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105261 



Israfel 

The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe 
Volume I 



If I could dwell 
^Nhere Israfel 

TAath dwelt y and he where 7, 
H<? might not sing so wildly well 

A mortal melody > 
Vf/iile a bolder note than this might swell 

From my lyre within the sky. 



BOOKS BY HERVEY ALLEN 



WAMPUM AND OLD GOLD Tale University Press .... 1921 

THE BRIDE OF HurrziL James F. Drake, Inc 1933 

CAROLINA CHANSONS The Macmillan Co 1953 

(WITH Du BOSE HEYWARD) 

THE BLINDMAN (a reprint) Tale University Press . , . , 1923 

EARTH MOODS AND OTHER POEMS Harper S3 Brothers 1925 

TOWARD THE FLAME George If. Dor an Company . , 1926 

FOB'S BROTHER George IL Dor an Company . . 1926 

(WITH THOMAS OLLIVE MABBOTT) 





Edgar Allan Poe as a Young Man 

From a daguerreotype* probably taken in Baltimore in the early 
Courtesy of the A /dryland Historical Society 



Israfet 



The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe 



Ey 
Hervey Allen 



In Two Volumes 
Volume I 




New York 

George EL Doran Company 
1927 



Copyright, 1926, by George EL Doran Company 
Second Edition 



THIB PLIMPTON PRBgfl NORWOOD 



PRINTB0 IN THSJ UWTITBD HTATEB OV A M li it 1 A. 



For 
Mary Lucy Allen 




*-^ *&. 

&/>*& *^-~ ^ 
^&s?*..SsCa. -&**t*4t. .sS'irjusr** 

ifS**-****' sX & 




Poe's Own Comment on His Childhood 

From a poem clipped from the album of a Mr/. BALDERSTONE of Baltimore, by 
. L. DIDIER. The date and title are in DIDIER'S hand, and the date is in- 
correct. POE was at Fortress Monroe on March 17, 1829. The poem probably 
belongs to sometime later in 1829 before FOB entered West Point 



PREFACE 

IT IS not the intention in this preface to attempt to pre- 
sent, in condensed form, a critical estimate of the great 
figure whose semblance, at least, walks through the 
pages of this biography. A long, laborious, and conscientious 
consideration of the immense amount of material concerning 
Poe, has convinced the author that any brief, comfortably- 
clever, and convenient presentation of his character, either 
from a literary, psychological, or romantic standpoint is 
bound to be misleading. So diverse, so conflicting, and so 
astoundingly confusing was the life experience of Edgar 
Allan Poe that, in comparison, the lives of many other men 
of letters are a simple tale. 

The method followed here has been to disregard, for the 
most part, the findings of all other biographers who have 
worked in the field, and to depend totally upon source mate- 
rial drawn from contemporary documents, letters, and the 
evidence given by those who saw, talked with, and, to some 
extent, knew the man. No matter how great the authority, 
or scholarship of those who lived after Poe died, it is felt 
that the evidence of those who affirm, " I saw him, talked 
with him, on such and such an occasion he did, or said, or 
appeared thus and thus " is of more value than theories, 
be they ever so erudite and clever* 

This biography, then, is the story of Edgar Allan Poe, and 
the strange forgotten America in which he lived, and perished, 
reconstructed from the direct evidence latent in the docu- 
ments, letters, books, and illustrations of the period from 
about 1800 to 1850. Neither expense, effort, nor meticulous 
care have been spared in assembling this data, in which proc- 
ess, the courtesy, advice, and enthusiasm of those who have 

vii 



vffi PREFACE 

been drawn upon for aid, or for source material in their right 
or custody, have been truly encouraging and have, indeed, 
made this work possible during the past four years. 

There are a great many Lives of Poe. This differs from 
all others in that, for the first time, it tells the complete 
story of the man, from birth to death, and makes reasonably 
clear the mystery which has hitherto surrounded the first 
half of his life and the formative processes of youth. For- 
mer biographers because of the inaccessibility of material, 
withheld, for sufficient personal reasons, have been largely 
compelled to project Poe as a somewhat enigmatical torso, 
with the base draped in convenient and impressive folds. 

It is purely an accidental circumstance, but nevertheless 
an important one, that the passing of time has brought 
about the release of sources, hitherto inaccessible, which now 
make it possible to tell amply the strange, and startling story 
of Poe's youth. There is no longer any necessity for talking 
about " the Poe mystery," indeed, it is no exaggeration to say 
that there are few other literary figures whose personal 
life is so fully documented. There exists in the files of the 
firm of Ellis & Allan, the business house in which Poe's 
guardian was a partner, a surprisingly complete record of the 
daily life of the family, and community in which Poe lived 
during his youth. These papers were purchased some years 
ago by the Economic Section of the Library of Congress, 
presumably as source material for the study of an early 
Nineteenth Century Virginia mercantile firm. There are thou- 
sands of papers comprising the business, and personal corre- 
spondence of Poe's guardian, John Allan, and his partner, 
Charles Ellis, covering a quarter of a century contempora- 
neous with Poe's youth. During this time, Poe was in John 
Allan's house, or in correspondence with him. There is, in this 
store of material, a constant running reference to " Edgar " 
from childhood to manhood, a number of items in his own 
hand, and many letters concerning him, and his guardian. 



PREFACE ix 

The author and other researchers have sifted this mass of 
documents, and from it drawn the material for the story of 
Poe's childhood and youth. The story which emerged is start- 
ling, strange, and contradictory of many assertions and 
legends, hitherto accepted about Poe and his early environ- 
ment. 

For the most part, the statements made in this text are 
heavily documented by footnotes, but the reader is asked 
to remember that many assertions made in the body of the 
work, about the character of those who had the moulding 
of the young Poe in their keeping, is made from a knowledge 
of the complete material as a whole. To quote sources in 
every case would require an annex volume of references 
alone. 

In addition to the Ellis & Allan Papers, the publication 
of the correspondence between Poe and John Allan by the 
Valentine Museum, in 1925, amply covered the period be- 
tween 1826 and 1832. By good fortune, the author was able 
to locate the wills of William Gait, and John Allan, which are 
here published in full, in the appendix, and from a synthesis 
of all three sources: Ellis & Allan, the Valentine Museum 
Letters, and the wills mentioned, to present his conclusions. 
It is proper to state here that the construction put upon the 
relations between Poe and his guardian is not an effort to 
exonerate Poe, The domestic affairs of John Allan have, as a 
matter of fact, been treated with considerable reserve. There 
is no desire to make " startling revelations " in this biography. 
Collateral material, bearing upon events and persons not 
concerned with Poe, has been carefully excluded. It is also 
pertinent to state that, in the author's opinion, the attempt 
by John Allan to throw a shadow on the name of the poet's 
mother was without foundation, and a doubtful gesture of 
desperate self-defense. 

A much closer, and more affectionate relation between 
Edgar Poe and his elder brother, William Henry Leonard 



x PREFACE 

Poe, than has hitherto been suspected, has been brought to 
light by the recent discovery of Henry Poe's poems and 
prose bearing upon Edgar. The above-mentioned material 
has been generously supplemented, and made more or less 
complete by the letters and data supplied to the author by 
Edward V. Valentine, Esq., of Richmond, related to Poe's 
foster-mother, and one of the few persons still living, known 
to have seen Poe, and to have had immediate knowledge of his 
character, his family, and personal friends. In this matter, 
and in others, the author is in great debt to Mr. Valentine. 

Although Poe was an extraordinary, and unique character, 
in attempting to reconstruct his life, it soon became ap- 
parent that, without a recall of the forgotten and swiftly 
changing world through which he moved amid the kaleido- 
scopic incidents of his environment, it would be hopeless to 
even approach an understanding of the man. Yet if Poe's 
reactions to his environment were peculiar to himself, it is 
in those very peculiarities that his essential literary charac- 
ter is to be glimpsed, and that his triumphs and failures are 
to be found. Because, for many intricate historical reasons, 
the America from 1800 to the Civil War, and, particularly, 
the America of the 1 830*5 and 1840*3 has been allowed to 
lapse into oblivion, only the lyrical, and romantically-imagi- 
native work of Poe is generally known to the present genera- 
tion. 

The peculiar and intense difficulties with which the writers 
of the " Middle American " period struggled, and to which 
most of them capitulated, are now much less evident, even 
to scholars, than the environment of Restoration London, 
or almost any other era. In this study, the intellectual and 
physical background of the central figure has therefore been 
reproduced with considerable care. 

America is gradually becoming aware of its past. Sud- 
denly realizing that, for some reason, the balance of influ- 
ence in the planet may have been conferred upon her, she is 



PREFACE xi 

now looking about and behind, and wondering why. It is ludi- 
crous to suppose that the three generations, from the found- 
ing of the Federal Union to the Civil War, were merely so 
many old-fashioned nobodies. We have already begun to be 
intrigued by their furniture and costumes, and it is now time 
to commence to look beneath the surface. Whether we ad- 
mire or not is inconsequential. The type of culture, which 
has now acquired a fearsome momentum, was then getting 
under way among Americans, its future direction was being 
settled so that, it is now little short of a necessity to be- 
come familiar with all of this background. It seems startling, 
at this time, to insist that in the Baltimore, or Philadelphia, 
or Boston of the 1830*3 and 1840*3, or even earlier, there 
were tides of thought, intellectual movements, and political 
theories that congealed in literature. But it was so, and, 
without understanding them, and resurrecting them, we can- 
not understand ourselves. 

It is, therefore, earnestly hoped that, in this biography, 
the attempt to suggest some of the values of the " Middle 
American scene " will become evident. Poe's own comment 
was couched in a style and with an irony that made it dis- 
tastefully, and even madly, iconoclastic, to his contempo- 
raries. In the year 1926 a great deal of his criticism of social, 
political, and literary life in America rings with a strangely 
modern sound. It is significant that, while conservative 
academic circles still continue to yawn through Mr. Emer- 
son's doubtful Compensations, there is no knowledge, or 
comment upon what Mr. Poe had to say of democracy, sci- 
ence, and unimaginative literature about the same time* 
The croak of the raven is conveniently supposed to be purely 
lyric. In that direction, the discussion of Poe's contribution 
to American letters may be said to be presented here in a 
modern aspect. 

The contribution to imaginative literature is, always, the 
main, and most pertinent claim for attention that an author 



Xll 



PREFACE 



can have upon posterity. Whatever may be the eventual 
niche accorded to Edgar Allan Poe in the literature of Eng- 
lish, and estimates vary, the great importance of his place 
in the field of American letters cannot be successfully denied. 

The legend of the man is enormous. One of the few Ameri- 
can literary names that cannot be mentioned without 
awakening interest, anywhere in the United States, is that of 
Edgar Allan Poe. He is one of the few of our poets who en- 
joys the perquisites of completely general fame. This is, in 
itself, for whatever reason, a giant achievement, and de- 
serves the attention of careful and complete biography, free 
from sectional propaganda, the pet theories of specialists, 
and sentimental, or moralistic twaddle. But there is some- 
thing more than that; for those who care nothing, even for 
those who deprecate his contributions to literature, the 
story of the man, as a mere human adventure, must, by force 
of its inherent, dramatic, genuinely romantic, and strange 
psychological values, be found intriguing to the last degree. 
Though we may find it impossible to love, and even diffi- 
cult to admire, we cannot help but be intensely interested. 
The bare material of the man's biography is fascinating. Its 
events constitute a series of human accidents out of which 
the timbre of personality, and the notes on the staff of inci- 
dent, have produced the harmony and dissonance of an 
orchestrated tragedy. With so great a theme, the present bio- 
grapher can only hope that his audience will not be repulsed 
by the many difficulties which, he is the first to acknowledge, 
he has frequently been unable to surmount. 

References in the text to authorities, sources, and the au- 
thor's comments, are made in a series of running footnotes 
numbered consecutively. Cumbersome Latin abbreviations 
have been left out, and the numbers may refer to footnotes 
either backward or forward. In using those references, the 
reader is asked to bear in mind that the footnotes run from 
i to 934, and that a reference to a note may also imply and 



PREFACE xiii 

include a reference to the discussion in the text upon the 
same page where the footnote occurs. Duplication of foot- 
notes, and cumbersome requoting of authorities have thus 
been avoided. 

The illustrations, with few exceptions, notably that of Poe 
on Sullivan's Island, are all from contemporary sources, and 
have been chosen and arranged, not only to illustrate a partic- 
ular place in the text, but also to make clear the background of 
the period in which Poe moved, and the panorama of the 
changes which occurred. For the convenience of Poe scholars 
and collectors, the title pages of Poe's bound works, issued 
during his lifetime, are here reproduced, together with the 
photographs of several rare newspapers, and a periodical 
to which he contributed. In each case, these accompany a 
discussion, and description of the publication in the text. 

No reference in the biography is made to the " Quarles " 
pamphlet supposed, by some to have been issued by Poe as 
a reply to Dickens's American Notes. In the opinion of the 
author, based on a thorough investigation, this is not an item 
that can be assigned to the pen of Poe. The discussion of Poe's 
" war " with Longfellow, and of his association with Dr. 
Thomas Holley Chivers has, for reasons of space, been only 
indicated. A study of Chivers is much needed in the bibliog- 
raphy of American Literature. The relations between Edgar 
Allan Poe, and his older brother, Henry, have only been 
touched on in the text. A full discussion of the two brothers 
will be found in Poe's Brother, The Poetry of William Henry 
Leonard Poe, by Hervey Allen and Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 
Doran, 1926, an excerpt from which is here printed in Appen- 
dix IV. It should also be noted that this biography ends with 
the death of Poe, and docs not purport to detail the after- 
math of the Griswold controversy, and other posthumous 
matters. 

In conclusion, the author desires to make evident his pro- 
found sense of gratitude, and indebtedness to the following 



xiv PREFACE 

persons, publishers, and institutions, for their invaluable 
aid, and generous contributions of advice and data: 

To the Edgar Allan Poe Shrine of Richmond, Virginia, 
and to Mr. and Mrs. Archer Jones, personally, for their in- 
valuable assistance, access to important stories of Poe mate- 
rial, and for illustrations; to Granville S. Valentine, Esq., and 
to Miss Julia Sully, both of Richmond, Va., to W. G. Stanard, 
Esq., President of the Virginia Historical Association, and to 
Mrs. Mary Newton Stanard for several valuable facts, remi- 
niscences, illustrations, and helpful observations; to Edward 
V. Valentine, Esq., for excerpts from his diary, and permis- 
sion to reprint letters from the Allan-Gait correspondence; 
to James Southall Wilson, Edgar Allan Poe Professor of 
Literature at the University of Virginia in particular for 
his generous attitude about the title "Israfel" and for 
access to the Ingram collection, diaries, and Whitman corre- 
spondence at the University of Virginia, as well as permis- 
sion to quote sundry items, and for his helpful advice; to 
William Van R. Whitall, Esq., of Pelham, New York, for the 
loan of essential texts from his library and collection, and for 
his advice and comment; to John T. Snyder, Esq., of Pel- 
ham, New York, for the use of rare Poe items, and first 
editions in his collection; to S. Foster Damon, Esq., of Har- 
vard University, for advice and information; to a New York 
" Poe Collector," who desires to remain anonymous, for the 
loan of texts; to James F. Drake, Esq., for the loan of three 
letters, and permission to reprint; to Dwight Franklin, Esq., 
for permission to reproduce his study of the young Poe; to 
Miss Laura M. Bragg, Director of the Charleston Museum, 
and to John Bennett, Esq., for information dealing with Poe 
in Charleston, and The Gold Bug; to Theodore Spicer-Sim- 
son, Esq., and to Miss Elena von Feld, of the American 
Museum of Natural History, for the illustrations of Poe's 
Gold Bug Synthesis; to Edwin M. Anderson, Esq., Librarian 
of the New York Public Library; to Francis Rawle, Esq., 



PREFACE xv 

President of the Pennsylvania Historical Society; to the 
Librarian of the Century Association; to the Maryland His- 
torical Society, in particular for rare files of newspapers and 
illustrations; to the Librarian of the Virginia State Library; 
and to the Custodian of the Ellis & Allan Papers at the 
Library of Congress. 

The author also desires to express his appreciation for the 
release of copyrights on various and sundry items and illus- 
trations to Houghton Mifflin Company, Thomas Y. Crowell 
and Company, Harper Brothers, the Century Company, the 
University of Virginia, the Columbia University Press, the 
Lewiston Journal Company, Charles Scribner's Sons, The 
Valentine Museum, of Richmond, Va., and J. B. Lippincott 
Company Also to Professor George E. Woodberry, Pro- 
fessor James A. Harrison, Professor Killis Campbell, and Dr. 
Thomas Ollive Mabbott particularly, for the benefit of their 
labors in the Poe field, without which no competent comment 
on Poe would now be possible. 



