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

he seems to have been utterly devoid. Not but what the imperious youth was frequently indulged in all money could purchase, yet the pettings and rebuffs which he was alternately subjected to were scarcely calculated to conciliate his disposition. Throughout life a morbid sensitiveness to affection was one of Poe’s most distinguishing traits, and it was the want of this which drove him frequently to seek in the society of dumb creatures the love denied him, or which he sometimes believed denied him, by human beings. In his terrible tale of The Black Cat there is a paragraph which those who were intimately acquainted with its author will at once recognise the autobiographical fidelity of. “From my infancy,” remarks Poe, “I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness:,of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them. This peculiarity of character brew with my growth, and in my manhood I derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure. To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable. There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere man.” Many of Poe’s schoolfellows at the Richmond Academy corroborate and supplement Colonel Preston’s reminiscences. Dr. R. C. Ambler writes: “I recollect my old playmate Edgar Allan Poe. I passed my early life in the city of Richmond, and in the years 1823-24 I was in the habit of constant intercourse with the boy. No one now living, I dare say, had better opportunities of becoming acquainted with his physique, as for two summers we stripped together for a bath daily, and learned to swim in the same pool in Shockoe Creek. . . . Poe was not apt at learning to swim, though at a subsequent period he became famous for swimming from Mayo’s Bridge to Warwick.” In allusion to this long remembered boyish feat, the poet himself remarked, “Any ’swimmer in the falls’ in my days would have swum the Hellespont, and thought nothing of the matter. I swam from Ludlam’s Wharf to Warwick (six miles) in a hot June sun, against one of the strongest tides ever known in the river. It would have been a feat comparatively easy to swim twenty miles in still water. I would not think much,” concluded Poe, in his strain of not infrequent exaggeration, “of attempting to swim the British Channel from Dover to Calais.” Whatever he might not think much of “attempting,” the lad did not, certainly, shrink from doing a deed of no little daring in his famous swim, an account of which is thus furnished by Colonel Robert Mayo, junior, at that time a companion and schoolmate of the poet: — “I started with Poe in his celebrated swim from Richmond to Warwick Bar, six miles down James River. The day was oppressively hot, and I concluded rather than endure the infliction to stop at Tree Hill, three miles from town. Poe, however, braved the sun and kept on, reaching the goal, but emerging from the water with neck, face, and back blistered.” The truth of this feat having been publicly question, Poe, who was intolerant of contradiction, obtained fro in Dr. Cabell and published the following certification of his prowess: — “I was one of several who witnessed this swimming feat. We accompanied Mr. Poe in boats. Messrs. Robert Stannard, John Lyle (since dead), Robert Saunders, John Munford, I think, and one or two others, were also of the party. Mr. Poe did not seem at all fatigued, and walked back to Richmond immediately after the feat — which was undertaken for a wager. ROBERT G. CABELL.” A yet more dangerous exploit in natation is recorded of the daring boy by Colonel Mayo. One day in midwinter, when standing on the banks of the James River, Poe bantered his companion into jumping in, in order to swim to a certain point with him. After floundering about in the nearly frozen stream for some time they reached the piles upon which Mayo’s Bridge then rested, and were glad enough to stop and try to gain the shore by climbing up the log abutment to the bridge. To their dismay, upon reaching the bridge, they discovered that its flooring overlapped the abutment by several feet, and that ascent by such means was impossible. Nothing remained for them but to descend and retrace their steps, which, weary and partly frozen, they did: Poe reached the land in an exhausted state, whilst Mayo was fished out by a friendly boat, just as he was about to succumb. On getting ashore, Poe was seized with a violent attack of vomiting, and both the lads were ill for several weeks. Colonel Mayo recalls Poe to mind as a haughty, handsome, impetuous boy, self-willed, defiant, and not indisposed for fight, but with great mental power and an ever-present anxiety to grapple with and solve difficult mental problems. Dr. Ambler, recurring to this period of Poe’s career, remarks, “Of course I was too young at that date to appreciate the poet’s mental capabilities; but I remember to have heard some verses of his, in the shape of a satire upon the members of a debating society to which he belonged. . . I cannot recall a line of these verses, but do remember that I envied him his ability to write them. These lines, as far as I know, were never published, but were circulated in manuscript among the boys, and were, probably, the first known out of his family.” Mr. John Clarke having relinquished the guidance of the Richmond school was succeeded, in the autumn of 1823, by a Mr. William Burke, and amongst the pupils who remained in his charge was Edgar Allan Poe. Mr. Andrew Johnston, another of his schoolfellows at Richmond, states that when he went to Mr. Burke’s, on the 1st of October 1823, he found Poe there. “I knew him before,” he writes, “but not well, there being two, if not three, years difference in our ages. We