Edgar Allan Poe: His Life, Letters, and Opinions — John H. Ingram, 1880, volume I — reading text

all hope of a permanent cure, when I found one in the death of my wife. This I can and do endure as becomes a man. It was the horrible never-ending oscillation between hope and despair which I could not longer have endured, without total loss of reason In the death of what was my life, then, I receive a new, but — Oh God! — how melancholy an existence.” Although the unveiling this terrible mystery in the poet’s life almost resembles sacrilege, it is better that the truth be bared, than that the false impressions — purposely or unintentionally created — should continue as to Poe’s accredited habits of dissipation. No one who really knew the man, either personally or through his works, but will believe him when he asserted, “I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have perilled life and reputation and reason. It has been in the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories.”* Doubtless, there are weighty reasons why this moral cancer, which ate so deeply into the poet’s health and happiness, should have remained unrevealed; but, in this history of his life concealment is as impossible as it is, apparently, needless, — be only has been the sufferer, personally and posthumously. Previous, however, to Poe’s resignation of the Graham Magazine editorship, the unhappy catastrophe had already happened to his idolised wife, and the hoping against hope, and relapses into fits of maddening despair, had already begun to exert their deleterious effects upon him, causing a gradual but slow deterioration of his whole moral, physical, and intellectual nature. Mr. Graham, in his eloquent defence of the poet against the defamation of Griswold,* thus alludes to domestic ties and troubles: — “I shall never forget how solicitous of the happiness of his wife and mother-in-law he was, whilst one of the editors of Graham’s Magazine; his whole efforts seemed to be to procure the comfort and welfare of his home. Except for their happiness, and the natural ambition of having a magazine of his own, I never heard him deplore the want of wealth. The truth is, he cared little for money, and knew less of its value, for he seemed to have no personal expenses. What he received from me in regular monthly instalments went directly into the hands of his mother-in-law for family comforts; and twice only I remember his purchasing, some rather expensive luxuries for his house, and then he was nervous to the degree of misery until he had, by extra articles, covered what he considered an imprudent indebtedness. His love for his wife was a sort of rapturous worship of the spirit of beauty, which he felt was fading before his eyes. I have seen him hovering around her when she was ill, with all the fond fear and tender anxiety of a mother for her first-born — her slightest cough causing in him a shudder, a heart chill, that was visible. I rode out one summer evening with them, and the remembrance of his watchful eves, eagerly bent upon the slightest change of hue in that loved face, haunts me yet as the memory of a sad strain. It was this hourly anticipation of her loss, that made him a sad and thoughtful man, and lent a mournful melody to his undying song,”* This adoration of and fidelity to his youthful wife is a trait in Poe’s character that no one personally acquainted with the hapless pair ever denied, even the poet’s most inveterate enemies acknowledged the fact. But when he was dead, and helpless to repudiate the slander, persons who assume to have had his confidence, and to have been his friends, yet knew him only in the last moments of his life, declare that the union with Virginia Clemm was only a marriage of convenience, and that Poe never had any real affection for her. Mrs. Osgood, who, undoubtedly, knew more of the poet’s innermost feelings during the last five years of his life than any person outside his domestic circle, said of his wife, “I believe she was the only woman whom he ever truly loved; and this is evidenced by the exquisite pathos of the little poem lately written, called ‘Annabel Lee,’ of which she was the subject, and which is by far the most natural, simple, tender, and touchingly beautiful of all his songs. I have heard it said that it was intended to illustrate a late love affair of the author; but they who believe this have, in their dulness, evidently misunderstood or missed the beautiful meaning latent in the most lovely of all its verses, where he says, — ‘A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling My beautiful Annabel Lee, So that her highborn kinsmen came, And bore her away from me.’ There seems a strange and almost profane disregard of the sacred purity and spiritual tenderness of this delicious ballad, in thus overlooking the allusion to the kindred angels and the heavenly Father of the lost and loved and unforgotten wife.” The long-tried affection displayed for each other by the poet and Mrs. Clemm was, undoubtedly, the result of the mutual love they bore, and knew each other bore, for the departed Virginia. In the well-known sonnet addressed to his mother-in-law — his “more than mother” — Poe says, in language we hold no evidence to question the truth and earnestness of, — “My mother — my own mother, who died early, Was but the mother of myself; but you Are mother to the one I loved so dearly, And thus are dearer than the mother I knew By that infinity with which my wife Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.” Mrs. Clemm clung to the poet, and watched waited upon him after her daughter’s death, because she knew how devoted a husband he had been. “It is utterly false,” she asserted at the first promulgation of this slander — lately revived, for easily apparent purposes — “It is utterly false the report of his being faithless or unkind to her (Virginia). He was devoted to her until the last hour of her death, as all our friends can testify. . . . I enclose you two of Eddie’s letters. . . . The other was written at the time you generously offered to take my darling Virginia. I wrote to Eddie asking his advice, and this is his answer. Does the affection then expressed look as if he could ever cease to love her? And he never did.”