New York City, U. S. A. 
October x, 1926 

HERVEY ALLEIST 



Contents to Volume I 



PREFACE 

Chapter I 
II 
III 
IV 
V 
VI 
VII 
VIII 
IX 
X 
XI 
XII 
XIII 
XIV 
XV 
XVI 
XVII 



A DRAMATIC PROLOGUE 3 

THE Two ORPHANS 17 

LADY BOUNTIFUL CLAIMS ISRAFEL 27 

" THE LITTLE ANGEL " TRIES His WINGS 50 

ISRAFEL IN ALBION 63 

ISRAFEL MEETS HELEN 90 

ISRAFEL SALUTES THE MARQUIS 112 

ELMIRA AND THE ENCHANTED GARDEN 132 

ISRAFEL IN CAP AND GOWN 147 

ALIAS HENRI LE RENNET 181 

ISRAFEL IN CAROLINA 209 

COLD MARBLE 227 

THE WEST POINT INTERLUDE 269 

THE WEARY, WAYWORN WANDERER 301 

"THE MYSTERIOUS YEARS" 319 

BOTTLED FAME 344 

VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASS 375 



Illustrations to Volume I 



Edgar Allan Poe as a Young Man Frontispiece 

Poe's Own Comment on His Childhood vi 

Mrs. David Poe 14 

The House in which Mrs. David Poe died in Rich- 
mond, Virginia 15 

Frances Keeling Allan 20 

The Richmond of Poe's Early Childhood 21 

John Allan, Merchant 29 

An Off-Hour at Ellis &f Allan 33 

William Mayo 37 

The Burning of the Theatre in Richmond, Virginia 44 

The Monumental Church, Richmond, Virginia 45 

The Right Reverend Richard Channing Moore 55 

The Grammar School at Irvine, Scotland 79 

The Manor House at Stoke Newington, London 79 

The Home of Charles Ellis, partner of John Allan 92 

"The Mother's Chamber" in the Ellis House 92 

A Poem by Edgar Poe 93 

The House of Poe's " Helen ", Jane Stith Stanard 106 

Bill of J. W. Clarke in 

The Earliest Known Lines of Poetry and Signature of 
Edgar A. Poe 124 

The Allan House, " Moldavia " 1 28 

John Allan 129 

Sarah Elmira Royster at Fifteen 144 

"A Fountain and a Shrine" 145 

The University of Virginia in Poe's Day 148 

Professor George Tucker 149 



XIX 



xx ILLUSTRATIONS TO VOLUME I 

No. 13, West Range 152 

Bill for a Suit of Clothes 153 

Title Page of Tamerlane and Other Poems 200 

The Front and Back Wrappers of Tamerlane and Other 

Poems 201 

Poe's Gold Bug Synthesis 216 
Original illustrations for The Gold Bug 217 
Baltimore, about the time of Poe's First Story 248 
Scenes in Early Baltimore familiar to Poe 249 
Title Page of Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, 

Baltimore 1829 258 

The United States Military Academy 270 
An Early Steamboat on the New York to Albany 

Route in the days of Poe 297 
Title Page of Poems Second Edition 306 
On the Philadelphia Trenton Line 316 
Philadelphia from the Navy Yard 316 
Baltimore in the Early 1830*5 317 
Part of a page on which Poe's Prize Story of "The 

MS. Found in a Bottle " appeared 346 
Street Scene in Baltimore of the 1830'$ 347 
John P. Kennedy 352 

T. S. Arthur, Author of Ten Nights in a Bar- Room 353 
The Southern Literary Messenger Building 378 
"Sunday Evening at the Yarringtons" 379 



ISRAFEL 
Volume I 



Israfel 



CHAPTER I 
A Dramatic Prologue 



MRS. PHILLIPS was a milliner who lived on Main 
Street in Richmond, Virginia, near that part of the 
town known as the " Bird in Hand." In the year 
1811, in addition to her usual summer creations of silk, lavender- 
ribbon and lace, which were said to have occasionally attained 
the distinction of good taste, she was also doing a more than 
usually thriving trade in perfumes and cosmetics, owing to the 
gathering next door at the Indian Queen Tavern' 1 of Mr. 
Placide's Company of Richmond Players about to open the local 
theatrical season. 

Sometime in August the personnel of Mr. Placide's troupe was 
further augmented by the arrival from Norfolk, where she had 
lately been playing, of a young actress then twenty-six years of 
age, Mrs. Elizabeth Arnold Poe, whose beauty, voice and terp- 
sichorean accomplishments had made it worth while for Mr. 
Placide to pay her way from Norfolk to Richmond, since her 
failing health, the presence of two young children, and the death 
or absence of her husband seems to have left her stranded in the 
former place, despite the fact of a performance having 'been lately 
advertised there for her benefit. 2 

Mrs. David Poe 7 for such had been her second husband's 
name, was accompanied by her two children, Edgar and Rosalie, 



1 Mrs. Phillips* shop, which Is still standing in an altered shape, was next door 
to a hostelry famous as the haunt of actors in a part of town where there were 
a number of inns. Among others near by, and one of the oldest, was the Bird in 
Hand, from which that portion of town took its name. Mrs. Phillips has been 
called " Mrs. Fipps " heretofore, but in the Richmond directories of the time she 
appears as "Mrs. Phillips." Fipps was evidently the Scotch equivalent adopted 
by tradition. 

3 Norfolk, Virginia, Herald for July 26, 1811. "Misfortunes have pressed 
heavily upon Mrs. Poe, who has been left alone, the support of herself and sev- 
eral young children." 



4 ISRAFEL 

and was then, or later, given rooms in Mrs. Phillips' establish- 
ment, probably owing to the fact that the inn next door was al- 
ready crowded, and that the nature of the entertainment pro- 
vided there was at times too Bohemian and convival to suit the 
needs of a young actress in delicate health, the mother of a 
family. 

Of the two children, Edgar was the older, then going on to 
three years of age. He had been born in Boston on January 19, 
i8o9, 8 while his mother and father were playing in that city at 
the old Federal Street Theater, At the time of his arrival in 
Richmond, Edgar was a handsome, sturdy little boy with large, 
dark gray eyes, long, dark brown hair, and an engaging counte- 
nance. His sister Rosalie was then a child in arms, having been 
born most probably in December, 1810, in Norfolk, Virginia.' 1 
A third and eldest child, William Henry Leonard Poe, had been 
left shortly after his birth, in the Summer of 1807, in the care of 
his paternal grandfather, " General " David Poe, at 19 Camden 
Street, Baltimore. 

Edgar Allan Poe, for that was the full name which the son of 
the young actress was later to receive, was the child of strolling 
actors, if so leisurely a word as " strolling " can be applied to 
the painful and varied peregrinations of his parents, David and 
Elizabeth. 

Elizabeth Arnold (Poe), the poet's mother, was the daughter 
of an actor, Henry Arnold, and an actress, Elizabeth Smith, both 
of the Covent Garden Theater, London. The marriage bans of 
the couple were published at St. George's Church in London in 
1784, and the couple were married in June of that year. Eliza- 
beth, their daughter, was born in the Spring of 1787, Henry 
Arnold, Poe's maternal grandfather, appears to have died in the 

8 This date has been agreed upon after the careful investigations of Prof. 
Woodberry. All other dates, whether given by Poe himself, or (ho members of Hw 
Poe family, can be confidently disregarded. Poe's autobiographic^ notes giv*n to 
Griswold on the back of an old envelope are particularly misleading. Set; note on 
Poe's parentage and heredity in Appendix I. 

4 Accounts of Rosalie Poe upon her adoption by the Mackenzie a fnv months 
later speak of her as much older and as " running about " even at the time of 
Mrs. Poe's arrival in Richmond. 



A DRAMATIC PROLOGUE 



early Winter of 1790, as his name disappears from the play bills 
about then. His widow continued to play at Covent Garden for 
the next six years, but left London at the beginning of November, 
1795, for the United States, taking her daughter Elizabeth along 
with her. They landed in Boston from the ship " Outram " on 
January 3, 1796, as a shipping notice two days later in the 
Massachusetts Mercury shows. Miss Arnold was then nine years 
old. The passenger list of the " Outram " included a number of 
emigrating English actors among whom was one Charley Tubbs. 

In February, 1796, with considerable success, 5 Mrs. Arnold 
made her American debut at Boston. A little later she and her 
daughter, accompanied by Mr. Tubbs, after a brief tour through 
part of New England, arrived at Portland, Maine; where the 
young Miss Arnold made her first appearance (sic) at a vocal 
concert on June i, 1796, singing some songs, suited to her child- 
ish age and part. It was about this time, if not earlier, that the 
attractive widow Mrs. Arnold became the spouse of the genial 
but superficial Mr. Tubbs. He accompanied her upon the piano- 
forte and supported her in minor parts. During the Fall and Sum- 
mer of 1796 they attempted to organize at Portland, Maine, 
what may be quaintly regarded as the first " little theater " in 
America. 

Mr. and Mrs. Tubbs and the young Elizabeth Arnold were 
the stars of the company, the other members appear to have been 
recruited mainly from the local amateur talent. One winter's ex- 
perience of the coldness of the climate and the frigid dramatic 
enthusiasm of the Puritans appears, however, to have been 
blighting, and in January, 1797, Mr. and Mrs. Tubbs together 
with the ten-year-old girl, " the beautiful Miss Arnold whose 



6 Massachusetts Mercury for February 16, 1796: " We have had the pleasure 
of a complete fruition in the anticipation of the satisfaction a Boston audience 
would receive from the dramatic abilities of Mrs. Arnold. The theater never 
shook with such bursts of applause, as on her first appearance, on Friday last/' 
etc. 

Mr. Tubbs may have married Mrs. Arnold before they left England. The 
actress naturally retained her old name on theater bills and the matter is there* 
fore difficult to trace. Woodbcrry is followed here. The story that Foe's mother 
was bom at sea is a legend with no basis of fact, it may be noted. 



ISRAFEL 



powers as an actress command attention," 7 attached themselves 
to Mr. Solee's Company of Boston and Charleston Comedians 
and started for South Carolina. On the way down the coast, they 
stopped in New York to give two performances at the John 
Street Theater, when an epidemic of yellow fever intervened and 
the company was scattered to reunite again in Charleston, S. C. 
The Tubbses arrived on the sloop " Maria " and went to board 
with Colonel Maybery on Bay Street. 

In Charleston, performances were given all winter. The season 
opened November gth, 1797, and Mr. Solee engaged both Mr. 
and Mrs. Tubbs for light comedy parts and songs, and the young 
Miss Arnold in childish rdles such as " Cupid," and " a nymph." 8 

In the Spring of JtTScj, just before the season was over, Mr. 
Tubbs, together with two other actors of the company, Edgar 
and Whitelock, caused such disaffection in the troupe as to re- 
sult in a dissension in its ranks. Some of the actors, among whom 
were Mr. and Mrs. Tubbs and the young Miss Arnold, were 
forced to leave the city temporarily. Mr. Tubbs was described by 
the manager, Mr. Solee, as the " least member of the company 
and a vermin." These disgruntled players were later gathered to- 
gether again in Charleston by Mr. Edgar, and for a month after 
the close of the season by the Charleston Company, continued to 
give performances under the name of the Charleston Comedians. 

It was in this troupe that Poe's mother, Elizabeth Arnold, 
ceased to take only juvenile parts and found herself described us 
jp. actress. Mr. Edgar, the pseudo-manager of the new troupe, 
appears to have been a drunkard with a disputatious disposition. 
Owing to this, and the fact that the secession of his cast from 
the ranks of the Charleston Players had been viewed unfavor- 



7 The Eastern Herald and Gazette of Maine, December n, 1706. 

8 Elizabeth Arnold made her debut on the Charleston boards November 18, 
singing The Market Lass, and her first "important" theatrical appwirann? iH'ww- 
ber 26, as the " Duke of York " in Richard ///. The family continual piayini' in 
Charleston through the Spring of 1798. . 

South Carolina State Gazette for April and May, 1798: Mta Army's nrw 
parts at this time were: "Anna" in the Death of Major Andrf; "Mins Biddv 
Bellair m Miss in Her Teens; " Nancy " in Three Wicks after Afarrtotf ' " Pink *" 
in The Young Quaker; " Sophia in The Road / Rmn; and " Phoebe* " in The 
Reapers. 



A DRAMATIC PROLOGUE 



ably by the public and press, the notices which he and his people 
received were by no means favorable. To this, however, both 
Mrs. Tubbs and Miss Arnold were notable exceptions. 

It is about this time that all references to Mr. and Mrs. Tubbs 
cease. They disappear from the scene; and it is quite possible 
that the grandmother of Edgar Allan Poe rests in some unmarked 
grave in Charleston, S. C., the victim of " Yellow Jack," the ter- 
rible fever, which for years haunted the old port epidemically 
and perennially, claiming, even a half century later, the brother 
of the English poet, Hugh Clough, and many another. 10 There is 
some tradition of Poe's grandmother having appeared later in 
Baltimore but it rests on a shadowy foundation. That she ac- 
companied Mrs. Poe and the children to Richmond in 1811 has 
no basis of fact. 

In the late Spring or early Summer of 1798, apparently with- 
out her mother or stepfather, Elizabeth Arnold in the care of a 
Mr. Usher 11 and a Mrs. Snoden came north to Philadelphia 
where they joined the dramatic company then playing in that 
city, and acted for the next four seasons, until 1802, with occa- 
sional appearances in Washington, Southwark, and other places. 

In March, 1800, the company with which the future Mrs. Poe 
was then playing was joined by a Mr. C. D. Hopkins, comedian. 
On July 4, 1802, Miss Arnold was given a benefit performance 
in Baltimore, and it may have been at that time that she was 
first seen by young David Poe, then about twenty-five years 
old and engaged in studying law ls> with Henry Didier and 
others. This meeting, however, is only a possibility. David Poe 



10 Epitaph in St. Michael's Churchyard, Charleston, S. C. 

GEORGE AUGUSTUS CLOUGH 

A NATIVE OF LIVERPOOL, 

DIED SUDDENLY 01* " STRANGERS FEVER " 

NOV'R STII 1843 

AGKD 22 

A careful search of available records in Charleston, S. C., made by the author in 
1923-4, failed, however, to reveal any trace of cither Mr. or Mrs. Tubbs being 
interred there. 

1 1 The name " Usher " thus appears curly in the history of Poe. 

12 He was born "certainly not later than 1780." John Poe, Esq., to Prof. 
Woodberry, June 10, 1883. The statement that David Poe eloped with Miss 
Arnold about this time as related by Ingram is not true. He was misinformed. 



8 ISRAFEL 

went south to an uncle in Augusta, Ga., and in July, 1802, Eliza- 
beth Arnold was married to Mr. Hopkins whose principal comic 
r61e was that of " Tony Lumpkin." The couple continued to play 
in Alexandria, Norfolk, Petersburg, and Richmond 13 as members 
of the Virginia Players. Of this union there were no children. 

In the meantime, young David Poe, who seems to have had 
more interest in amateur theatricals where his appearance 
had met some encouragement than in " Blackstone," left his 
uncle's house in Augusta and went to Charleston, S. C., where 
he made his " second appearance on any stage " December $th, 
1803." Despite his desire for theatrical fame, David Poe seems 
to have been of a retiring and even bashful disposition. In addi- 
tion, he was delicate and tubercularly inclined, which probably 
partly accounts for the fact of an awkwardness and self-con- 
sciousness that precluded him from success in any but the most 
minor r61es. 15 His amateur manner remained, and whatever his 
talents, it may be definitely stated that they were always fur be- 
low those of the young actress whom he afterward married. 11 
Nevertheless, the young actor's first press notices lrt were not un- 
favorable, and he seems to have met with considerable encour- 
agement in Charleston, then one of the principal theatrical cen- 



13 The plays and the r61es in which Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins appeared can be 
found in the contemporary newspaper files of the towns mentioned. 

** The Charleston City Gazette for December x, 1803, advertises David Poe\s 
first appearance in a pantomime, La Perouse as "An Officer." For a full dis- 
cussion of the relative dramatic abilities of both of Poe's parents, see Woodbcny'st 
Life, 1909, vol. I, chap. I. I have somewhat curtailed it here as being of minor 
importance in connection with Poe himself and have contented myself by intro- 
ducing some new material not given by or accessible to former biographers. 

" George Barnwell "Young Poe begins to emerge from the abyss of em- 
barrassment in which natural diffidence, from his first appearance until two or 
three of his last performances had plunged him so deep as to deprive him of all 
power of exertion. But he must have not only courage but patience: 'slow rises 
the Actor.' " Information from a contemporary dramatic criticism in a Charleston 
newspaper supplied by Eola Wfflis of Charleston, S, C. 

* "The Charleston Courier at this time had an official critic, *Tlu*pi*'~- 
(Mr. C. C. Carpenter), a cultivated Englishman, who not only wrote dramatic 
criticisms of a peculiarly honest and helpful nature, but took a keen fatherly 
interest in the advancing careers of the young members of the company. His 
sympathy and understanding must have been very comforting to the tyros who 
were trying to prove their worth to the Manager's satisfaction," Eola Willis in 
the Bookman. 



A DRAMATIC PROLOGUE 



ters, where he appeared during the entire Winter of 1803 17 under 
the management of Mr. Placide of the Charleston Players, who 
had succeeded Mr. Solee. 