went to school together all through 1824, and the early part of 1825, Some time in the latter year (I cannot recollect at what time exactly) he left the school. . . Poe was a much more advanced scholar than any of us; but there was no other class for him — that being the highest — and he had nothing to do, or but little, to keep his headship of the class. I dare say he liked it well, for he was fond of desultory reading, and even then wrote verses. . . We all recognised and admired his great and varied talents, and were proud of him as the most distinguished schoolboy of the town. At that time Poe was slight in person and figure, but well made, active, sinewy, and graceful. In athletic exercises he was foremost. Especially, be was the best, the most daring, and most enduring swimmer that I ever saw in the water. . . . His disposition was amiable, and his manners pleasant and courteous.”* These somewhat similarly minded reminiscences by the poet’s playmates — doubtless slightly, albeit unconsciously, biassed in tone by the after celebrity of Poe — serve to illustrate and prove that even at that early age the lad had strongly impressed his comrades with a belief in his intellectual superiority, and that he had already begun to entertain a proud and somewhat pugnacious contempt for those less richly endowed by nature. Other equally marked idiosyncrasies of his character — extraordinary fidelity of friendship, and intense sensitiveness to kindness — are strikingly portrayed by some well-authenticated incidents in this period of his life, and to which the late Mrs. Whitman was the first to draw attention.* The correctness of her remarks in connection with these episodes have been amply confirmed by the correspondence of Mrs. Clemm and Poe himself. Referring to the passionate, almost fanatical, devotion of the poet for those who became the objects of his affection, Mrs. Whitman relates this characteristic anecdote of his boyhood: “While at the academy in Richmond, he one day accompanied a schoolmate to his home, where he saw for the first time Mrs. H[elen] S[tannard], the mother of his young friend. This lady, on entering the room, took his band and spoke some gentle and gracious words of welcome, which so penetrated the sensitive heart of the orphan boy as to deprive him of the power of speech, and for a time almost of conscious ness itself. He returned home in a dream, with but one thought, one hope in life — to hear again the sweet and gracious words that had made the desolate world so beautiful to him, and filled his lonely heart with the oppression of a new joy. This lady afterwards became the confidant of all his boyish sorrows, and hers was the one redeeming influence that saved and guided him in the earlier days of his turbulent and passionate youth.” Writing on this same subject, Mrs. Clemm records that he entertained a most profound devotion for this lady, and that “when he — was unhappy at home (which was very often the case), he went to her for sympathy, for consolation, and for advice.” Put, alas! the sad destiny which appeared to haunt the poor lad, and all dear to him, overtook his beloved friend! This lady herself was overwhelmed by fearful and peculiar sorrows, and at the very moment when her guiding voice was most needed, fell a prey to mental alienation, and when she died and was entombed in a neighbouring cemetery, her poor boyish admirer could not endure the thought of her lying there lonely and forsaken in her vaulted home. For months after her decease, Poe — like his great Hungarian contemporary Petofi, at the grave of his girl-love Etelka — would go nightly to visit the tomb of his revered friend, and when the nights were very drear and cold, “when the autumnal rains fell, and the winds wailed mournfully over the graves, he lingered longest, and came away most regretfully.” For years, if not for life, the memory of this unfortunate lady tinged all Poe’s fancies, and filled his mind with saddening things. In a letter, written within a twelvemonth of his own death, to Mrs. Whitman, the poet broke through his usual reticence as to the facts of his early life, and confessed that his exquisitely beautiful stanzas “To Helen,”* were inspired by the memory of this lady — by “the one idolatrous and purely ideal love” of his tempest-tossed boyhood. In the early versions of his youthful verses, the name of “Helen” continually recurs, and it was undoubtedly to her that he devoted “The Poean,” a juvenile poem which subsequently he greatly improved in both rhythm and form, and republished under the musical name of “Lenore.” The weird thoughts which he experienced when he beheld this lady robed in her grave garments are hinted at in “Irene,”† and the description which he gave to a friend of the fantasies that haunted his brain during his desolate vigils in the cemetery,-the nameless fears and indescribable phantasmata — “Flapping from out their Condor wings Invisible Woe!” she compares to those which overwhelmed De Quincey at the burial of his sweet sister-playmate. Those willing to study Poe’s idiosyncrasies should not object to linger over this little-known epoch of his story, because we are indeed convinced that in “those solitary churchyard vigils, with all their associated memories,” Mrs. Whitman has found “a key to much that seems strange and abnormal in the poet’s after life.” There can be no doubt that those who would seek the clue to the psychological phenomena of his strange existence — “that intellect,” as Poe himself remarked, which would try to reduce his “phantasm to the commonplace” — must know, and even analyse this phase of his being. The mind which could so steadfastly trace, step by step, the gruesome gradations of sentience after death, as does