* A writer in a New York journal, and, apparently, a personal acquaintance of Poe, says, “It was one of the saddest things in his sad history that the two dearest to him were sharers of his hardships and sufferings — his beautiful young wife and her devoted mother. He married his cousin, who was brought up at the South, and was as unused to toil as she was unfit for it. She hardly looked more than fourteen, fair, soft, and graceful and girlish. Every one who saw her was won by her. Poe was very proud and very fond of her, and used to delight in the round, childlike face and plump little finger, which he contrasted with himself, so thin and half-melancholy looking, and she in turn idolised him. She had a voice of wonderful sweetness, and was an exquisite singer, and in some of their more prosperous days, when they were living in a pretty little rose-covered cottage on the outskirts of Philadelphia, she had her harp and piano.”* At the time to which this writer refers the Poes appear to have resided in Coates Street, Fairmount, whence they removed to North Seven Street, Spring Garden, in the suburbs of the city. Some pleasant reminiscences of the poet and his family, as the household was in this pretty Pennsylvanian home, have been furnished to us by Captain Mayne Reid and others. After describing the charming little suburban dwelling, with its floral bedecked porch, and its tasteful although inexpensive furniture, Captain Reid proceeds to describe its inmates, as he knew them, personally as well as by repute. “Poe,” he says, “I have known for a whole month closeted in his house, all the time hard at work with his pen, poorly paid, and hard driven to keep the wolf from his slightly-fastened door; intruded on only by a few select friends, who always found him, what they knew him to be, a generous host, an affectionate son-in-law and husband, — in short, a respectable gentleman. . . . In the list of literary men there has been no such spiteful biographer as Rufus Griswold, and never such a victim of posthumous spite as poor Edgar Allan Poe.”* The poet’s wife is referred to by the Captain as, “A lady angelically beautiful in person, and not less beautiful in spirit. No one who remembers that dark-eyed, dark-haired daughter of Virginia,† — her own name — her grace, her facial beauty, her demeanour, so modest as to be remarkable; no one who has ever spent an hour in her company, but will endorse what I have said. I remember how we, the friends of the poet, used to talk of her high qualities, and when we talked of her beauty, I well knew that the rose-tint upon her cheek was too bright, too pure to be of earth. It was consumption’s colour, that sadly beautiful light that beckons to an early tomb.” Mrs. Clemm, the poet’s aunt, the mother of his wife, was still the presiding spirit of their little domicile, and of her the Englishman says, “Besides the poet and his interesting wife, there was but one other dweller. It was a woman of middle age and almost masculine aspect. She had the size and figure of a man, with a countenance that, at first sight, seemed scarce feminine. A stranger would have been incredulous, surprised, as I was, when introduced to her as the mother of that angelic creature who had accepted Edgar Poe as the partner of her life. She was the ever vigilant guardian of the house, watching it against the ever silent but continuous sap of necessity, that appeared every clay to be approaching closer and nearer. She was the sole servant, keeping everything clean; the sole messenger, doing the errands, making pilgrimages between the poet and his publishers, frequently bringing back such chilling responses as, ‘The article not accepted,’ or, ‘The cheque not to be given until such and such a day’ — often too late for his necessities.” Mr. A. B. Harris , the author already quoted from, proceeds to relate of the residence in Spring Garden, that “It was during their stay there that Mrs. Poe, while singing one evening, ruptured a blood-vessel, and after that she suffered a hundred deaths. She could not bear the slightest exposure, and needed the utmost care; and all those conveniences as to apartment and surroundings which are so important in the case of an invalid were almost matters of life and death to her. And yet the room where she lay for weeks, hardly able to breathe, except as she was fanned, was a little place with the ceiling so low over the narrow bed that her head almost touched it. But no one dared to speak, Mr. Poe was so sensitive and irritable; ‘quick as steel and flint,’ said one who knew him in those days. And he would not allow a word about the danger of her dying, the mention of it drove him wild.” Not only did the mention of the danger of his wife’s death drive Poe wild, but the thoughts of it evidently rendered him unfit for literary work. Unable to provide the comforts needed for her dearest to him, to have to see his anxieties and privations shared by her, drove the poet to the brink of madness. Powerless to provide for the necessities at home, “he would steal out of the house at night,” says Mr. Harris, “and go off and wander about the streets for hours, proud, heartsick, despairing, not knowing which way to turn, or what to do, while Mrs. Clemm would endure the anxiety at home as long as she could and then start off in search of him. “So they lived, bound together in tender bonds of love and sorrow — their love making their lot more tolerable — the three clinging to each other; and the mother was the good angel who strove to shield the poet and save him. This way their lives went on in those dark days; he trying desperately at times to earn money, writing a little, and fitfully fighting against himself,