The best portrait of Edgar Allan Poe's father that remains is 
to be found in the dramatic criticism of a contemporary Charles- 
ton newspaper describing his first speaking appearance: 10 

Of the Young Gentleman who made his first appearance on any 
stage, it would be hazardous to take an opinion from his performance 
this evening. For some time he was overwhelmed with the fears inci- 
dent on such occasions to an excess that almost deprived him of speech. 
A first appearance is a circumstance of novelty, and the audience 
therefore did not, as the European audiences do, on such occasions, 
greet the newcomer with encouraging plaudits; nor did the young 
gentleman receive one token of welcome or approbation till it was 
earned by him. Though he could not, even to the last, divest himself 
of his fears, we thought he disclosed powers well fitted for the stage. 
His voice seems to be clear, melodious and variable; what its compass 
may be can only be shown when he acts unrestrained by timidity. His 
enunciation seemed to be very distinct and articulate; and his face and 
person are much in his favor. His size is of that pitch well fitted for 
general action if his talents should be suited to sock and buskin. On 
the whole, we think that if the young gentleman has a passion for 
histrionic fame he may promise himself much gratification. What he 
did disclose was greatly in his favor; and extreme modesty though it 
may operate as a temporary impediment, will be considered by every 
judicious person, as a strong prognostic of merit, and earnest of future 
excellence! 

That neither the professional performance nor the type of 



17 The characters acted by David Poe at the Charleston Theater in 1803 were: 
"Belmore" in Jane Shore; "Laertes" in Gustavus Vasa; "Harry Thunder" in 
WUd Oates; "Donalbain" in Macbeth; "Grimm" in The Robbers; "Fallicro" 
in Abaellinor or the Great Bandit; " Stephcno " in The Tale of Mystery; " Young 
Woodland" in Cheap Living; "Williams" in John Butt; "Don Pedro" in Much 
Ado About Nothing; "An Officer" in La Perouse; "Tressel" in Richard 111; 
"Pedro" in The Voice of Nature; Allan-a-Dale " in Robin flood; " Thomas" 
in The Marriage Promise; " Trueman " in George Barnwelt; " Carmillo " in Julia 
or the Italian Lover; " Trifle " in The East Indian; " Dennis Crackskull " in The 
Scheming Lieutenant; "Don Garcia" in A Bold Stroke for a Husband; "Meze- 
tin" (Pantomime) in The Touchstom of Truth; "Don Antonio Gaspard" in 
Liberty m Louisiana; "Hunter" in The Fatherless Children; "Hortensio" in 
Catherine and Petruchio; "Sebastian" in Charlotte and Werter; and "Lover" 
in The Old Soldier. Eola Willis in the Bookman, from files of contemporary 
Charleston newspapers. 



io ISRAFEL 



plays in which David Poe acted entitled him to any claim upon 
" histrionic fame," both the criticism of the time and the play 
bills with the small parts in which he appeared confirm. 17 

In the Fall of 1804 David Poe had evidently come North, for 
we find him joining the Virginia Players in company with his 
future wife, and playing in Petersburg and throughout the entire 
circuit of that company. The season of 1805 was opened in 
Washington under the management of Mr, Green. It was unfor- 
tunate in several ways; financially, and from the loss of the com- 
pany's star comedian, Mr. Hopkins, who died after a very brief 
period of illness on October the 26th. His widow, the former 
l^fiss Arnold, did not remain long unconsoled, for in a surprisingly 
short time afterward she was married to young David Poe, who 
borrowed money from a friend for the expenses of the occasion. 
Whether the young widow's haste was due to the natural ardor 
of her temperament or the failure of the deceased to engage her 
affections, must remain in those realms of speculation sacred to 
theologians. 

The Poes remained with the Virginia Players until May, 1806, 
when they went North to Boston, stopping on the way for sum- 
mer engagements at Philadelphia and New York. By October 
they had rejoined their old friends the Ushers of the Boston and 
Charleston Players, whose influence may have been responsible, 
together with the Poes' former appearance with the* company, 
for their engagement at the Federal Theater in Boston. 
^ The Poes remained in Boston for three years. Mrs. Poe played 
several major Shakespearean r61es from time to time, " Blanche," 
"Ophelia," "Cordelia," "Juliet," and occasionally "Ariel." 
She appeared frequently as a dancing partner with her husband, 
dancing the Polish Minuet or singing between his clogs, reels, 
hornpipes, and Scotch flings. 

A digest of the criticisms which Mrs. Poe received shows her 
to have been more gifted with diligence in her art than by native 
talent, and deserving of praise rather than of admiration. David 
Poe found his natural level in minor parts, or in appearing as an 
entertainer and dancer, supported by the acceptable voice of his 
wife. Together they managed to make a bare living. 



A DRAMATIC PROLOGUE n 

It was during this Boston sojourn that the two boys were born: 
William Henry Leonard probably sometime in the early Winter, 
or during the Summer of i8o7, ls as the records of Mrs. Poe's un- 
broken appearances preclude any other time; and Edgar in Jan- 
uary, 1809, when Mrs. Poe was again absent from the theater 
from January 13 to February 8th. 10 At this time the family was 
living at 33 Hollis Street. 

As a great deal has been made in some quarters of the fact 
that Poe was born in Boston and of his later brief association 
with the place, it must always be kept in mind that he was born 
there and nothing more. Even a genius can scarcely be expectedT 
to have memories of the first six months of his life, even though 
they be passed in New England. " Because kittens may be born 
in an oven, that does not make them loaves of bread." Edgar 
Allan Poe was not a Bostonian, despite the claim, largely one of 
sentiment and convenience, on the title page of his first book. 
By education, association, preference, and prejudice, Poe was a 
Virginian, 20 and throughout all of his wanderings Richmond was 
his home. 

David and Elizabeth Poe continued to play in Boston after the 
birth of Edgar until the end of the theatrical season. How poor 
these actors were, is shown by the fact that three weeks after 
Edgar's birth his little sylph-like mother was back on the boards 
dancing and singing, her first appearance after the arrival of her 
son having taken place on February 8th, 1809, and not two days 
later as the newspaper notices indicate. 21 The sudden popularity 

18 Almost certainly during the early Winter of 1807 as this child, William 
Henry Leonard Poe, was left with his grandparents in Baltimore during the sum- 
mer of 1807, the theatrical vacation. If he were born there, this might account 
for the story in the Poe family that Edgar had been born in Baltimore. 

30 Mrs. Poe is advertised to appear in January, 1809, on the 6, 9, 13, 20 as 
the " Peasant " in The Brawn Mask, a pantomime. Her next appearance was on 
February 8th. Her confinement probably took place between January i3th and 
February 8th, the notice for the 20th having probably been inserted some days 
before the event, 

80 By "Virginian" I do not mean an "American"; the distinction, which 
was once a real one, has since become blurred. 

21 Original playbill of the Boston Theater. False Alarms, Brazen Mask, Mr. 
and Mrs. Poe in the cast of the latter, February 8, 1800. This bill is of peculiar 
interest because it shows that Mrs. Poe appeared two days earlier, after Edgar's 



12 ISRAFEL 



of the boy actor, John Howard Payne, who made his first appear- 
ance in Boston in 1809, seems for a time to have threatened the 
Foes' livelihood. " Master Payne/ 7 however, evidently had his 
heart in the right place, for on April 19, the following notice ap- 
peared in a Boston newspaper: 

BOSTON THEATRE 
For the Benefit of Mrs. Poe 

MRS. POE RESPECTFULLY INFORMS THE PlJBUC, 
THAT IN CONSEQUENCE OF REPEATED DISAPPOINT- 
MENTS IN OBTAINING PLACES DURING, 

Master Payne's 

ENGAGEMENT, HE HAS CONSENTED TO PLAY ONE 
NIGHT LONGER AT HER Benefit 

THIS EVENING, APRIL IQTH (1809) WILL BE PRK- 
SENTED, FOR THIS NIGHT ONLY, THE CELEBRATED 
PLAY CALLED Pizzaro: 
ROLLO (First Time) . . . Master PAYNE 

Two nights before, Mrs. Poe had played " Ophelia " to Payne's 
"Hamlet." Such a concession as the benefit must have been nec- 

to keep the wolf away from " Ophelia's door. 
Mrs. Poe's last appearance in Boston took place at the Ex- 
change Coffee House where she sang on May 16, 1809. Septem- 
ber found the family in New York at the Park Theater, where 
both she and her husband played, mostly in light comedy, until 
July 4th, 1810, Her husband's press notices were now often un- 
favorable, and it is about this time that David Poe apparently 
disappears. He either died or deserted his wife, and there is no 
further authentic mention of him. The tradition is that he died 
of consumption. If so, the sound of the small applause which had 
occasionally been his must have been effectually muffled by the 
clods of the potters' field. 
-""The" disappearance" of David Poe in July, 18x0, dates the 

birth, than the date which Prof. Woodbcrry records. A pathetic suldirfit is that 
the r61e chosen for Mr*. Poe was "little more than a walking part." See note in 
the Catalogue of the American Art Association Inc., for Poe Hums in sale of April 
2*> 29, 1924, No. 932. * 



A DRAMATIC PROLOGUE 13 

beginning of a Poe family mystery about which there has been 
a good deal of futile speculation. It gave rise to suspicions that 
later on played an important part in the life of the poor actor's 
famous son. According to one legend, with little basis of fact, 
David Poe deserted his wife for a Scotch woman and went to 
live with her abroad. By her he is reputed to have had a son 
with whom Poe is supposed to have gone to school at Irvine, 
Scotland, a circumstance that laid the basis for the plot of Wil- 
liam Wilson. This can all be safely dismissed as imagination not 
to be described as pure. A more credible Richmond tradition 
supposes that David Poe died in Norfolk, Virginia, which one de- 
tached and untraced newspaper clipping tends to confirm, giving 
the date as October 19, 1810. This tradition is all very nebulous, 
however, and the historical record of the poet's father ends with 
July, 1810, in New York. 

Whatever may have been the cause of David Poe's final dis- 
appearance, there was something about it that afterward caused 
great uneasiness to the son of the little actress. She treasured 
some unfortunate correspondence, almost her sole legacy to her 
son, Edgar, which he too cherished while he lived, but left direc- 
tions that at his death it should be burned. The request was car- 
ried out by his mother-in-law and aunt, Maria Clemm. What 
part David Poe, the poet's father, played in this, if any, it is 
therefore impossible to say and useless to guess. The position of 
Mrs. Poe, however, is considerably clearer. 

Deprived of her husband either by death or conjugal misfor- 
tune, probably the former, she left New York in the Summer of 
1810 and went south to Richmond. There she was once more 
engaged to play on the Southern circuit, where she was already 
well and favorably known- She was accompanied from place to 
place by the child Edgar, now only two years old, but even then 
involved in the maze of tragedy. Edgar was already separated 
from his older brother by the poverty of his parents, who had 
been forced to leave Henry in Baltimore. Mrs. Poe had now lost 
her husband and was striving to support herself and her child. 
She must already have been far gone in tuberculosis, of which 
she died only a year later, yet she was forced to appear by the 



14 ISRAFEL 

dire necessity of her poverty, dancing and singing in motley, 

night after night. To cap the climax she was pregnant with a 

posthumous child. For an actress ill and without resources, a 

"Helpless woman without a husband, engaged in a profession at 

which the age was only too prone to point the finger of scorn, 

^t was a dreadful and precarious plight. There can be no doubt, 

that even while he was learning to talk, the little Edgar was 

clasped, with many a dark foreboding of natural terror, to his 

^mother's heart. 

Keeping Edgar with her, Mrs. Poe continued to play in Rich- 
mond and Norfolk, although her time was approaching. While in 
Norfolk (at the Forrest House on December 20, 1810) accord- 
ing to the Mackenzie family Bible, Mrs. Poe gave birth to a 
daughter, Rosalie. 

That David Poe was not with Mrs. Poe in Norfolk at this time, 

is shown by the fact that Rosalie's birth took place so long after 

the death or disappearance of her husband that doubt was after- 

wards thrown on the paternity of the child. 2 - It is an ungrateful 

task thus even to touch upon the reputation of this unfortunate 

young actress who gave to the world what art she had, and be- 

queathed to her adopted country one of its greatest geniuses in 

the person of her son. But the facts of the situation should no 

longer be suppressed as they undoubtedly affected the relations 

of Edgar Poe with his guardian, and his own family later on. It 

was this story, or the echoes of it, which long afterwards caused 

Poe to put the deaths of his father and mother " within a few 

weeks " of each other. 23 

All the authentic dates and the known facts show that the 
suspicion which was thus afterward thrown upon the memory 

See the letter from John Allan to William Henry Leonard Poe in Baltimore, 
dated Richmond, November i, ^24, in which among other things he ays- 
At least she is half your sister and God forbid, my dear Henry, that we should 
Jj*"? ^ errors and frailtit ' s of lh(J <lea<i '" Th "* fetter is to be 



' 

- ,* in the Library of Con W Photostat in the 

possession of the author. For a full discussion of this see page 125 

' ' 



ti, to William Po *' RMwwmd. 'August 20, 1835) 

that "my father David died when I was in the second year of my age ... my 

SS^fi* i*I T CkS , bC [ 0rC hi ?'" ! S Of a piccc with lhe rcst " f hi * Cuddled 
autobiographical data and shows that he was either ignorant of the facts (sic), 
or nghtly anxious to shield the reputation of his mother and sister 




ffi&fe^.5r.*a 

s. David Foe 
life Arnold 



miniature long cherished by 



A DRAMATIC PROLOGUE 15 

of Mrs. Poe was not only cruel but untrue. That it was thrown 
upon her, however, there is no doubt. With the use that was 
made of it, and its effect upon the character of her son Edgar, it 
will be necessary to deal. 

Soon after the birth of Rosalie, Mrs. Poe was again appearing 
in various parts, continuing a now hopeless struggle to support 
herself and her two " infants " despite her now fast-failing health 
The earnings of a minor actress on the early American stage 
were at best pitiable, and all the incidents of the life were ig- 
noble, squalid, and precarious. The hardships of travel were 
great, and the places of entertainment rarely comfortable and 
not always respectable. For a sensitive woman with two babies 
to care for, it was a difficult and exhausting mode of life. Mrs. 
Poe's misfortunes and condition were evidently the cause of 
solicitude to her fellow actors, as frequent appeals for herself 
and her fatherless children in the columns of old newspapers stil 
meet the curious eye. In Charleston, Norfolk, and Richmond, she 
was accorded frequent benefits at which the charitable public was 
urged to assist. 

From Norfolk Mrs. Poe went to Charleston, S. C., where she 
played in the Winter and Spring of 1810 and 1811. In April of 
the latter year her health was evidently failing, for she was given 
a special benefit performance. In the notice of this, which ap- 
peared in the Charleston papers, her ill health was specifically 
mentioned. From Charleston the young actress and her family 
returned to Norfolk, where she was apparently in failing health 
and destitute. 21 The article about her there is lengthy and ap- 
pealing, and stresses the point that she " has been left alone, the 
support of herself and several children." Evidently the response 
was not great, and in August we find her again returning to Rich- 
mond, where she was always most popular, in time for the open- 
ing of the season. 

It was to be the last of her many weary journeys with her 
young and doubtless often fretful family. Her little space of 
comedy was about to end in a tragedy, one of many which pur- 



** Norfolk, Virginia, Herald for July 26, i8u. 



16 ISRAFEL 

sued her son Edgar through the remainder of his astonishing life. 
As she drove through the brick arch 2C into the wagon yard of 
the old Indian Queen Tavern and ensconced herself in the rooms 
behind and over the milliner shop of the good Mrs. Phillips, she 
had entered upon the last scene of the last act. Perhaps in her 
heart she knew it, for she had already been very ill and must 
have been, from the nature of the events which were soon to fol- 
low, in a consumptive condition and a low state of health. 

For an account of Mrs. Poe in the heyday of her fame, we 
nave the description of one who had seen her as a care-free girl. 20 
Although the description is evidently taken from the miniature of 
Mrs. Poe which Edgar long cherished, a copy of which was sent 
to Ingram, Poe's first competent biographer after Poe's death; 37 
it, and the miniature itself, are the best memorials of the poet's 
mother which exist. This description shows Mrs. Poe to have had 

the childish figure, the great, wide open, mysterious eyes, the abun- 
dant curling hair confined in the quaint bonnet of a hundred years 
ago and shadowing the brow in raven masses, the high waist and at- 
tenuated arms clasped in an Empire robe of faint, flowered design, the 
tiny but rounded neck and shoulders, the head proudly erect. It is the 
face of an elf, a sprite, an Undine who was to be the mother of the 
most elfish, the most unearthly of poets, whose luminous dark gray 
eyes had a glint of the supernatural in them and reflected as he says 
in one of his earlier poems, " the wilder 'd " nature of the man. 

Such was the charming young actress who, with her attractive 
little boy Edgar, and her baby daughter Rosalie, took up her 
abode with Mrs. Phillips, the milliner at Richmond, sometime in 
August, 1811, "above that part of the town known as the 'Bird 
in Hand.' " For the mother of Israfel it was the next to the last 
remove. 



* Since bricked up but still visible. 

20 Beverly Tucker, a contributor to the Southern Literary Mftssengcr, and the 
author of The Partisan Leader. The description was written in 1835. 

27 The Ingram Papers and Manuscript in possession of the University of Vir- 
ginia Library. 



CHAPTER II 
The Two Orphans 



THE arrival of Mrs. Poe at the Indian Queen Tavern, as 
the star of the little troupe of actors then gathered 
there, was no doubt the signal for a good deal of com- 
ment in local dramatic circles. Rehearsals and performances soon 
began. 

