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

following September. The poem is replete with words — thoughts — expressions — that have appeared again, and again, in others of their author’s poems, but is, nevertheless, most idiosyncratic and original. Those who have thus far followed Poe’s “route, obscure and lonely,” need not ask who is “the traveller” that “Meets aghast Sheeted Memories of the Past — Shrouded forms that start and sigh As they pass the wanderer by — White-robed forms of friends long given, In agony, to the Earth-and Heaven.” “The Oblong Box” appeared in Godey’s Lady’s Book for September. It is a tale of no particular merit, for Poe, and is chiefly remarkable for some somewhat curious mental analyses. In this same month the New Mirror perished, and with it, of course, the unfortunate poet’s chief, although slender, source of livelihood. Thoroughly adrift, something decided had now to be done, and done at once. A living was not to be had, apparently, from literature in Philadelphia, and the conclusion was arrived at, probably through some intimation from Willis, to seek New York once more. * Vide the Reply to Thomas Dunn English, p 81, vol. ii. * Letter to Mrs. S. H. Whitman. * R. W. Griswold was an employé of Mr. Graham, and, it is alleged was dismissed for dishonesty. Thackeray, when in America, detected him in deliberate lying, and it was through his falsehoods that Messrs Harper & Brothers had to pay Charles Dickens a larger sum that anticipated for “advance sheets” of “Bleak House.” — J. H. I. * Graham’s Magazine, March 1850. * Letter from Maria Clemmn to Neilson Poe, August 26, 1860. * A. B. Harris, in Hearth and Home, 1870. * “A Dead Man Defended,” in Onward for April 1869. † Virginia Poe was a native of Maryland. — J. H. I. * “Memoir of Edgar Allan Poe,” by R. H. Stoddard, pp. 66-69. * Edgar Allan Poe. A Memorial Volume. Baltimore, 1877, pp. 82, 83. * Vide pp. 119-123. John H. Ingram, “Chapter 14,” Edgar Allan Poe: Life, Letters, and Opinions (1880), pp. 259-294 CHAPTER XIV. NEW YORK ONCE MORE. EDGAR POE’S reputation had already proceeded him to New York, where, indeed, the publications of N. P. Willis, and other literary correspondents and friends had kept his name for some time before the public. “Our first knowledge of Mr. Poe’s removal to this city,” says Willis,* “was by a call which we receive 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 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 by 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 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 necessities of life.” The immediate result of that interview with Mrs. Clemm is not told; but, eventually, Edgar Poe was engaged as sub-editor on the Evening Mirror. Willis, writing to his former partner Morris,* when called upon to make some remarks respecting his acquaintance with the deceased poet, says, in language that would give greater gratification were it a little less self-glorifying: “In our harassing and exhausting days of ‘daily’ editorship, Poe, for a long time, was our assistant — the constant and industrious occupant of a desk in our office. . . . Poe came to us quite incidentally, neither of us having been personally acquainted with him till that time; and his position towards us, and connection with us, of course unaffected by claims of previous friendship, were a fair average of his general intercourse and impressions. As he was a man who never smiled, and never said a propitiatory or deprecating word, we were not likely to have been seized with any sudden partiality or wayward caprice in his favour. “I should preface my avowal of an almost reverence for the man, as I knew him, by reminding the reader of the strange double, common to the presence and magnetism of a man of genius, the mysterious electricity of mind. . . . “It was rather a step downward, after being the chief editor of several monthlies, as Poe had been, to come into the office of a daily journal as a mechanical paragraphist. It was his business to sit at a desk, in a corner of the editorial room, ready to be called upon for any of the miscellaneous work of the day; yet you remember how absolutely and how good-humouredly ready he was for any suggestion; how punctually and industriously reliable in the following out of the wish once expressed; how cheerful and present-minded his work when he might excusably have been so listless and abstracted. We loved the man for the entireness of fidelity with which he served us. When he left us, we were very reluctant to part with him.” Again, in the letter to the Home Journal already referred to, Willis says: — “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, and, to our occasional request that he would not probe too deep in a criticism, or that be would erase a passage coloured too highly with his resentments against society and mankind, he readily and courteously assented — far more yielding than most men, we thought, on points so excusably sensitive. With a prospect of taking the lead in another periodical, he, at last, voluntarily gave up his employment with us, and, through all this considerable period, we had seen but one presentment