in his phrase nor delicate in his ridicule, all of his adverse decisions but one (that on “Sartor Resartus”) have [page 173:] been sustained. Moreover, the severity, what is called the venom and heartlessness, of these critiques, has been much exaggerated; as he himself pointed out in a public letter to a con temporary newspaper(1) which had reproached him for severity. There were in all but four like that upon “Norman Leslie” and these were milder than the first, a fact very creditable to Poe when one recollects how loudly he was urged “to hang, draw, and Quarterly,” and how aptly such a literary temper fell in with the proud self-confidence of his nature. His end was justice, if his manner was not courtesy.

In fact, his reputation as a critic would now suffer rather for the mercy he showed than for the vengeance he took. With what hesitancy he suggests that Mrs. Sigourney might profitably forget Mrs. Hemans; with what consideration he hints a fault in Mrs. Ellet, or just notices a blemish in Miss Gould; with what respect he treats Mellen and Gallagher! And if he asserts that Drake had an analogical rather than a creative mind, and insinuates that Halleck's laurel was touched with an artificial green, — these were the names that a lesser man would have let [page 174:] pass unchallenged. The whole mass of this criticism — but a small portion of which deals with imaginative work — is particularly characterized by a minuteness of treatment which springs from a keen, artistic sensibility, and by that constant regard to the originality of the writer which is so frequently an element in the jealousy of genius. One wearies in reading it now; but one gains thereby the better impression of Poe's patience and of the alertness and compass of his mental curiosity. Here and there, too, one sees signs of his own education, as when he praises with enthusiasm Godwin and Coleridge, Bulwer, Disraeli, and Scott; or one finds the marks of his peculiar individuality, the early bent of his mind, as when he mentions the love of analytical beauty in this author, and whispers to the next the secret of verisimilitude by obscuring the improbability of the general in the natural ness and accuracy of the particular. In especial some progress is made in his poetic theory, but this must be treated by itself.

He had reprinted without a signature his “Letter to B——” from the 1831 edition of his poems, with the editorial remark that “of course we shall not be called upon to indorse all the writer's opinions.” To the somewhat bald [page 175:] conclusions there advanced, that poetry should aim at pleasure, and be brief, indefinite, and musical, he now had something to add in a peculiar dialect of German metaphysics and phrenology, then the fashion. The most significant passage is one in which, after identifying “the Faculty of Ideality” with the “Sentiment of Poesy,” he goes on as follows: —

“This sentiment is the sense of the beautiful, of the sublime, and of the mystical. Thence spring immediately admiration of the fair flowers the fairer forests, the bright valleys and rivers and mountains of the Earth and love of the gleaming stars and other burning glories of Heaven — and, mingled up inextricably with this love and this admiration of Heaven and of Earth, the unconquerable desire — to know. Poesy is the sentiment of Intellectual Happiness here, and the Hope of a higher Intellectual Happiness hereafter. Imagination is its soul. With the passions of mankind, — although it may modify them greatly — although it may exalt, or inflame, or purify, or control them — it would require little ingenuity to prove that it has no inevitable, and indeed no necessary coexistence. ... We do not hesitate to say that a man highly endowed with the powers of [page 176:] Causality — that is to say, a man of metaphysical acumen — will, even with a very deficient share of Ideality, compose a finer poem (if we test it, as we should, by its measure of exciting the Poetic Sentiment) than one who, without such metaphysical acumen, shall be gifted, in the most extraordinary degree, with the faculty of Ideality. For a poem is not the Poetic faculty, but the means of exciting it in mankind.”(1)

Poe's meaning may not be entirely plain at first sight, built up as it is out of obscure Coleridgian elements, which he derived mainly from the “Biographia Literaria.” In the plainest words, Poe conceived that beauty, whether natural or imaginary, whether springing from the creative act of God or the creative thought of man, affects the mind as a glimpse of the in finite, and thus excites instantaneous pleasure, and furthermore, by intimating a fuller delight beyond, stimulates men to endeavor to penetrate deeper into the mystery that encompasses them. Beauty is thus a revelation of infinite truth, seized only by the imagination. Poetry consequently, according to Poe's view at this time, makes its highest appeal to the intellect instead of the passions, and requires imagination rather [page 177:] than sympathetic power in both its makers and its readers.