Mrs. Phillips' little shop at that time stood some little distance 
back from Main Street, abutting the purlieus of the Tavern on 
the corner of Main and Twenty-third. There was a neat walk up 
through the dooryard, then lined with shade trees under which 
the young child Edgar immediately after his arrival in Richmond 
must first have played. 28 

According to the testimony of a lady from Norfolk 20 who, as 
a little girl, remembered seeing Mrs. Poe play there in 1811, and 
made friends with her children who lodged nearby on Bermuda 
Street (at Norfolk), the family was then accompanied by a 
Welsh nurse who looked after the children and nursed Mrs. Poe. 
This evidence is extremely legendary, however, and there is no 
authentic mention whatever of the nurse's presence in Rich- 
mond. 30 



8 For the description of the house in which Mrs. Poe died and its environs, I 
am indebted to information supplied me by the present owner of the property in 
whose family it has been for many years, and under whose hands it has passed 
through successive building changes greatly altering it and the old inn next door, 
both belonging to the same owner. A personal visit was made to the spot, and 
photographs of the premises made and compared with old ones, in July, 1925. 
The former house of Mrs. Phillips is now inhabited by negroes and surrounded 
by a tenement, all in a shocking state of neglect and disrepair. The former front 
yard of her shop is occupied by a building erected some time since. The inn arch- 
way is bricked up. 

80 Afterwards a Mrs. Archer of Richmond, mother of Mrs. S. A. Weiss, 
80 Although there is some doubt about this "nurse" having been with Mrs. 
Poe, the evidence from this account and several others is too precise to be ig- 
nored. I am inclined to accept it as accounting for the persistent rumors that Mrs. 
Tubbs, for whom the nurse was mistaken, accompanied Mrs. Poe to Richmond. 



i8 ISRAFEL 

Mrs. Poe's bright little lad would no doubt have been a fa- 
vorite with the members of the Virginia Players and the hangers- 
on about the Indian Queen next door, and he must often have sat 
on the knees of his father's and mother's friends before the great 
open chimney of the inn. The hostelry was the center of the pro- 
fessional dramatic life of old " Richmond City " and was also 
frequented by the hangers-on and stage-door Lotharios of the the- 
ater, together with a few teamsters and travelers. But its principal 
business was that of a theatrical lodging house and its coterie. 

Mrs. Poe, who was in increasing ill health, as the frequent 
interruptions of her appearances at the theater showed, must 
have been glad to have had the children taken care of by anyone 
who would do so. Often enough, perhaps, there was no one at all 
Mrs. Phillips, who appears to have been a kind woman, had prob- 
ably taken the burden of the two little ones and the partial care 
of their sick mother upon herself as any good woman would 
between the intervals of waiting upon her customers in the little 
front room with a low fireplace and small square window panes, 
where her scanty stock of ribbons, poke bonnets, lace caps, cos- 
metics and perfumes was on display. 

Mrs. Phillips' clientele was of two strata: that of the fashion- 
able ladies of Richmond who looked to her for the latest crea- 
tions, and the dramatically inclined persons from the theatrical 
hotel next door, who, no doubt, found upon her counters the 
faultlessly blooming roses which have always enhanced the 
cheeks of " the profession " both on and off the stage. 

Thus there was ample opportunity for the ladies of the better 
families of Richmond, who would not otherwise in those days 
have been introduced to members of the theatrical profession off- 
stage, to become acquainted with the fact that a young actress, 
the mother of the handsome little fellow playing about the door- 
yard, was ill in the rooms immediately behind the shop of Mrs, 
Phillips. There can be no doubt either, that Mrs. Poe, as the 
star of Mr. Placide's company, the mother of a family, and an 
actress who, by repute and appearance, was well known to all of 
fashionable Richmond, was held in a different estimate than 
some of her more humble sisters in the theatrical boarding house 



THE TWO ORPHANS 19 

next door. These, too, however, were occasionally honored by 
fashionable visitors who desired to testify to their admiration in 
a more ardent manner than a discreet applause from a seat in 
the theater might express. And among the most gay and ardent, 
if contemporary accounts are to be credited, none were more so 
than the members of a numerous circle of prosperous and pious 
Scotch merchants* 

The theater in which Mrs. Poe and Mr. Placide's Company of 
Virginia Players acted stood on the present site of the Monu- 
mental Episcopal Church, on the block between Twelfth and 
Fourteenth Streets on Broad, known at the time as Theater 
Square. 81 In order to reach this from the lower part of Main 
Street where Mrs. Poe lived, it would have been most convenient 
to pass along Fourteenth Street to Broad. 

At the corner of Fourteenth Street and Tobacco Alley was the 
residence of Mr. John Allan, the junior partner of Ellis Gr Allan, 
Scotch merchants doing a general merchandising business in the 
city and the region about, and trading by chartered ships and by 
cargo at home and abroad. The store was not under the resi- 
dence, as has heretofore always been asserted, but was around 
the corner on Thirteenth Street about a block away on premises 
which were leased by the firm and purchased later on 3 " in April, 

12. 

During the late Summer and the Fall of 1811, Mrs. Poe must 



31 The Richmond Theater was on the site of a frame building which had been 
built by a remarkable Frenchman in 1786 as an Academy in which he attempted 
to introduce many new ideas in education and the fine arts into America. Among 
other things, theatricals, painting, and sculpture. The first classic plaster casts 
for models even seen in' America were shown here. M. Qucsnay's scheme failed. 
The Academy was afterwards used for the Virginia Convention which ratified the 
Federal Constitution, and in 1802, the building having been destroyed by fire, its 
site was occupied by the new Richmond Theater, a brick and frame structure 
also destroyed by fire in x8it. As many of Poe's earliest and most intimate asso- 
ciations are connected with this spot it has been thought worth while to give the 
above facts. 

82 Ellis & Allan Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. Articles of 
agreement made and entered into the 22nd day of April in the year of our Lord 
1812, between Anthony R. Thornton of the Town of Frcdericksburg and State 
of Virginia, of the first part and Charles Ellis and John Allan, Merchants and 
partners trading under the name of Ellis 6 Allan. (Consideration one thousand 
pounds of current money on or before the 22nd day of April, 1817, with interest). 
To sell and convey to the said Ellis & Allan a house on Thirteenth Street, etc. 



20 ISRAFEL 



have often passed the house of John Allan, probably upon occa- 
sions taking little Edgar with her to performances or rehearsals 
at the theater. It is quite possible that Edgar may have some- 
times appeared on the stage in an infantile r61e; 8a his juvenile 
repertoire of poems and recitations was known to have caused 
comment upon private occasions a little later. That he must have 
gone to and fro with his mother, past the door of John Allan, 
jthere can be little doubt. 

Mrs. Frances Keeling Allan, the first wife of the merchant, had 
at this time been married to him for eight years, but was with- 
out children and undoubtedly longed for them with all the 
yearning of her sex and the tenderest desires of a noble but 
lonely and disappointed heart. The household consisted of John 
Allan himself, his wife Frances, her sister Anne Moore Valentine, 
and the negro servants or slaves. It is probable that either or 
both the ladies may have made the acquaintance of Mrs. Poe 
and her handsome boy, by whom Mrs. Allan was greatly at- 
tracted, as they passed the door from time to time, while a 
speaking acquaintance was struck up with the popular young 
actress and Edgar was offered apples,'' 14 a fruit as much prized 
then in Southern towns as oranges were in the North, one with 
which the Allan house was always well supplied/' 15 Whether it 
was in this way, or at the shop of the milliner, Mrs. Phillips, 
certain it is that Frances, wife of John Allan, merchant, became 
acquainted with and more than casually interested in the fate 
and fortunes of Elizabeth Poe and her fatherless children. 
Through Mrs. Allan, too, doubtless came the interest and help 
of Mrs. William Mackenzie, a charitable and motherly woman, 
the wife of one of Mr. Allan's closest friends, already provided 
with two children of her own, John and Mary, It was, indeed. 



88 Edward V, Valentine to the author at Richmond, Virginia, July, 

8 * Frances Allan seems to have been the active factor in Edgar's 4t adoption " 
from the first. 

80 John Allan to Charles Ellis in New London, Connecticut, from Richmond, 
Virginia, October 26th, 1812. 

" P. S. I wish you would procure for me a barrel of nice green pippins on your 
return to New York." For this and similar items see the Ellis & Attan Com* 
spondence, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. 




Frances Keeling Allan 
tite Valentine 

First Wife of JOHN ALLAN, merchant, of Richmond, Virginia, Beloved 

fostrr-mcitluT of KIWSAR ALLAN POK 

Born February H, 1784; adopted by JOHN Dixon, printer, January 12, 1795? 
married JOHN ALLAN 1803; died February 28, 1829 

[/>r//rt emirtrsy nf JMward /'. falenlhif] 

From ft portrait by namrtf SW//.Y, ?prt/ AV Ktlwanl J\ rafatiiie 
Courtesy of the J'alentme A/usrum, Riclnmmth 9'irRinia 



The Richmond of Poe's liarly Childhood 

Frnm n r<irr olil print 
Courtesy of the JM}\ar J II tin /'/ Xbrin?* A?/r/w/wr/, t'irt'jnia 



THE TWO ORPHANS 21 

for both Mrs. Poe and her children, a benign combination of cir- 
cumstances, whatever they may have been, which brought these 
two good women to her bedside in the house of the little Scotch 
milliner. 

The Scotch circle in " Richmond City " was at that time a 
peculiarly close one. One of the Mackenzies afterwards remarked 
that " Mrs. Phillips came of a good family," 86 and doubtless both 
the kind ladies who had taken an interest in the young actress 
were provided with news as to Mrs. Poe's condition, and in return 
provided for her the necessities of life in the form of occasional 
gifts of food and clothing. 

During the late Fall of 1811 Mrs, Poe's condition grew rap- 
idly worse. The burden of supporting her two infant children 
must have fallen with crushing weight upon her narrow and con- 
sumptive shoulders. Her appearances at the theater grew fewer 
and farther apart; they finally ceased. Mr. Placide, the manager, 
doubtless did what he could for so important a member of his 
company, because all of these actors lived from hand to mouth. 
Mrs. Phillips must soon have been contributing the room rent 
free, as Mrs. Poe's stipend ceased with her appearances; and 
doubtless Edgar was very much about the shop, much to the good 
woman's terror for her poke bonnets and falderals, whose rigid 
repose upon uprights would have been grievously disturbed by 
the play of a vigorous three year old lad. 

The rooms behind Mrs. Phillips' shop were not the best place 
in the world for an invalid. There was one fireplace downstairs, 
but whether there was any fuel to burn there, is another question. 
The lower part of Main Street, a few blocks away, was subject 
to periodical invasions of the River James which took every oc- 
casion to overflow its banks. The season had been an exception- 
ally rainy and unheaithful one throughout tide-water Virginia, as 
the letters of that date show; mosquitoes must have been rife, 37 



80 Meaning a good " Scotch " family. 

87 Letter from Pedlar Mills, Virginia, from Joshua L. Ellis to Mr. Charles 
Ellis at Richmond, August i3th, 1811, and others of like import at later dates. 
"The rains have been greater here than I have ever seen them." Ellis & Allan 
Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. 



22 ISRAFEL 



and this had added constantly recurring attacks of malaria to her 
poverty and deprivations, to further deplete the ebbing strength 
of the consumptive young actress. 

t * The little upstairs room in which she lay dying had the scanti- 
est of furnishings: a miserable bed for herself on a straw mat- 
tress, 88 with perhaps a woven coverlet and a blanket contributed 
by Mrs. Phillips; one or two old chairs; probably a trundle bed 
for the children, or a cot upon which a nurse, if present, slept; 
and some bottles with candle ends in them. Mrs. Poe's effects 
would have been of the most meager description. A few soiled 
odds and ends of dramatic costumes, tawdry splendors of her 
past triumphs; a small trunk or chest in which some relics and let- 
ters of the vanished Harlequin were cherished by his widowed 
Columbine; the scanty remnants of even scantier meals; and the 
children's tattered clothes. In such a room lay dying the mother of 
^Edgar Allan Poe. 

In her poverty-stricken condition medical attendance must 
have been nil, probably luckily for her, as the science had not 
yet passed beyond regarding the lancet and the barbers' bowl as 
the panacea for all ills. She must have lain through the shorten- 
ing days, as November waned into December, striving to read 
the darkness of the future, which for her was dark enough, try- 
ing to still the noisy and peevish crying of little Rosalie, listening 
to the voices of Mrs. Phillips' customers in the room below, or 
to the feet of her little son as they stumbled up the narrow stairs. 
^ Her hopeless darkness, however, was lightened from time to 
time by visits to the squalid, but interesting garret of the dying 
actress and her charming children, by the grandcs dames and 
lesser ladies of Richmond, who sought the latest mode in bon- 
nets at the hands of Mrs. Phillips. She, indeed, poor woman, we 
may be sure, had done her full part to interest her customers in 
the misery of her guests, and had received perhaps an unex- 
pected reward at finding her little shop the center of consider- 
able interest, not all of which could have been in vain. 

Those who care to search the Richmond papers of that time 
will find in the Enquirer of November 25th, 1811, an appeal for 

88 This is specifically mentioned in some accounts. 



THE TWO ORPHANS 23 

Mrs. Poe " to the kind hearted of the city," inserted no doubt 
by the thoughtful hands of Manager Placide, for four days later 
one comes across the advertisement of a benefit to be repeated 
for the second time, "in consequence of the serious and long 
continued indisposition of Mrs. Poe, and in compliance with the 
advice and solicitation of many of the most respectable families." 

Among the " ladies of the most respectable families " who vis- 
ited Mrs. Poe and her children, as her tragedy neared the end 
of its last act, none were more welcome and efficacious to the 
little family in the dingy upstairs room than Mrs. Frances Allan 
and Mrs. William Mackenzie. 

It is not hard to imagine what must have been the thoughts 
and emotions of Mrs. Allan, the tenderly inclined, childless 
woman, as she sat in that bare garret with the handsome, curly- 
headed young Edgar Poe in her yearning arms, talking to him; 
and with the girlish mother on the bed, against whose soiled pil- 
lows the black hair of the invalid lay tangled in dark disarray. 
Nor could she have been oblivious to the silent appeal of the 
haunted, "wildered" eyes of the young actress which shifted 
tragically from the baby face of young Rosalie, resting trustfully 
against the bosom of Mrs. Mackenzie, to that of her little son 
smiling sadly back at her from the chair of Mrs. Allan. There 
was a silent appeal there which even a rough man might under- 
stand. To these good women, as the future proved, it was not 
made in vain. A few days later there was an appeal of a more 
obvious kind 

I* TO THE HUMANE HEART 

On this night Mrs. Poe. lingering 
on the bed of disease and surrounded 
by her children, asks your assistance: 
and asks it perhaps for the last time. 
For particulars, see the Bills of the day. 

It was, indeed, " for the last time! " 80 Azrael had appeared 
in one of his favorite disguises, pneumonia: and the tragedies 

*' 10 Mrs. Elizabeth Arnold (David) Poe died December 8, x8n. On December 
9th Mrs. Mackenzie took Rosalie home, and Mrs. Allan carried Edgar to her 
house. (Statement by Mary Mackenzie, Rosalie's foster-sister.) 

In the newspaper notice quoted on this page there was an error in spelling which 
has not been reproduced. 



24 ISRAFEL 

of the little doll actress were over. " Ariel " had received release; 
the tinsel stars of the wand were laid away with the paper flowers 
of " Ophelia "; " Juliet " was tricked out in her best paste jewels, 
and, for a few hours, lay in squalid state in the milliner's attic, 
where all those who had made her small world, and who had 
cared a little, might come to see. Among these, we may be sure, 
were the members of Mr. Placide's company from the tavern 
next door, Mrs. Phillips, Mrs. Allan and Mrs. Mackenzie and 
their husbands, who by this time had been interested in the 
startling little tragedy on lower Main Street to the extent of tak- 
ng the arrangements for the funeral into their own hands. 

It would be easy enough to pull out the vox humana for the 
final scene when Edgar and Rosalie Poe were at last parted from 
that which had been their mother. For the not unimaginative the 
facts will suffice: Mrs. Allan and Mrs. Mackenzie came for the 
children the morning after their mother's death. One can imagine 
the sudden hush about the old inn and the milliner's shop. The 
broad Scotch lamentations of Mrs. Phillips, the moment when 
the two children were held up to look for the last time upon their 
little doll-like mother, now waxen, indeed, and lying upon the 
bed, dressed in some high-waisted Empire slip of the period. 
Certainly, as the custom then was, 'some loll was taken of her 
long, dark locks, and before the children left the room little 
Rosalie was given an empty jewel case, the modest contents of 
which had long ago vanished to put food in her mouth. For 
Edgar there was a miniature of his mother, and a painting by 
her of Boston Harbor, upon the back of which in her own piti- 
ful cipher she had charged her little son to " love Boston, the 
place of his birth, and where his mother found her best and most 
sympathetic friends.' 740 Like many another death-bed admoni- 
tion it was to be in vain, for her son always found there the re- 
verse of his mother's experience. This, together with a certain 
weakness of constitution, was the entire inheritance of the 
orphans of David and Elizabeth Poe. 41 



40 Woodbcrry, XOOQ, vol. I, papje 14, and other authority Incram T, 6, etc. 

41 There was also a bundle of letters, and as it now appears from a poem by 
Henry Poe recently discovered, a pocket book with locks of hair of both parents. 
See Poe's Brother, Doran, 1926. 