of the man — a quiet, patient, industrious, and most gentlemanly person, commanding the utmost respect and good feeling by his unvarying deportment and ability.” This characterisation of the poet is not of much importance, save that it affords another link in the chain of evidence as to Poe’s general behaviour. Mr. Willis’s fondness for patronising his betters is somewhat ludicrous, and he quite forgets to remark that the profits of his grandiloquent paper scarcely sufficed to pay his “critic and sub-editor” an honorarium large enough to keep body and spirit together. Poe’s contributions to the Evening Mirror were not great either in quality or quantity, and soon after his resignation of his post upon it, the paper passed from Messrs. Willis and Morris into the hands of new proprietors. At first, beyond those of a “mechanical paragraphist,” Poe’s ditties in his new position had not called for much activity. In October he appears to have resumed his translations from the French, and to have continued them in the columns of this paper for several months but it is not until the beginning of the following January that any original writing therein can be traced to his pen. Meanwhile, in Godey’s magazine for November, was published his tale, “Thou Art the Man,” — one of the most conventional of his fictions; and in the Southern Literary Messenger for December, a caustic satire on the “Mutual Admiration Society” system among editors, entitled “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq., late Editor of the Goosetherumfoodle.” More important than these were the initial papers of “Marginalia,” contributed to the Democratic Review, during the last two months of the year. From the introduction to these pungent, pithy, paragraphs, which were continued in the pages of various publications up to the very day of their author’s death, and which, despite their idiosyncratic powers, have not yet all been collected — these sentences may be fittingly reproduced: — “In getting my books I have been always solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of pencilling suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general. Where what I have to note is too much to be included within the narrow limits of a margin, I commit it to a slip of paper, and deposit it between the leaves; taking care to secure it by an imperceptible portion of gum tragacanth paste. “All this may be whim; it may be not only a very hackneyed, but a very idle practice, yet I persist in it still; and it affords me pleasure — which is profit, in despite of Mr. Bentham with Mr. Mill on his back. “This making of notes, however, is by no means the making of mere memoranda — a custom which has its disadvantages, beyond doubt. ‘Ce que je mets sun papier,’ says Bernardin de St. Pierre, ‘je remets de ma mémoire, et par consequence je l‘oublie;’ and, in fact, if you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered. “But the purely marginal jottings, done with no eye to the Memorandum Book, have a distinct complexion, and not only a distinct purpose, but none at all; this it is which imparts to them a value. They have a rank somewhat above the chance and desultory comments of literary chit-chat-for these latter are not unfrequently ‘talk for talk’s sake,’ hurried out of the mouth; while the marginalia are deliberately pencilled, because the mind of the reader wishes to unburthen itself of a thought — however flippant — however silly — however trivial — still a thought indeed, not merely a thing that might have been a thought in time, and under more favourable circumstances. In the marginalia, too, we talk only to ourselves; we therefore talk freshly — boldly — originally — with abandonnement — without conceit-much after the fashion of Jeremy Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne, and Sir William Temple, and the anatomical Burton, and that most logical analogise Butler, and some other people of the old day, who were too full of their matter to have any room for their manner, which being thus left out of question was a capital manner indeed — a model of manners, with a richly marginallic air. The circumscription of space, too, in these pencillings, has in it something more of advantage than inconvenience. It compels us (whatever diffuseness of idea we may clandestinely entertain) into blontesquieu-ism, into Tacitus-ism (here I leave out of view the concluding portion of the ‘Annals’). . . . “During a rainy afternoon, not long ago, being in a mood too listless for continuous study, I sought relief from ennui in dipping here and there at random among the volumes of my library — no very large one certainly, but sufficiently miscellaneous, and, I flatter myself, not a little recherché. “Perhaps it was what the Germans call the ‘brain-scattering’ humour of the moment; but, while the picturesqueness of the numerous pencil-scratches arrested my attention, their helter-skelteriness of commentary amused me. I found myself at length forming a wish that it had been some other hand than my own which had so bedevilled the books, and fancying that, in such case, I might have derived no inconsiderable pleasure from turning them over. From