The remainder of his proposition amounts only to saying that one who is able to analyze the elements which give rise to his own experience of the vision that poetry brings, and thus to discern how such moods are caused, can by forethought so select and combine these elements as to arouse the same state in others, whereas one who is merely susceptible to such experience might not be capable of reproducing it with certainty: the latter has the poetic temperament, the former has in addition the analytical power which is necessary to art; one is the creature, the other the master, of his inspiration. All this is a good illustration of the rationalizing by which Poe was accustomed to feed his own vanity indirectly. Did he not possess “analytical power”? Was he not distinguished by “metaphysical acumen”? And through all, too, most noticeable is his constant parroting of Coleridge, who was, taken all in all, the guiding genius of Poe's early intellectual life.

Of more consequence than either Poe's mysticism or his metaphysical acumen, however, was the lesson he learned from Schlegel, and now adduced in support of his pet canon, that poems [page 178:] should be brief. “In pieces of less extent,” he writes, “the pleasure is unique, in the proper acceptation of that term the understanding is employed, without difficulty, in the contemplation of the picture as a whole and thus its effect will depend, in a very great degree, upon the perfection of its finish, upon the nice adaptation of its constituent parts, and especially upon what is rightly termed by Schlegel, the unity or totality of interest.”(1) This is the first expression of Poe's intellectual sense of poetic form, the quality in which his early verse was most defective and his latest most eminent.

The most noted of the transitory articles of a miscellaneous nature that Poe furnished, simply as a magazine writer, was that in which he demonstrated that Maelzel's Chess Player must be operated by human agency, and solved the methods used. The paper was well reasoned, and shows that its author had a quick and observant eye, but it has been vastly overrated, as any one may convince himself by comparing it minutely with Sir David Brewster's “Letters on Natural Magic,” to which it stands confessedly obliged, and from which it is partly paraphrased. An other article, “Pinakidia,” being selections from [page 179:] Poe's commonplace book, is worth a moment's detention for the light it incidentally throws on his habits of quotation. In prefacing the clippings (which by an obvious but very unfortunate misprint are declared to be original instead of not original), he says that in foreign magazines extracts of this sort are usually taken “by whole sale from such works as the Bibliothèque des Memorabilia Literaria, the Recueil des Bon (sic) Pensées, the Lettres édifiantes et Curieuses, the Literary Memoirs of Sallengré, the Mélanges Litéraires (sic) of Suard and André, or the Pièces Intéressantes et Peu Connues of La Place.”(1) These titles must have been taken down at haphazard, for a thorough search of bibliographies fails to reveal the existence of the first two, and the others, apart from their bad French, are incorrectly given. The earmark in this masquerade of borrowed learning is seen in the “Mélanges Litéraires of Suard and André,” — a title evidently noted from the recent translation of “Schlegel's Lectures on the Drama” (which furnished some extracts to the body of the article), for there alone it occurs, the translator having erred in rendering “Suard und Andre” (andere), that is, Suard and others; Poe innocently [page 180:] followed him, and so tripped. The satirical young editor goes on to say that “Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature, Literary Character/ and Calamities of Authors have of late years proved exceedingly convenient to some little American pilferers in this line, but are now be coming too generally known”; and forthwith he takes from this same convenient repertory several fine bits, including nearly all the alleged plagiarisms, of the poets.(1)