THE TWO ORPHANS 25 

Outside the little shop some of the members of Mr. Placide's 
company doubtless gathered to say, on the part of the women 
at least, a tearful farewell to the little grey-eyed boy who had 
been their pet. Some of them may have accompanied Mrs. Poe 
to her last resting place in St. John's Churchyard where Mr. 
Allan and Mr. Mackenzie, who were members of the congrega- 
tion, had arranged for her burial, not without protest from cer- 
tain members of the vestry who shared the prejudices of their 
time and were reluctant to see even the mortal remains of an 
actress sheltered by consecrated ground. Fittingly enough she 
was buried " close to the wall." There is an entry for the burial, 
but it is without name, and the grave was, and is at this writing, 
unmarked. 42 

Young as he was, Edgar Poe could scarcely have remembered 
the actual scenes surrounding the final tragedy of his young 
mother, but even a child of three may be conscious at the time 
that its own familiar little world has suddenly gone to pieces 
about it. When Edgar got to the street in front of Mrs. Phillips 7 
shop he was parted from his baby sister, Rosalie, and suddenly 
found himself alone with an affectionate but nevertheless strange 
woman. The soft and always comforting presence known to all 
children as " mamma " had disappeared. The doubtless protest- 
ing sister Rosalie had mysteriously vanished in the arms of an- 
other unknown person. As the boy rattled over the old, cobbled 
streets of " Richmond City " in Mrs. Allan's hired hack 4a he must 
dimly have experienced for the first time, in an emotion without 
words, the extreme sense of fear and utter loneliness which was 
to follow him to the grave. The tenderness of the strange woman 
who sat beside him could never supply the intimate sense of 
well being and spiritual safety which a real mother confers natu- 
rally upon her child. Ishmael was gone forth to dwell in other 
tents, and the hand of the stranger was henceforth mysteriously 
against him. 

42 August, 1925, 

4:t John Allan did not at this time own a horse and carriage, but he was at 
considerable expense for hack hire. For the frequent bills from Richard E. 
Wortham & Co., for hack hire through 1811 and 18x2, see the Ellis & Allan 
Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C, Receipt for iath of November, 
1812, etc. 



26 ISRAFEL 

Looking back after more than a hundred years, to us, the 
bitter end of the little tragic-comedy of Mrs. Poe seems to be 
one of those petty victories of which even Death might be 
ashamed. To young Israfel, whose trembling little mouth was 
for the time being stopped by the bread and kisses of charity, it 
was the first and perhaps the most decisive of the many tragedies 
which the Dark Angel Azrael was bidden to confer. 



CHAPTER III 
Lady Bountiful Claims Israfel 

THE household in which the orphan child Edgar found 
himself ensconced, if not entirely welcome, was as we 
have seen, that of John Allan, the merchant, and 
Frances Keeling 44 his wife, a charming young woman then 
twenty-five years old. With them at this time and for many years 
thereafter lived Mrs. Allan's elder sister Anne Moore Valentine, 
soon to become known to Edgar as " Aunt Nancy," a lady whose 
affection, like that of her married sister, never failed to follow 
Edgar Poe till death stilled her loyal heart. 

The house at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Tobacco 
Alley was neither " one of a row of dingy three story dwellings " 
nor a "princely Southern Mansion," as it has been variously 
described, but a well built, rather spacious brick structure of the 
Georgian type with three floors containing three or four rooms 
each, and a garret which at that time had a small hall and two 
rooms. In the rear there was probably provision for the housing 
of the servants, of which at this time Mr. Allan is known to 
have kept three and possibly more, 45 not at all unusual in slave 
times, nor indicative of wealth. Either upon the first or second 
floor, there was a large dining room with folding doors that 
opened into a drawing room or library, which in all probability 
did not contain many books, as the owner was of a practical 
cast of mind. Most of the rooms contained open fireplaces which 
at one time must have possessed handsome Georgian mantel* 



44 Frances Keeling (Valentine) Allan born 1786, her sister Anne Moore Valen- 
tine was born the previous year. 

46 I find record of this transaction in the Ellis 6" Allan Papers: " Jan. ist, 
1811, a negro woman named Judith hired from Master Cheatham for the sum 
of 2$ to be retained clothed as usual under a bond of 50." Judith was retained 
for some years. See also J. H. Whitty Memoir The Complete Poems of Edgar 
Allan Poe, large edition, note page XXII for the names of the servants some 
years later. Also will of William Gait, Appendix III. 



28 ISRAFEL 



pieces to match the style of the finely turned mahogany banisters 
with delicate uprights that still remain. 46 It was in short an excel- 
lently comfortable though not pretentious nor impressive dwell- 
ing. The house was then owned by William Gait. 

As the long residence, cherishing, breeding, and education re- 
ceived in the home of John Allan is perhaps the central fact in 
Poe's story, since the vital formative years of his life were 
largely spent there, and since the relations between Poe and his 
foster-father were in a sense decisive as to the poet's future, it 
is the purpose here to discuss the character and affairs of John 
Allan and his family relations at some length and with a consid- 
erable degree of candor. 47 

Almost a century and a quarter have elapsed since the events 
and the persons involved in them troubled the world of men, and 
it is now high time to set forth the facts. That the reputations of 
those involved have all been carefully shielded, except the great 
name which has caused their several obscurities to be remem- 
bered, is already a smoking sacrifice to family pride. 

John Allan was a native of Irvine, Scotland, where he had 
been born in 1780 and received at least an ordinary but sufficient 
education, of which he states, that at the age of fifteen his foster- 
son Edgar had already received a better one. 4 * Whatever formal 

<ltt The author visited this house in July, 1925, and found the lower story 
still occupied as an office. The house has passed through many vicissitudes hav- 
ing at one time been the most notorious in Richmond. The partitions have been 
torn out to make storage space, but their location can .still be seen as well as one 
old mantelpiece, the rest of which have been replaced by Victorian marble in- 
sults. Viewed from the front, a very deceptive idea of the sixe of the place is 
given, as it is in reality quite large, A great many of the absurdities in some of 
Poe's biographies could have been avoided by a visit to the houses where he and 
his friends lived, many of which are still standing in Richmond and elsewhere, 

47 The relative importance of the time spent in Mr. Allan's house by Poe can 
probably be brought home most vividly in a graphic form. Representing the 
whole of Poe's life by a straight line, the time spent with Mr. Allan and his 
family is shown by the heavier portion. The influences, of course, extended much 
further. The scale is one inch to each decade of Poe's life. 






48 Letter to William Henry Leonard Poe from John Allan, dated Richmond, 
November x, 1824. 




John Allan, Merchant 

The foster-father of Edgar Allan Poe 

Born at Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland, in 1780, died at Richmond, Virginia, 



March 27, 1834 
From a silhouette 




Signatures 
of the partners 



LADY BOUNTIFUL CLAIMS ISRAFEL 31 

education he had was considerably augmented by a gift of keen 
natural parts and a mercantile familiarity with the forms of busi- 
ness correspondence, legal papers and accounts. His letters are 
couched in a style which stamp their writer as a man of decided 
and astute personality, not without a pleasant and softer gleam 
here and there, but only too often with the glitter of steel and an 
affected piety. In early youth he had been left an orphan 49 and 
emigrated from Scotland to settle in Richmond, having been 
brought up in the store, counting house, and ships of his uncle, 
William Gait, a rich Scotchman doing a prosperous mercantile 
and tobacco trade at home and overseas, said to have accumu- 
lated before his death one of the largest fortunes in Virginia. 
Mr. Gait's generosity and native clannishness were the main- 
stay, the hope, and the means of final gratification of a host of 
squabbling, poor Scotch relatives. 50 

On a stool in the same counting house, where he had been 
brought up with John Allan, was another young Scotchman, Mr. 
Charles Ellis, also provided with previously settled relatives who 
were already trading to some advantage. After having served 
for some time about Mr. Gait's establishment, the two young 
clerks set up for themselves as partners in a general mercantile 
and trading business by sea and land, in which tobacco buying 
and selling was the most profitable transaction. They were in all 
probability backed by William Gait and Josiah Ellis, their two 
uncles respectively, either by a capital stock or an advance of 
credit sufficient to set up the new firm which traded under the 
name of Ellis & Allan. In the meantime both the young partners 
had married. 

The nature of the trade carried on by the firm of Ellis & Allan, 

40 The Allans and Gaits were petty traders and smugglers about the ports of 
Greenock and Irvine toward the end of the i8th century. John Allan's mother, 
whom one of the Gait cousins, once hoped to marry, kept a tea shop in Greenock* 
For the life of the place and time, including characters from the Allan and Gait 
families, see the works of the Scotch novelist, John Gait, the friend of Byron, 
also see Chapter V, note 126. 

60 For the statements made in this and the next paragraphs I am indebted to 
the correspondence between John Allan, and his sisters and brother-in-law in 
Scotland anent family affairs in general, Mr. William Gait of Richmond, and the 
troubles arising about his will. All in the Ellis 6* Allan Files at the Library of 
Congress. 



32 ISRAFEL 

the aroma and atmosphere of it, which literally and figuratively 
permeated and dominated the household and the environment in 
which Poe spent his boyhood, is not well described by the term 
" Tobacco Merchants." The firm dealt in everything under the 
sun, and would do or perform anything which was probably 
profitable and ostensibly lawful. Peace could not satiate nor did 
war abate the infinite variety of their correspondence and their 
ways of gathering pence. 01 

Shortly before the outbreak of hostilities between Great 
Britain and the United States we find Mr. Charles Ellis dashing 
off in great trepidation to New London, Connecticut, and later 
on beseeching Mir. James Pleasants C2 in the Hall of Congress to 
aid in liberating the good ship " Georgiana," which had sailed a 
little too close-hauled into the weather eye of the embargo law, 
nor did the commencement and duration of hostilities apparently 
cause any cessation in the correspondence with the British and 
foreign merchants, or with Mr. Allan's family in Scotland. Some 
means were found, by cartel or privateer, and the letters slipped 
through. 53 

In addition to the great item of tobacco (in which most of 
the imported merchandise purchased from the firm by Virginians 
was paid for in kind) the partners dealt in wheat, hay, maize, 
corn meal, grains, fine teas and coffees, cloth, clothing of all 
kinds, flowered vest stuffs, seeds, wines and liquors (especially 
Philadelphia claret); outfitted slaves; supplied plantations with 
agricultural implements, nails and hardware; chartered ships and 



61 One of the ten thousand various items in the Ellis 6* Allan Papers: 

Messrs. ELLIS AND ALLAN Powhattan, Jan. 6th, x8n 

This will be handed you by my son John E. Mcadc who wants a few articles of 
clothing. Will you be so good as to furnish him on my acct, and oblige yours 
respectfully, 

D. MKADE 

82 Afterwards governor of Virginia. 

M The correspondence of the firm is interesting from the standpoint of show- 
ing that the merchants on both sides of the water regarded the* War of 1812 purely 
as a quarrel between two governments and as an unmitigated nuisance. In particular 
the Regent (George XV) comes of rather roughly in the candid opinions ex- 
changed. 




An Off-Hour at Ellis & Allan 

From an old print of a contemporary establishment 



LADY BOUNTIFUL CLAIMS ISRAFEL 35 

coastwise schooners; imported tombstones, 54 and, as a side 
issue, were not above trading in horses, Kentucky swine from the 
settlements, and old slaves which they hired out at the coal pits 
till they died. 55 The concern also advanced money; dabbled occa- 
sionally in city real estate; and both of the partners or their 
families had plantations in the country, John Allan's at " Lower 
Byrd's " and the Ellises' at " Red Hill " and " Pedlar's Mills." 
These also were expected to pay. It was on the whole a thrifty, 
a Scotch, and sometimes a sordid atmosphere in which Charles 
Ellis and his partner moved. 56 But for all that it was not a nar- 
row, and never a stingy one, until years later when it might have 
been more generous still. 

For over it all was the variety and the romance of the sea 
that floated up the James to the thriving port at the Falls, the 
long splendor of Virginia sunshine, the syrupy perfume of to- 
bacco, and the almost magic life of old Richmond. About the 
warehouse and docks of Poe's foster-father crowded the foreign 
and coastwise shipping of square-rigged days. 67 Martingales 
sprang away from the proud double curve of mirrored bows, brass 
glittered, sails flapped, and the bo'suns' whistles sang like frantic 
canaries. Drays laden with great tuns of fragrant Virginia leaf 
rattled over the cobbles. Dark stevedores answered the hails and 
songs of passing barges and canal boats; and the yellow river 
stuttered and clucked, as the siphon of the tides rolled it back- 
ward and forward under the piles and slivered planks. 

At the store, planters rode up and tethered their horses; 
wagons loaded for the western settlements with blankets, ging- 

B * These for Charlottcsvillc seemed to have always had the names and dates 
wrong:, doubtless to the present confusion of antiquaries. The New England stone* 
cutters evidently had little reverence for Virginia families. 

65 Memorandum marked " Old Papers 1811- 1812." 

" In re. McCaul-Stevens and Eudocia. Stephens hired to McGrouder at the Coal 
Pits, Eudocia hired to Dan'l Woode's son not far from Col. Saunders." 

(This girl was bought from John McCaul January 2, 1811.) Also "tell Mrs. 
F. McCaul at Hennrico her old man died last night." 

50 Letter from R. S. Ellis to Mr. Charles Ellis, his brother, from Red Hill, 
Virginia, December u, 1811. Ellis 6* Allan Papers. "Mr. Were has returned the 
horse we sold him saying he was lame and too small, Brother Joshua was mar- 
ried on 3rd instant., all your hogs arc disposed of except 3," etc. 

97 This warehouse was rented from Joseph Galligo for $137.50 a quarter. 
Ellis & Allan Papers. 



36 ISRAFEL 

hams, and the little puncheons of rum and powder, while the 
clerks weighed out the rolls of ponderous lead. Students on their 
way to William and Mary presented letters of credit from their 
up-country sires. Ladies came to make choice of taffetas and 
brocade stuffs, young gentlemen pursers, in semi-nautical garb, 
strolled in and out with accounts and monies, while Ellises, 
Allans, Mackenzies, McMurdocks and MacDougals punctuated 
the snuff-dusty air with the bur of broadest Scotch, and John 
Allan strolled off down Tobacco Alley with some British or 
Yankee captains to dinner at the cozily furnished house around 
the corner. Here their weathered seamen's countenances looked 
masterfully across the table at the engaging Miss Valentine and 
the wide-eyed young Edgar Poe, as Frances Allan brewed a 
strong dish of the best of Imperial Gunpowder Tea, and her 
husband spoke feelingly of the fine nappy ale of Kilmarnock. 58 

The conversation was of the decline in the flax prices at Lis- 
bon, of the latest alarms and excursions of Bonaparte, the Orders 
in Council, and the prices last fetched at Liverpool for the best 
Virginia leaf. To this board and household the young housewife 
of twenty-five summers and her sister Miss Valentine brought 
a fresh blonde beauty and the traditions of grace and ease of 
Virginia planters, together with an unfailing feminine tenderness 
in which a sensitive little orphan boy basked. It was the atmos^ 
phere of the old, vanished Eastern Sea-board, the South of 1 
slavery and the days of sailing ships, something to be recalled 
over a glass of old port and a churchwarden's clay pipe. Out of 
this, it had pleased the wayward ways of fate to conjure a 
prince and a master of dreams. 

Despite the considerable volume of business carried on by the 
partners, the condition of John Allan's affairs in December, 1811, 
were not such as to permit the addition of another soul to his 
permanent household without his pausing to take thought. 50 When 



6ft Letter from Allan Fowlds, Kilmarnock, Scotland, 4th of January, 
" Mrs. F. is keeping for you some fine nappy ale," etc. Ellis & Allan Papers. 

60 The somewhat detailed account of the firm's affairs given above should not 
lead the reader to suppose that at this time, 1812, Mr. Allan was a wealthy man, 
The business was as yet a younjaj one, the firm was new and struggling, and enter* 
ing upon a period of general commercial stagnation. 



William Mayo 

The Master of " Powhatan Seat" 

A plantation on the site of an old Indian settlement in the suburbs of 
Richmond, Va. 

A gentleman of the Old Virginia school, a type familiar to POE during the days of 
his childhood. Mr. MAYO was a member of POE'S church, a customer of Ellis fcf 
Allan> and a friend of POE'S foster-father 



By permission of Mrs. Mary Mayo Jnjfe, 



LADY BOUNTIFUL CLAIMS ISRAFEL 39 

Frances Allen brought young Edgar Poe home the day after 
the death of his mother, her husband no doubt regarded it as 
the kindly and impulsive act of a woman, but as the days and 
weeks passed and the problem of what to do with the two orphans 
grew pressing with both the Allans arid Mackenzies, it became 
evident that the hands of the pretty young boy had twined very 
deeply in the heartstrings of the childless merchant's wife that 
she could not bear to part with him. Doubtless he clung to her; 
his beauty and already romantic story were appealing to the 
child-hungry woman it was enough. 