Poe might now justly regard his future as bright. The “Messenger” had so prospered under his management that it was an assured success, and was likely to afford him a constantly increasing income. His reputation was steadily growing; the Southern press, with a few exceptions, was vociferous in its praises, and Poe took care that these acclaims should not die away unechoed; he was at all times his own press-agent. He was settled in life; his salary was seven [page 181:] hundred and eighty dollars, and was to be a thousand and forty: he was actively planning for future work; and then there was a sudden change. The first number of the magazine for 1837 announced that, “Mr. Poe's attention being called in another direction, he will decline, with the present number, the editorial duties of the Messenger “; and on a later page Mr. White added that the resignation had taken effect January 3, but would not prevent Poe's contributing articles from time to time. Up to this announcement he had published no tale since the previous April, and no poem since August; of criticism, however, there had been no lack. The October issue was delayed by the illness of both editor and publisher, and the November issue by a press of business, while in the latter there is a very marked shrinking of the space devoted to reviews, and in December there was no number issued. The tide of his published writing had ceased. He had, however, in private, turned again to the vein of invention opened in the “MS. Found in a Bottle,” and had begun a long sea-narrative of adventure, “Arthur Gordon Pym.” He may have been preoccupied with this tale and his delayed reviews. The January number, however, in which his resignation was [page 182:] announced, is crowded with reviews, one third of the matter, about thirty-five octavo pages, being by him, besides the first installment of the seastory, and he had desired that more of the latter should be inserted, a portion having been thrown over to February. It is plain that in view of his departure, both he and Mr. White wished to exhaust all of his copy in hand.

The separation was not suddenly or violently effected. The two parted friends, and Mr. White continued throughout life to speak of Poe with great kindness and warm feeling. When the matter was settled Poe wrote to his old friend Wilmer, whose work he had kindly noticed in the “Messenger” in words that prove his friendship, that if he would come to Richmond the position would be given to him. Two weeks after the official cessation of Poe's editorship White wrote to him a letter showing their personal relations:

Poe furnished no more installments of the serial.

Kennedy, who should have known the facts, writes: “He was irregular, eccentric, and querulous, and soon gave up his place.”(2) Poe himself afterward said: “For a brief period while I resided in Richmond and edited the ‘Messenger’ [page 184:]

I certainly did give way, at long intervals, to the temptation held out on all sides by the spirit of Southern conviviality. My sensitive temperament could not stand an excitement which was an every-day matter to my companions. In short, it sometimes happened that I was completely intoxicated. For some days after each excess I was invariably confined to bed.”(1)

The only contemporary reference by him to this matter occurs in a business letter, in which, although it was written six days after his resignation went into effect, he accepts the article from Magruder mentioned by White, without any hint that he had ceased to be the editor of the magazine, except that he begs pardon for delay because of “ill health and a weight of various and harassing business.”(2) Mr. White, despite the cold address of his last communication, had been Poe's kindly disposed friend, and must have required on business grounds strong reasons to make him part with the editor who had proved his capacity by helping, in his sphere of the enterprise, to make the “Messenger” the good investment it was; its circulation had gone from five hundred to thirty-five hundred [page 185:] copies. In view of these various facts the obvious grounds for Mr. White's willingness to let him go lay in his editor's failing service and its attendant circumstances in the regimen of his life.

What part, if any, was played in these events by his flirtation with Mr. White's daughter, of which the tradition survives in Richmond, or whether this was a cause of his hasty marriage with Virginia, are matters too obscure to be more than briefly mentioned. From the beginning his marriage was, in a sense, no marriage; it was a family arrangement. His love for his wife was never that of man for woman, and Virginia, on her side, was always contented with the affection shown to a favored child. Poe, himself, was fond of society, mingled with it, danced with much pleasure, used his powers of fascination; he was always a ladies man in Richmond, from the beginning to the end of his career. He was, besides, arrogant and resentful toward those whom he disliked. His social life at the time seems to have been embarrassing to others and unsatisfactory to himself, and he had always had enemies and ill-wishers in the city. In many ways it was natural for him to seek a new residence for his career. [page 186:]

Thus Mr. White's willingness to let him go was only one element in a complicated situation. Poe himself seems to have been willing to go. His rapid and brilliant success had led him to indulge high hopes of his editorial abilities, and he was less solicitous to retain his post. He had received an invitation from Dr. Francis L. Hawks, a North Carolina divine settled in New York City, whose work . he had lately reviewed in the “Messenger,” to contribute to the newly projected “New York Review.” He was irked, editorially, by his subjection to a man, who, however kindly, was his mental inferior; and he was discontented, financially, because he had no proprietary interest nor share in the profits of the magazine. Reputation, merely, and his salary did not seem to him a sufficient reward. He had developed all sides of his genius, and was man -grown. He now centred his worldly ambition on becoming an independent editor of a magazine that he should own wholly or in part. He believed in the financial success so to be won in the magazine-world, and the swift and great development of popular magazines soon after justified his belief. He determined to attempt to realize his dream; and, having a corresponding acquaintance with [page 187:]