With her husband, however, it was different. 60 He was willing 
and kindly enough to indulge his lovely wife in a temporary 
charitable impulse, against which no one but a boor would pro- 
test, but to make the object of it his legal son and heir, with all 
that would be involved, was a horse of a different color. That he 
was altogether justified in this hesitancy, few, who can imagine 
themselves confronted by a like problem, will deny. Left an 
orphan himself, he could not but have been moved by the fate 
of the child who rode cock-horse so engagingly, or sat upon his 
knee, but it was by no means sure that he and his wife might 
not yet have children themselves she was twenty-five and he 
was thirty-one and the prospects of his own issue sharing alike 
with strangers, even in future time, might well daunt him. Be- 
sides, to put it coldly, and he was capable of doing that, the brat 
of strolling play actors, as his Scottish tongue would frame it, was 
perhaps not the best of blood to claim as his own. That he had 
his doubts about Mrs. Poe, we have already seen. David Poe he 
must have seen upon the stage, and he was capable of drawing 
his own conclusions. Besides John Allan had social ambitions as 
the future showed. What of the whispers about his " son " ? In 
addition there were other more practical, and at that time secret, 
but cogent reasons, which might well make him pause. 

In the first place, the posture of his affairs was not at that 
time such as to warrant the additional burden of the keep and 



00 As a great deal of criticism has been levelled against John Allan for not 
legally adopting Poe and making him his heir, the question will be presented toe 
with the facts which have not heretofore been aired. 



40 ISRAFEL 



education of a child. In March, 1811, he had sailed to Portugal 61 
with a considerable cargo on the ship " Sylph " in company with 
one or two other vessels employed by the Ellises, himself, and 
Mr. Gait, in expectation of selling provisions to the British Army 
under Lord Wellesley, just then about to open the Peninsular 
Campaign. Prices were high and some profit resulted, but owing 
to the precarious situation of affairs in America just prior to the 
then imminent war, the gain had been swallowed up, and he had 
returned to Richmond in the Summer to meet a decidedly serious 
and widespread financial situation owing to the Embargo and 
Non-Intercourse Acts. 

In addition, his whole family relationship was liberally pro- 
vided with orphans. He, and four partially dependent sisters at 
Irvine and Kilmarnock, Scotland, were orphans. The children 
of at least one of his married sisters were the object of the 
bounty of himself and his wife, a niece being Mrs. Allan's name- 
sake. There was an old Aunt Jane, " the only surviving member 
of our father's family," and four young orphan boys, cousins by 
the name of Gait. These boys had to be, and were, well taken 
care of by remittances from Mr. William Gait, the wealthy Rich- 
mond uncle. That orphans and their doings were much in Mr. 
Allan's mind about this time, and that he might well shrink from 
adding another and gratuitous one to the family role of charity, 
a few extracts from the family correspondence will make star- 
tlingly clear. 02 

Kilmarnock, 4th Jan. 1812. 
MY DEAR BROTHER: (read brother-in-law) 

I wrote you some time back with the Melancholy News of the Death 
of my Little Boy William which I hope you have received. I had your 

01 Letter from John Allan to Charles Ellis in the Ellis 6* Allan Papers, post- 
marked New York, June *6, x8u, and dated Lisbon, April 28, 1811, Ship 
"Sylph" off Bellumcastle "Dear Charles: I am happy to inform you that we 
arrived in safety here on the 26th about xa A.M. after a most boisterous passage 
of 23 days from the roads." 

Also John Allan from Lisbon, May 3ist, 1811 

"McLurin Scott has taken passage on board of the Ship 'Tolegra* for New 
York to sail the and or $rd of June. I shall not be long: after him." Joaioh Ellis 
accompanied Mr. Allan on the voyage. It was the intention of both of them to 
visit Scotland on their way back, but this had to be deferred. 

02 From the EMis 6- A.Uan Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. 



LADY BOUNTIFUL CLAIMS ISRAFEL 41 

favor of the 6th of August . . . which gave us all great pleasure to 
hear that you and Mrs. A was in good health, and received from Mr. 
Kerr the coral Necklace and Braceletts as a present from Mrs. Allan to 
her Little Namesake. I am glad to inform you she is getting quite 
about and is I trust beginning to walk, the rest of the children is all at 
school. ... I had another from your uncle Mr. Gait, and I cannot 
help thinking he is one of the best-hearted Men, his great anxiety for 
the Education and support of those Little Orphan Boys the Gaits show 
it in a clear point of view he has appointed me to look after them and 
see everything done for their interest . . . they seem smart fine chil- 
dren. . . . Your Uncle was so very kind as to send Mrs. Fowlds a 
present for the education of my children one hundred pounds sterling. 
. . . Dear Brother we are fully expecting to see you and Mrs. .Allan 
this summer. . . . Your sisters Mary, Jean, and Elizabeth are well. 
. . . Elizabeth is at Mrs. Gaits at Flowerbanks. Mrs. Fowlds desires 
me to say to you that she received the five guineas for which please 
accept her warmest thanks . . . etc. 

I am My Dear Brother 
Yours sincerely, 

ALLAN FOWLDS 



Some time later we get further news of the orphans from Mrs. 
Fowlds, John Allan's sister: 

MY DEAR BROTHER: 

Your Letters of Feby. 3rd and July 6th I duly record. ... I was 
extremely sorry to observe by it the account my Aunt has given of 
poor Thomas Gait. I flatter myself he is not so bad as has been rep- 
resented he is an Orphan, John, and I am convinced, none of his faults 
will be hid; my Aunt and him had not sorted well some how or other; 
but sister Jane blamed the Maid for it: however, she was so displeased 
she would not allow him to sleep in the House last time he was at 
home and Robt. Gemmel took him and I heard the vessel was to be 
laid up for the Winter and I wished him to stay with me as ... was 
informed the Owners were going to put him on board another vessel 
so his education will be kept back this Winter he is a clever Boy I am 
told and an excellent scholar and I have no doubt not withstanding all 
his boyish faults he will be a clever Man he is the best Looking of the 
whole. 7 myself know what it is to be an Orphan they require to walk 
very circumspectly indeed to escape the censours of a criticising 
World. . . . 



42 ISRAFEL 

But the tale of family troubles is not quite complete, John Allan's 
sister it appears may have had her own reasons for suspecting 
the frailty of womankind, the same letter continues 

. . I was extremely happy to observe that Jane and you were come 
to an understanding, nothing gives me greater uneasiness than friends 
quarrelling. Were you not extremely sorry when you heard Cousin 
William had acted so very foolishly, she was young and thoughtless no 
doubt but no such apology can be offered for a Man at least 28 or 30 
years older than her the betraying the trust Mrs. Gait 0:l had reposed 
in him was not honorable and is what aggravated the trial to think she 
had encouraged a man to go about her house who was doing everything 
in his power to destroy the peace of it. However, Mrs. G. is reconciled. 
... I hope Uncle William will forgive her and not let her impropriety 
have any influence on him as she was a good hearted Girl and had an 
innocent gaiety about her. I would have not have thought her capable 
of so imprudent a step. . . . Jean Guthrie calls often and asks for her 
Johnny she was here yesterday inquiring for you . . . etc. 

As Mr. John Allan, merchant, then in some financial perplexity, 
turned these and other family matters over in his mind, he can- 
not be entirely blamed for a certain lack of enthusiasm and 
pessimism about orphans. But there were several other reasons 
why he could not acquiesce in the immediate adoption of the 
boy Edgar Poe, reasons of which there is every right to suppose 
he did not and could not present to his wife. He was already a 
father, by two other women in Richmond, of several children, a 
daughter by one and a son by the second/ 11 One of these, a son, 
by a Mrs. Collier, he was then, or a few months later, educating 
if not supporting, as is shown by the following receipt from 
William Richardson, a Richmond schoolmaster. 115 



M This is a Mrs. Gait at " Flowcrbanks " on Crcc Water. Sec Chapter V, page 
69. 

04 John Allan's illegitimate children at the time that Poe was taken into 
his household were certainly two, *.<?., a daughter by a " Mrs. Wills " and a son by 
a Mrs. Collier." There are traces of still others a little later not mentioned here 
or in the will. Young Poe was sent to school with Edwin Collier, For further 
complications as late as 1834, see John Allan's will, Appendix III. 

6 Ellis & Allan Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D, C. The evidence 
does not rest on this one item by any means. 



LADY BOUNTIFUL CLAIMS ISRAFEL 43 

1812 Mr. JOHN ALLAN, Z>r. 

To WILLIAM RICHARDSON 
Oct. 

5th To three Months Tuition of Edwin Collier $5 

Received payment 

WILLIAM RICHARDSON 

That the good Scotch merchant was not cast down entirely by 
these responsibilities, that he had the solace which is said to 
soothe the breast, and was willing to pay for it, as for his other 
pleasures, is brought out nicely by another item of about the 
same date 66 

Mr. J. ALLAN 14 Oct. 1812 6 * 

Bought @ Auction 

i Flute $21 

Received payt. for Foster and Satchell 

TH. FOSTER 

It is, in all probability, the same flute upon which Edgar Allan 
Poe afterwards learned to play in those early, easy days in Rich- 
mond which were to permeate his dreams, for circumstances 
and Frances Allan prevailed, and Edgar Poe became the foster- 
child of John Allan. 

The circumstances which added the force of public opinion to 
the already patent desire of his wife to retain Edgar, and which 
was the immediate decisive factor in persuading John Allan to 
acquiesce in her desire, was one of those fearful tragedies whose 
only mitigation lies in the fact that they arouse universal charity^ 
On December 26, 1811, only about two weeks after Mrs. Poe 
had been buried at St. Johns, the Richmond Theater, where she 
had so often played, took fire from the stage chandelier during a 
presentation of the Bleeding Nun by Mr. Placide and his Com- 
pany to a packed house. It was the night after Christmas. The 
results were for a generation, memory-searing. Among the 
seventy-three persons who are known to have perished was the 
Governor of Virginia. 

66 Ellis & Allan Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C 



44 ISRAFEL 



On that night an Herculean negro blacksmith strode through 
the flames along with other persons engaged in the work of res- 
cue: heroism, pathetic sacrifice, and children in the fire moved 
to one outcry the then not too United States. The Federal Sen- 
ate purchased crepe sleeve bands, and even the Legislature of 
Massachusetts was melted to official tears. This letter will give 
some idea of how John Allan felt about it at the time, and why 
he and all his family escaped. It is from a friendly commercial 
correspondent. 

New York, Jany. 8th, 1812 
JOHN ALLAN, Esq., 
DEAR SIR: 

I received your favor of the $rd inst. ... Of the Horrible Catas- 
trophe which befel your city I have indeed had too correct informa- 
tion , it was first announced here by a gentleman from Washington 
who reported, that as he was leaving, the mail arrived from Richmond 
announcing it. My Fears were it would prove too true and knowing the 
confined manner in which the Stairs were built I felt confident (I) 
would hear of the loss of some Friends, which the next day's mail 
brought, and with it, a detail of all the Horror of that Fatal night 
Haw fortunate, that yourself and Family went out of Town and what 
a consolation that Mr. Richard and family escaped as they did with 
the exception of poor little George Dixon whose fate I must lament 
with you. , . . My God what must be the feelings of Mr. Gallego and 
Mayor Gibson and Family, but I must stop I am going too far. . . . 

W. WHITLOK, 



Miss Valentine escaped too, having been on a holiday visit with 
the Ellises in the country to see "Uncle Joshua" married.** 
John Allan had good reason to congratulate himself, doubtless 
he felt grateful that so far he had escaped the flames, and re- 
flected that a little insurance with Providence as to the future 
might pay. All of Richmond was at that time busy in works of 
charity. Orphans were being cared for by wholesale, and the up- 



07 Ettis & Allan Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, I). C. 

** From Eliza M. Hunter, niece of Charles Ellis, at Red Hill, Virginia, Janu- 
ary, 1812, to Charles Ellis of Kills & Allan at Richmond. " Nancy went home 
about four weeks ago with Cousin Betsy to Cynthia Hunter. They came up to 
the wedding and spent a few weeks with us," 




The Burning of the Theatre in Richmond, Virginia 
on the Night of December 26, 1811 

This was the theatre in which ELI/ABKTH ARNOLD POE, mother of EDGAR 
AIMN POK, was actins just before her death on December 8, 1811 

Copyright on photo ffepb applied for by the Rdyir Man ht Sbrine, Richmond) 
j/w, Ibrvutb whose courtesy it is here reproduced 




The Monumental Church, Richmond, Virginia 

Mr, ALLAN and his partner held pew So, \\heiv the youtiR I'm-, sat with 
his foster-parents 

Frmn (i '.vrv raff ultl print 
Courtesy nftbe lid^r Mian Vw .S'/'riV, Richnmn^ /'/V;;iiV; 



LADY BOUNTIFUL CLAIMS ISRAFEL 45 

shot of the matter was that the Poe children remained where 
they had been taken; Edgar in John Allan's house, and little 
Rosalie at Mr. William Mackenzie's. 

In Edgar's case, that his fostering in the house where he had 
been sheltered was mainly due to the intercession and insistence 
of Frances Allan, there can no longer be any doubt There is the 
direct statement of one of the family servants to that effect and 
even the possibility that Frances Allan was so anxious to keep 
the beautiful young boy in lieu of the child which nature denied 
her, that she failed to answer the inquiries of his anxious grand- 
parents in Baltimore, " General " David Poe and his wife, 60 and 
Edgar's Aunt, Eliza Poe. Even after more than a hundred years 
there is something touching in the beseeching tone of this long 
dead voice speaking out of the dry mould of government archives 
with the deep anxiety of tears. 

Baltimore, Feb. 8th, 1813 

'Tis the Aunt of Edgar that addresses Mrs. Allen for the second 
time, impressed with the idea that a letter if received could not remain 
unacknowledged so long as from the months of July, she is induced to 
write again in order to inquire in her family's as well as in her own 
name after the health of the child of her Brother, as well as that of 
his adopted Parents. I cannot suppose my dear Mrs. Allen that a heart 
possessed of such original humanity as yours must without doubt be, 
could so long keep in suspense, the anxious inquiries made through 
the medium of my letter by the Grand Parents of the Orphan of an 
unfortunate son, surely ere this allowing that you did not wish to com- 
mence a correspondence with one who is utterly unknown to you had 
you received it Mr. Allen would have written to my Father or Brother 
if it had been only to let them know how he was, but I am confident 
that you never received it, for two reasons, the first is that not hav- 
ing the pleasure of knowing your Christian name I merely addressed 
it to Mrs. Allen of Richmond, the second is as near as I can recollect 
you were about the time I wrote to you at the springs where Mr. 
Douglas saw you, permit me my dear madam to thank you for your 
kindness to the little Edgar he is truly the child of fortune to be 



60 The reader will doubtless recall the fact that Edgar's elder brother, William 
Henry Poe, was already residing with this couple, having been left with them 
by his parents in 1807. See page 4 for this. For a further account of " General " 
David Poe see Chapter VII, note 172. 



46 ISRAFEL 



placed under the fostering care of the amiable Mr. and Mrs. Allen, Oh 
how few meet with such a lot the Almighty Father of the Universe 
grant that he may never abuse the kindness he has received and that 
from those who were not bound by any ties except those the feeling 
and humane heart dictates I fear that I have too long intruded on 
your patience, will you if so have the goodness to forgive me and 
dare I venture to flatter myself with the hope that this will be received 
with any degree of pleasure or that you will gratify me so much as to 
answer it give my love to the dear little Edgar and tell him tis his 
Aunt Eliza who writes this to you, my Mother and family desire to be 
affectionately remembered to Mr. Allen and yourself Henry fre- 
quently speaks of his little brother and expresses a great desire to see 
him, tell him he sends his very best love to him and is greatly pleased 
to hear that he is so good as also so pretty a Boy as Mr. Douglass 
represented him to be I feel as if I were writing to a sister and can 
scarcely even at the risk of your displeasure prevail on myself to lay 
aside my pen With the hope of your indulgence in pardoning my 
temerity I remain my Dear Mrs. Allen yours 

with the greatest respect 

EIJZA POE 

Mrs. Allen the kind Benefactress of the infant Orphan Edgar, Allen, 
Poe. TO 

Now there are some remarkable things about this letter. In 
the first place Rosalie is not mentioned at all for which there are 
several possible explanations that suggest themselves, 71 secondly 
this letter definitely disposes of the story repeated by so many Toe 
biographers that either the Allans or the Mackenzie^ entered into 
correspondence with the Poes in Baltimore who refused on ac- 
count of poverty to take in the two orphans. Evidently nothing 
of the kind had occurred, and as a matter of fact the shoe was on 
the other foot. In a letter which Poe wrote to his guardian from 
West Point in 1830, he specifically mentions the fact that John 
Allan had followed his own desire, or the desire of his wife to 

The letter is printed, of course, with the original spelling and punctuation 
carefully reproduced from a photostat of the original in the Mi$ & Allan Papers. 
"Allan" is spelt "Allen" by Eliza Poe. 

71 There are several explanations of this possible: 

x, Eliza Foe simply failed to mention Rosalie or chose not to. 