Paulding, Anthon, and Hawks, he decided to go to New York, as offering the most favorable opening, and there subsist by hack work until he could execute his plans. He wished to be a great editor, and therefore changed his locality and, with a true sense of the market and the field, went North. The tradition of the magazine is that “Poe besought the proprietor to reinstate him as editor, but Mr. White, in terms firm yet kindly, refused to do so.”(1) Whether Mr. White or he broke the connection is immaterial. He had found the master-current of his own life.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 137:]

1  The Records of St. Paul's Parish, Baltimore. The date August 13 has some authority by family tradition.

2  The author has not seen this letter, but is assured by its custodians that such is its character.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 141:]

1  Kennedy MSS. The first part of this letter is curiously like the repentant epistles of Coleridge, and such continued to be Poe's style in similar circumstances; the contrast of the two parts also is a marked trait, and first reveals clearly what might seem a double personality in him, so characteristic was it, and in the end so glaring.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 143:]

1  Griswold MSS.

2  Marriage Records of Baltimore City.

3  Didier, p. 58. The date of marriage is given as September 2. As Mr. Didier knew nothing of the record of the marriage license granted September 22, the error is of a kind to support rather than to discredit the marriage. The license was the last issued that day, and it fails to prove the marriage only because there is no return of the minister officiating; but such a return was not obligatory, and there are several other entries in the records that are similarly incomplete.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 146:]

1  Griswold MSS.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 148:]

1  Kennedy MSS.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 149:]

1  Griswold MSS.

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

1  Kennedy MSS.

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

1  Griswold MSS.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 154:]

1  Griswold MSS.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 156:]

1  Griswold MSS.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 159:]

1  Griswold MSS.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 160:]

1  Griswold MSS.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 163:]

1  Poe to George Poe, MS.

2  Hustings Court Records, Richmond, Virginia.

3  Southern Religious Telegraph, May 20, 1836; Richmond Enquirer, May 20, 1836.

4  Mrs. F. B. Converse to the author, May 20, 1884.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 166:]

1  Kennedy MSS.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 167:]

1  To Mary, To ——, To Eliza, and the Bridal Ballad are now known in revised versions, the first three entitled respectively To F——, To One in Paradise, and To F——s S. O——d. To Zante was suggested by a passage in Chateaubriand's Itinéraire de Paris à Jerusalem, already mentioned.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 169:]

1  New York Mirror, April 9, 1836.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 170:]

1  Southern Literary Messenger, ii, 327 (April, 1836).

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 171:]

1  Southern Literary Messenger, ii, 326 (April, 1836).

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 173:]

1  Richmond Courier and Daily Compiler, September 2, 1836. Reprinted in The Virginia Poe, viii, pp. xii-xv.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 176:]

1  Southern Literary Messenger, ii, 328 (April, 1836).

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 178:]

1  Southern Literary Messenger, ii, 113 (January, 1836).

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 179:]

1  Southern Literary Messenger, August, 1836.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 180:]

1  A more curious instance of Poe's mode of dealing with authorities is his note on Israfel, which originally read, “And the angel Israfel, who has the sweetest voice of all God's creatures: Koran.” The passage referred to is not in the Koran, but in Sale's Preliminary Discourse (iv, 71). Poe derived it from the notes to Moore's Lalla Rookh, where it is correctly attributed to Sale. At a later time he interpolated the entire phrase, “whose heart-strings are a lute” (the idea on which his poem is founded), which is neither in Moore, Sale, nor the Koran.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 183:]

1  Griswold MSS.

2  Kennedy MSS.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 184:]

1  Poe to Snodgrass, April 1, 1841, Baltimore American, 1881.

2  Poe to Allan B. Magruder, January 9, 1837, MS.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 187:]

1  The Southern Literary Messenger, 1834-1864. By Benjamin Blake Minor, editor and proprietor from 1843 to 1847. Washington: The Neale Publishing Co., 1905: p. 64.