2. She did not care to confuse issues with Mr. Allan by mentioning Rosalie. 

3. The Poes did not know there was such a child, 

4. The Poes were already in communication with the Mackensies. 



LADY BOUNTIFUL CLAIMS ISRAFEL 47 

adopt Edgar Poe, despite the express wishes of the grandfather, 
" General " David Poe, to have the care of his favorite grand- 
child. Poe represents that his grandfather was in good circum- 
stances at the time, and that in order to induce the Poes to allow 
Edgar to remain with the Allans, John Allan had held out strong 
inducements for them to do so by promises of adoption and liberal 
education. This letter Poe says was at that time (January 3rd, 
1830) in possession of the members of the Poe family in Balti- 
more. 72 The implication is clear, once having determined to 
gratify the fond wishes of his wife for the " adoption " of Edgar, 
John Allan carried the matter off with his usual vigor and deter- 
mination. 

Hence Eliza Poe seems more than doubtful as to whether her 
letter to Lady Bountiful is going to be answered. It is also inter- 
esting to observe that two commas in the last line quite subtly, 
and thus early assert the boy's right to his own name. There is 
a tradition but no record to show that both Edgar and Rosalie 
were baptized respectively as Edgar Allan 7S and Rosalie Mac- 
kenzie, but as neither was ever legally adopted they remained 
" Poe/ 7 as they had been born. 74 Thus the boy came by the name 
of Edgar Allan Poe, which he has successfully projected into 
time. Aside from this, the baptismal water left very little trace. 

Like other mortals the young Poe was subject to those inter- 
nal frailties and afflictions which cause parents endless anxiety, 
and Mrs. Allan must often have found herself, with this rather 
delicate and pretty little boy, filling the r61e of mother in grim 
earnest. Let it be solemnly recorded then for the first time, that 
in May, 1812, " Israfel " was afflicted with the croup for which 
his foster-father paid the bill. As the earliest documentary evi- 
dence of Poe's being in John Allan's household it is not with- 
out a genuine element of interest: 

72 Poe to John Allan from West Point, New York, January 3, 1831. See 
the Valentine Museum Letters, letter No. 24, page 253. 

79 J. H. Whitty says, probably as early as December xx, 18x1, in the case of 
Edgar. See his Memoir to The Complete Poems, page XXII, large edition. There 
is also a tradition that both the children were baptized by the Reverend Mr. 
Richardson of St. John's. 

74 Legal adoption outside of the tics of blood was almost unknown in the 
South at this time. Prof. James Southall Wilson to the author, July, 1925. 



48 ISRAFEL 



Mr. JOHN ALLAN 

To P. THORNTON 
1812 
May 2ist. To Visit and medicine to child $1.50 

22nd. To Visit i.oo 

23rd. To Visit and Vial Pectoral Mint 1.50 

$4.00 
Rect. payment 

PHILIP THORNTON 7ri 



In July, as we have seen, the family visited the Springs where 
Edgar was evidently noticed by a Mr. Douglas of Baltimore who 
remarked upon his great beauty to his aunt Eliza Poe. That the 
young boy was a really lovely child, whose winsome appearance 
and romantic story appealed to all tender hearts, there is a mass 
of testimony and tradition to attest. Frances Allan was evi- 
dently in love with her little pet, now nearly three yeans old, an 
affection which he is known to have passionately returned. Some- 
time in the Fall the family returned to Richmond, probably after 
having visited Mrs. Allan's relatives, the Valentines, near Stuun- 
ton, as it was their custom to do. During the Winter of 1812 we 
find them in Richmond as usual living at the corner of Four- 
teenth Street and Tobacco Alley. " Uncle " William Gait seems to 
have been living with them then. Edgar was by this time for 
better or for worse a fixture in the household, where he was often 
seen by an Abner Lincoln of Boston who was at this time a fre- 
quent guest together with Dr. Thornton and the Ellises at John 
Allan's table. 

Mr. Allan was in considerable difficulties, one of his ships hav- 
ing been seized by the customs authorities at Norfolk, and as 
he sat in front of the coal fire, pondering the style of his " prayer 
for release " to the Federal Court, his thoughts must have wan- 
dered over the water to the orphans at Kilmarnock or have 
paused between the wailing notes of his new flute to consider the 
future of the little orphan whose bare feet could be heard padding 

Tti Philip Thornton was a doctor, the persona! friend of John Allan. He fa fre- 
quently mentioned in correspondence. The receipt is from the Ellis & Allan 
Papers. 



LADY BOUNTIFUL CLAIMS ISRAFEL 49 

about upstairs while he was being put to bed by "Ma" or 
" Aunt Nancy." John Allan, too, had his softer moods, and in the 
years ahead, he conceived a pride and a tenderness for the little 
lad whom he came to regard as his son. It was this which his 
proud heart never forgave; that the youth to whom he had once 
unbent and unbosomed, would not obey his behest, was unpar- 
donable. For as with everything else that the merchant dealt in, 
there was a price to be paid for his affections, a price which the 
poet in Poe found too great to pay. It was the control of his heart 
and soul. But now, for a while at least, Lady Bountiful and her 
husband were in control of the clay, if not the spirit of the boy, 
and that momentous modeling had begun which was to make and 
mar the man. 



CHAPTER IV 
"The Little Angel " Tries His Wings 

FRANCES ALLAN would undoubtedly have liked to adopt 
the young Edgar Allan Poe formally and legally but her 
husband continued to demur. It was only after consider- 
able persuasion and the unexpected force of circumstances that 
he had at length consented to receive the boy permanently into 
his household. At first blush his refusal to adopt the child legally, 
after consenting to his becoming a fixture in the family circle and 
lending him his name, may seem a captious distinction, but from 
his point of view many poignant reasons continued to operate 
for refusing or at least deferring indefinitely such an irrevocable 
act. In addition to those which have already been rehearsed, there 
must have been a deep-seated feeling that in a certain way he 
would be overriding Providence by adopting a child that it had 
not pleased God to send him in the ordinary course of nature. 
The Scotch sense of literal reality is almost morbidly honest, and 
John Allan could not allow even his sympathy and affection to de- 
ceive him into believing by legal fiction what was in reality not 
true. He was willing to indulge his wife, with and for whom he 
doubtless felt a great sympathy in their mutual childlessness, but 
he was not willing to commit himself, without further demonstra- 
tion as to the character of his ward, into declaring him to be the 
inheritor of his property. All this, and a certain instinctive sense 
of the vast gulf which separated the temperaments of himself and 
his ward, something which both of them must have instinctively 
felt almost from the first all this, must have decided him that 
delay was the best policy, and as the good old Scotch adage has 
it, he had best " bide a wee." 

In this decision he differed profoundly from the feminine im- 
pulsiveness of his wife, but the overwhelming desire of a child- 
less woman for an object upon which to lavish the pent up ten- 



" THE LITTLE ANGEL " TRIES HIS WINGS 51 

derness of thwarted maternity, and the unemotional foresight of 
a clear-headed man of affairs are two different things. It is im- 
possible to say, even now, which was right, the blind love of 
the foster-mother, or the oblique though logical view of the man; 
possibly the former. 

Had Edgar been legally adopted, it is probable that the feel- 
ing of eating the bread of strangers, of in the final analysis being 
an object of charity, of which fact he was often reminded, it is 
quite possible that this feeling of inferiority against which he 
built up an almost morbid pride, destined to be one of the con- 
trolling factors in his character, would never have been present 
at all, or have vanished as time went on. 

As it was, Poe was compelled to move in a world of uncertain- 
ties, one where the deepest and most intimate ties of life were, 
as he increasingly realized with the years, dependent upon the 
impulses of charity. 

The illusion of the permanence of home and the immutability 
of the paternal and maternal relations are the twin rocks upon 
which a well integrated personality is built and stands. Shatter 
these, or give them the quality of uncertainty, and the spirit be- 
comes one with the quickstand upon which it feels that life rests. 

Even in the endearments of his foster-mother, Poe must have 
come to realize that he was a substitute for her own child. Her 
affections were great, but the fact remains that she was not his 
own mother. If he did not sense it, Mr. Allan on several well au- 
thenticated occasions took care to make it painfully clear. As a 
very young child, Edgar would have actually missed the physical 
presence of his own mother; as he grew older and her memory 
dimmed, he must have sought for compensation elsewhere. That 
Frances Allan met this situation with a plenitude of endearments 
that undoubtedly had an effect upon Poe's character there seems 
every reason to feel. Mrs. Allan's unusual fondness for children 
and for her foster-son in particular was the cause of remark at 
the time and later. 70 That her affection for the little boy was one 
of the holiest and finest of his many feminine contacts, does not 

76 Sec Mrs. Gait's letter to Frances Allan about the Gait children from Irvine, 
Scotland, in 1818, Chapter V, page 73. 



52 ISRAFEL 

lessen the probabilities of its far-reaching effects. In the same 
house was also his " Aunt " Nancy Valentine who seems to have 
been only a little less fond. In the light of modern psychology, 
it may well seem to many that this is alone sufficient to account 
for many of the apparent motions of his later life. It may be 
that from the first Edgar Allan Poe was embarked upon one of 
those hopeless quests of the soul that drive many artists to the 
greatest heights of creation and the lowest depths of despair. 
'As a little boy it seems that he cared more for the company 
of little girls than of boys of his own age, and that his school 
days were lonely and unhappy. 77 Though not unhealthy he was 
delicate, a condition in which his foster-mother indulged him, 
for he was brilliant and beautiful, and soon became the pet of the 
household and its friends. At a very early date he is said to have 
shown an innocent but passionate attachment for Catherine Eliza- 
beth Potiaux, a pretty little girl, who as Mrs. Allan's godchild was 
one of his first playmates. 78 It was also Mrs. Allan's particular 
delight to take him upon calls to her various friends and relations, 
upon which occasions she is said to have dressed him in a charm- 
ing costume of a peaked, purple velvet cap with a gold tassel 
from which his dark curls flowed down, like those of a Restora- 
tion periwig, over an ample tucker that disappeared into small 
baggy trousers of yellow Nankin or silk pongee. Seated upon a 
davenport, swinging his little buckled shoes in the air, he would 
gravely look on, while the assembled ladies dressed in the semi- 
classic empire costumes of the day, with fillets in their hair, 
chattered about the latest war news and sipped tea. 

Sometimes he would be called upon to amuse the company by 
standing upon a high-backed chair to recite jingles. Tradition has 
it that the company was both delighted and amused. Even John 
Allan was not insensible to his juvenile talents, and we have a 
picture of the young Poe, mounted shoeless upon the long, shining 
dining room table, after the dessert and cloth had been cleared 

J T Poe in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine for April, 1840. " Since the. sad ex- 
perience of my schoolboy days to this present writing, I have .seen little to sus- 
tain the notion held by some folks, that schoolboys are the happiest of all 
mortals." 

7 * J. H. Whitty, Memoir, large edition, page XXIV. 



THE LITTLE ANGEL " TRIES HIS WINGS 53 

away, to dance; or standing between the doors of the drawing 
room at the Fourteenth Street house reciting to a large company, 
and with a boyish fervor, The Lay of the Last Minstrel. " He 
wore dark curls and had brilliant eyes, and those who remem- 
bered him spoke of the pretty figure he made, with his vivacious 
ways." 79 The reward for such occasions was to pledge the healths 
of the company in sweetened wine and water. Much has been 
made of this fact, which in all conscience seems harmless and 
trivial enough. 80 

Of the early life in Richmond of this delightful little boy, who 
later on felt competent to exchange places with the Archangel 
Israfel, there remains a mass of legend and some few authentic 
facts. Perhaps it will not be entirely without some contribution 
as to the nature of the man as a human being to get a few 
glimpses of him trying out his young wings even before he as- 
pired to leave the nest. 

Some of the earliest and dearest associations of Poe's life clus- 
tered about the old Memorial Church on Broad Street which had 
been erected on the site of the Richmond Theater as a memorial 
to those who had perished in the fire. 81 John Allan and Charles 
Ellis had both subscribed to the fund for its erection, the latter 
twice as much as his partner, 82 and both had taken out their 
membership there after leaving St. Johns. This was consonant 
with a well marked determination to better the social status of 
the " firm." 

The building was an impressive one with a monument to the 
sufferers of the fire at the entrance, a rather naive fresco of the 
heavenly regions on the ceiling, tablets with the Ten Command- 
ments, and a great gold lettered text, " Give Ear O Lord," just 
over the chancel. It was the custom of all the children to try out 
their spelling on this, and Mary Brockenbrough, a little girl one 



Woodberry. 

Sec the discussion of Poe's early drinking in Chapter IX, page 167. 

81 The history of this church is in itself very interesting and closely connected 
with the successful reestablishment of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Virginia 
which had suffered a serious eclipse during the Revolution. Among those promi- 
nently concerned with it were Bushrod Washington and Chief Justice Marshall. 

82 The bills and receipts for this are in the Ellis & Allan Papers at Washington. 



54 ISRAFEL 



year younger than Poe, remembered looking back and seeing Poe, 
" a pretty little boy with big eyes and curly hair " hypnotized by 
the text 

The Allans had pew 80 and, from the end where he usually 
sat, Poe could see the back of little Mary's head obliquely in 
front. Just across the nave was the front pew of Chief Justice 
Marshall and his long-legged son who sat with the gate open and 
his feet in the aisle. The Allan pew was directly before the pul- 
pit in which the stout Bishop Moore, rector of the church at that 
time, held forth, to what effect upon Israfel we can only surmise, 
probably the usual one. 

It was here that Poe first met his youthful companion Ebene- 
zer Burling, of whom more hereafter, and laid that foundation 
of familiarity with the Bible and the church services and sing- 
ing which he never lost, 83 One biographer has averred "that 
phrenologically considered," the bump of reverence was entirely 
lacking in both Poe and Rosalie and that they never evinced any 
interest in the saving works of religion.*' 1 However that may be, 
to church he went regularly in the company of Mrs. Allan who 
was extremely pious. From his foster-father who had a more 
eighteenth century and encyclopaedic attitude and philosophy, 
Edgar undoubtedly received or overheard opinions which made 
him one of the first poets in America to view the world minus 
the explanation of a miracle working deity, and to take a meta- 
physical interest in the growing data of science. 

Among the many visitors to the house then and later, was Mr. 
Edward Valentine, a cousin of Mrs. Allan, who was very fond 
of the boy. He was a great practical joker and by way of being 
somewhat of a merry rogue himself. 8 * This young gentleman 
taught young Edgar several amusing tricks. One of these was the 
ancient amusement of snatching a chair away from someone 

83 I am indebted to the kindness of Mrs. Mary Newton Stanard for the remi- 
niscences of her grandmother, Mary Brockcnb rough, here included. Sec also J. II. 
Whitty's Memoir, large edition, page XXV. Also Mrs, Shcw's account of Poe in 
church, taken from the Ingram Papers. 

84 Mrs. Susan Archer Weiss in The, Home Life of Poe. 

8B For several amusing facts about this gentleman I am indebted to Mr. 
Edward V. Valentine, the well known sculptor, of Richmond, Virginia, which he 
related to me in July, 1925. 




Rf. Rev. Richard Channing Moore 
First Rector of the Monumental Church, Richmond, Virginia 

Where EDGAR POE attended with his foster-parents, and Protestant 
Episcopal Bishop of Virginia 

The Monumental Church was completed in 1814 on the site of the burned "Rich- 
mond Theatre," in which POE'S mother had often played, and where she received 
two benefits while on her death bed. JOHN ALLAN'S pew was No. 80, directly 
in front of the pulpit; there POE sat and looked up into Bishop MOORE'S face 
By permission of Mrs. Mary Mayo Ingle 



"THE LITTLE ANGEL" TRIES HIS WINGS 57 

about to sit down. Unfortunately the newly acquired talent was 
tried upon the person of a portly and extremely dignified lady 
caller, and tradition has preserved for us the picture of John 
Allan leading his too pert young charge away for chastisement 
after the old fashioned manner, and of Mrs. Allan with tears in 
her eyes hurrying upstairs shortly after to quiet the lamentations 
of her pet 

As a counterbalance to his wife's indulgence, Mr. Allan con- 
scientiously set about to train up the boy according to his more 
severe ideas of the proper way in which the twig should be bent. 
Consequently, when the child was " good," he was indulged, but 
any exhibition of waywardness or disobedience brought down on 
him the usual punishment of the time which, it was said, was ad- 
ministered to him upon divers occasions with undue severity. To 
save him from this was the constant aim of the ladies, and even 
the servants of the household. With their connivance the boy 
soon learned to shield himself by means of petty subterfuges 
upon his own part which were doubtless more clever than manly. 

The child's education was early well looked after. As a very 
little boy, there is a trustworthy legend that he was sent to a 
"dame school," which would correspond most nearly to the 
modern kindergarten, minus much of the element of organized 
play. This was said to have been kept by an old Scotch lady with 
a broad Lowland accent, doubtless in itself a recommendation to 
the parents of many of her charges. Of her, very little is remem- 
bered except a rumor that she called Edgar, "her ain wee 
laddie," and in after years was said to have brought him pres- 
ents of the best smoking tobacco she could obtain (sic). 88 Poe 
also indicates in a seemingly autobiographical passage in The 
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, " He (Mr. Allan) sent me at 
six years of age to the school of old Mr. Ricketts, a gentleman 
with only one arm, and of eccentric manner." It has since been 
found that there was in Richmond about that time a one-armed 
schoolmaster by the name of " Ricketts." 87 One William Richard- 

rt This story rests upon evidence that can be questioned. 
7 I am indebted for the sources of this information to Mr. J. H. Wmtty s 
Memoir to The Complete 



S 8 ISRAFEL 

son also kept a boys' school where John Allan sent some of the 
other children in whom he was interested in 1813-14. The truth 
is, it is not definitely known exactly where and to whom Poe first 
went to school. 

It is fairly certain, however, that shortly before the departure 
of the Allans for England in 1815, Poe was a student with a Mr. 
William Erwin who kept a boys school in Richmond at that 
time. 88 Erwin from his letters seems to have had a dry sense of 
humor, and in addition to have taken a real interest in his young 
charge, remarking in a letter some two years after the lad had 
left him that " He is a charming boy," and inquiring what he 
was reading. Evidently, even by 1814 or 1815, Poe was one of 
those strange freaks of nature in a school, a boy who took a 
lively interest in his books. Mr. Erwin also received payments 
from John Allan for Edwin Collier, the natural son, from March 
15, 1815, to March 15, 1818. In all probability young Collier 
attended the school in 1815 at the same time as Edgar Poe. BO 
There are also indications that Mr. Allan was educating others 
of his progeny about this time elsewhere, as the firm of Ellis & 
Allan was called upon by other teachers for their tuition. 00 

There is another side to Edgar Poe's childhood for which, by 
the nature of things, there can be very little documentary evi- 
dence, yet one that careful inference has every right to draw. 
It is that of his intimate association with negroes as a Southern 
boy brought up in Richmond during the days of slavery, and of 
the profound affect which their rhythms, melodies and folk-tales 
must have had upon his imagination. 

From earliest childhood Poe must also have listened to a con- 

88 Letter from William Erwin dated Richmond, November 27th, 1817, to 
John Allan in London. 

** tf Letter from William Erwin to John Allan from Richmond, Virginia, No- 
vember ao, 1815. 

Letter from John Allan to William Erwin from London, England, March 
21, 1818. 

w Young Collier seems to have been withdrawn from his former schoolmaster, 
William Richardson, sometime in 1814 ami to have entered with William Erwin, 
March, 1815. Whether Poe went to .school nlso under William Richardson, or 
whether Erwin succeeded Richardson in the business is not clear. The where- 
abouts and names of the other children have only a remote connection with Poe 
at this time, and, for obvious reasons, they are not elaborated upon in the text. 



" THE LITTLE ANGEL " TRIES HIS WINGS 59 

tinuous stream of oral narratives and exploits related by the sea 
captains, merchants and adventurers who sat at his foster-father's 
table and later on unburdened themselves before the fire. That 
much of his flair for sea narrative was the result of this seems 
a warrantable inference. 

That the boy often found himself seated by the glowing hearth 
of many a negro cabin, or, in the slave quarters, listening to the 
weird tales of the dark tenants and swaying to the syncopations 
of their songs is inevitable. Northern critics and biographers 
seem, largely, to have forgotten that Edgar Allan Poe was a 
Southerner raised in the South. To them, the importance of his 
early environment, and the romantic and grotesque incidents of 
the life about him in his early but impressionable boyhood, must, 
for the most part, on account of their lack of sympathy with 
something which they have never experienced or suspected, be 
forever a closed book. 

For if there is one thing more than any other which sets off 
that portion of the Union where Poe was raised, the Old South, 
" Uncle Sam's Other Country," from all other sections, it is the 
exotic and withal grotesque presence and influence of the negro. 
He, more than any other factor, he, and the soft languor of its 
sub-tropical springs and summers, are responsible for the com- 
bined squalor and glamor of its ancient villages and towns. Here 
transplanted to a new environment in a more boreal continent, 
the negro has created for himself another native habitat, and 
no one who lives there can fail to come under the peculiar and 
oft-times fatal influence of his methodical-chaos of life. To this 
influence the receptive and imaginative mind of young Poe was 
constantly subjected during the most impressionable years of his 
childhood. 01 

Like all well j bred Virginia boys, he had his own negro 
" mammy " up until the time when the family left for England in 
i8is. 02 The life of the white man overshadows and often checks 



01 One biographer avoids much of this by saying, " The psychology of a poet's 
boyhood is obscure." 

02 Possibly the " Juliet " or the " Eudocia " mentioned by receipts and the 
bills of sale as being in John Allan's household. See note 45 ante. 



60 ISRAFEL 

the exuberance and strangeness of the modus vivendi of the 
darky; the "black secrets " and the magic of his real existence 
are seldom penetrated by the adult members of the dominant 
race. Children, however, are always privileged characters, and 
young Edgar, as a prime favorite and pet of the family, must 
often have sat by their firesides in the rooms of his foster-father's 
house-servants in Richmond, or in the slave-quarters and cabins 
upon the plantations at which he was a frequent visitor. 

There he must have feasted upon corn-pone and listened, while 
many a tale of Bre'r Rabbit and his ilk went round, while the 
ghosts, and " hants " and spooks of an ignorant but imaginative 
and superstitious people walked with hair-raising effect, and songs 
with melancholy harmonies and strange rhythms beat themselves 
into his consciousness with that peculiar ecstasy and abandon 
which only children and the still half-savage individuals of a 
childish race can experience. Here it was then, rather than upon 
some mythical journey to France or Russia, that he first laid 
the foundation for his weird imaginings and the strange " new " 
cadences which he was to succeed later on in grafting upon the 
main stream of English poetry. Here too may have arisen his 
flair for the bizarre, and the concept that birds and animals were 
speaking characters, and that fear of graves and corpses and the 
paraphernalia of the charnel, so peculiarly a characteristic of the 
negro, which haunted him through the rest of his life. Reliable 
tradition, indeed, has preserved some incidents which confirm the 
probability. 

One Summer, when Edgar was about six years old, the Allans 
paid a visit to one of the smaller Virginia Springs, and on their 
way back to Richmond stopped to visit Mrs. Allan's relatives, 
the Valentines, at Staunton. Edward Valentine, whose interest 
in Edgar has already been remarked, was fond of organizing 
wrestling matches for small money prizes between Edgar and the 
little pickaninnies with whom he played. He would also take 
young Poe about the country driving, or seated behind him on 
horseback. Valentine is responsible for the story that once as 
they were returning from the country post-office, where Edgar 
had astonished the rustics with his infant learning by reading a 



" THE LITTLE ANGEL " TRIES HIS WINGS 61 

newspaper aloud to them, 93 on the way home, they passed a log 
cabin near which were several graves. The boy betrayed such 
nervous terror that Mr. Valentine was forced to take Edgar 
from his seat behind, and hold him before him on the horse, 
while the boy kept crying out, " They will run after us and drag 
me down." Upon being questioned later, he admitted that it had 
been the custom of his " mammy " to take him at night to the 
servant's quarters "Where many a tale of grave-yard ghost 
went round " and he had been regaled with gruesome stories of 
cemeteries and horrible apparitions. To such incidents as these 
there can be little doubt that American Literature owes a con- 
siderable debt. The time had come, however, when Edgar Poe 
was to be removed temporarily from such plantation influences 
and plunged into the midst of an older, and perhaps more civi- 
lized and complicated world. With the cessation of hostilities 
after the Treaty of Ghent in 1815, John Allan had decided to 
pay a long deferred visit to England and Scotland, and the family 
went abroad. 

The early Spring and Summer of 1815 must have been largely 
occupied by the family preparations for the voyage in which 
Edgar would naturally have taken a lively interest. Frances Allan 
had been hurt in an accident and the departure was delayed. We 
catch a final authentic but fleeting glimpse of the boy at this time, 
when the easy flow of his happy childhood in Richmond was 
about to be interrupted by an important remove. From the remi- 
niscences of one Dr. C. A. Ambler, 04 afterwards a well known 
physician, we learn that about this time he used to swim with 
Edgar Poe at a pool in Shockoe Creek, then situated where the 

9:1 There is an interesting letter in the Ellis & Allan Papers which throws 
considerable light on the state of culture among the poorer up-country whites at 
this time, in which one of the Elliscs depicts their incredulity over his prediction 
of an eclipse of the sun, and their superstitious astonishment at its fulfilment. 
The mental condition of these "poor whites" seems to have approached that of 
the medieval peasant during the early renaissance. 

* This information is given in a letter from Dr. Ambler to Edward V. 
Valentine of Richmond, which the latter read to the author in July, 1925- The 
.story of Shockoe Creek and its peregrinations and floods is closely interwoven 
with the history and fate of Richmond. In the early Nineteenth Century, a sud- 
den flood in this stream prevented the perpetration of a massacre by an uprising 
of the slaves. 



62 ISRAFEL 

shops of the C. & (X Railroad now stand. Dr. Ambler says that 
he stripped with Edgar day after day, and that the boy was of a 
delicate physique and rather timid disposition, taking to the water 
a bit reluctantly. 95 The testimony as to Poe's physical develop- 
ment in childhood is not without value, and in many particulars 
confirms the evidence as to his early appearance. That he was 
about to be removed to a more bracing climate and exposed to the 
vigorous and sometimes brutal influences of the playgrounds of 
English schools for the next five years, cannot but have exerted 
a powerful influence upon his mental and physical equipment. 
The sunlight of Virginia, and the mists and snows of Scotland and 
Stoke Newington are two different things. 

05 Dr. Ambler states Poe was about "nine years old at this time." As Poe 
was in England during his ninth year, the doctor is mistaken on this point, Poe's 
later prowess as a swimmer is in contrast with this early timidity. 



CHAPTER V 
Israfel in Albion 



THE correspondence of Poe's guardian John Allan with 
his relatives in Scotland during the year 1811 and 
1812, and from then on to the end of the war, the let- 
ters from his sisters and brother-in-law at Irvine and Kilmar- 
nock ee fairly teem with references and invitations to him and 
his wife to revisit the haunts of his youth. In 1811 he had in- 
tended to return from Lisbon by way of Great Britain, when the 
imminence of hostilities intervened. The war, of course, had en- 
forced the postponement of the family wishes, and his own, for 
some years. Now, at last, he was about to see them realized. 

There were, in addition, business reasons the most urgent. 
The cessation of trade between England and America had borne 
peculiarly heavily upon the Virginia tobacco merchants. Ac- 
counts for cargoes shipped just before the war were still un- 
settled, and it was necessary to close these and to reestablish 
personal relations with English houses in a market where tobacco 
prices were extraordinarily high, due to the cessation of supply, 
but which might be expected to be glutted as soon as intercourse 
was resumed, from the immense reserve stocks on hand. All of 
this required the personal presence of at least one member of the 
firm, and it was the junior partner, who, combining his personal 
desires and business advantage, undertook the mission to estab- 
lish a foreign branch. 07 

Personally it must have been with a good deal of pleasure that 
John Allan looked forward to a reunion with his family upon his 
native heath. It had now been many years since he had left Scot- 
land a penniless youth to make his fortunes in the land where 



See the letters in the Ellis & Allan Papers, Library of Congress, Washing- 
ton, D. C., from John Allan's sisters, Mary, Elizabeth, Jane, and his brother-in- 
law, Allan Fowlds, from 1811 to 1814. 

07 Woodberry, 1.909 edition, page 20. 



64 ISRAFEL 



fortunes were then to be made. The pot at the end of the rain- 
bow had not proved a mere dream, and the orphan was return- 
ing to his relatives in comfortable, though not wealthy circum- 
stances, enhanced social prestige, the prospect of his uncle's 
fortune in the foreground, and a beautiful young wife and sister- 
in-law, for Miss Valentine accompanied them. Perhaps not the 
least factor in his natural pride of accomplishment was the pres- 
ence of his handsome, brilliant, and lovable little foster-son, 
Edgar, a living testimony to the charitable inclinations and 
capacity of his purse. Some stress has already been laid on the 
less appealing aspects of John Allan's character. It is only just 
to make the point, at this juncture, that there was also in the 
man a deep and abiding generosity and capability for the finer 
manifestations of human affection. Like most of us, this wily 
Scot had contradictions in his nature. He was capable, at once, 
of a generous bounty and a mean parsimony, a large tolerance 
and a bigoted determination to dominate. During his association 
with him, Edgar Poe experienced the entire gamut of the capa- 
bilities of a nature, the vigor of which can only be described by 
the adjective " tremendous.' 7 It was no weakling into whose nest 
the little fledgling had fallen, but that of a hawk, whose wings 
were strong to protect, but with talons that clutched, and a beak 
that pierced to the heart. 

At the time when John Allan and his family sailed for Eng- 
land, the child Edgar had been taken not only into the house, 
but into the arms and heart of his foster-father. The merchant's 
correspondence at this date and afterwards bears unmistakable 
evidence of the pride, the affection and the hopes which he 
cherished for the boy, and it is safe to say that from 1815 to 
1820, and for a year or two after, John Allan looked upon little 
" Edgar Allan " as he would have regarded the child of his loins. 
As for his wife, Frances, and her sister, they were completely 
under the boy's spell. Only the cloud of his school days cast a 
shadow on an otherwise sunny landscape. 

Before leaving Richmond, Mr. Allan auctioned his household 
furniture and some personal effects through the commission house 
of Monicure, Robinson & Pleasants, drew 335.10,6 from his 



ISRAFEL IN ALBION 65 

own firm, had his goods conveyed by dray and boat to the ship 
"Lothair" anchored in the James, and, on June 17, 1815, 
set sail for England with his wife, Miss Valentine and Edgar. 
From these facts it can be seen that he contemplated a stay 
of some duration. 98 Edgar left behind him his little sweetheart 
Catherine Potiaux of whom, even at this early age, he was very 
fond. 

As the custom then was, Mr. Allan provided his own stores for 
the voyage. These he purchased partly in Richmond, while the 
rest came on board at Hampton Roads, sent over from Norfolk 
by the firm of Moses Myers & Sons. A few brief glimpses can be 
caught of the family during their voyage of thirty-six days. The 
"Lothair" sailed from the " Roads " on June 22, 1815, and a 
letter brought back by the pilot boat tells us that, " Ned (Edgar) 
cares but little about it, poor fellow." From later letters, from 
the other side, we learn that Edgar soon recovered, however, and 
inferences show us John Allan, or his pretty wife with the child 
on her lap in the cabin, instructing him out of Murray f s Reader, 
The Olive Branch, or Murray's Speller which had been provided 
for the purpose at a cost of i6s. 6d. 

They arrived at Liverpool July 28, 1815, and next day Mr. 
Allan writes his partner Charles Ellis that, " The ladies were 
verry sick. . . . Edgar was a little sick but had recovered." In 
Liverpool John Allan had business to transact with Ewart Myers 
& Company. 

Apparently family ties in Scotland were powerful, for business 
detained them only a short while, and a few weeks later we find 
them at Greenock in Scotland, where they had probably just ar- 
rived, or had come over from Irvine only a few miles away in 
order to catch an outbound American mail. Evidently they suc- 
ceeded, for we have this hurried letter from John Allan to 
Charles Ellis, his partner, written with the family hanging over 



08 Letters in the Ellis & Allan Papers, also see letter from Col. Thomas Ellis 
to Prof. Woodberry, from Baltimore, May 28, 1884, also J. H. Whitty Memoir, 
large edition, Appendix, page 192. The author of the school texts was Lindley 
Murray, and the Reader was / " The eleventh Philadelphia edition. / published by 
Johnson & Warner, / at their Stores in Philadelphia, and Richmond (Vir). / John 
Bouvicr, Printer, / 1814. ^ 



66 ISRAFEL 

him with messages for home, and little Edgar pleading, " Pa, say 
something for me." 

Greenock Sept 21, 1815 

D. CHARLES, 

I arrived here about a half an hour ago . . . finding some American 
vessels on the eve of sailing I avail myself of the chance to write a few 
lines, though I cannot say much about our business . . . (evidently 
the time was too short. Here follow some price quotations of tobacco, 
of which he continues.) I flatter myself from the small quantity in 
London & the Postieur of affairs on the Continent that our sales will 
be profitable. 

It would appear that France and the Allies have concluded a Treaty 
but it has not been promulgated the Allies will hold the strong posts 
for a while until the refractory spirit of some of the old adherents of 
Bonaparte has subsided. France is far from being settled. Louis is too 
lenient & too peaceable the French delight in War I believe they care 
but little who rules them provided that ruler indulges them in their 
Habit which 25 years of war has so strongly fixed upon them. 

Provisions of every description are extremely low here and in this 
quarter they are in the midst of Harvest, the crops are abundant and 
I think will be got in well. . . , 

Frances says she would like the Land and lakes better if it was 
warmer and less rain, she bids me say she will write Margaret (Mrs. 
Ellis) as soon as she is settled but at present she is so bewildered with 
wonders that she canna write. Her best Love to Margaret & a thou- 
sand kisses to Thos. (Thos, Ellis a playmate of Poe) Nancy (Miss 
Valentine) says give my love to them all Edgar says Pa say something 
for me, say I was not afraid coming across the Sea. Kiss Theo, (?) for 
him. We all write our best Love to my Uncle Gait and old Friends, 

I am etc. 

JOHN ALLAN xo 
(Postscript) Edgars Love to Rosa & Mrs. Mackenzie. 

Frances Allan's remarks about the weather in that part of 
Scotland where the Allans had gone to visit was by no means 
purely conversational. Greenock is officially the town with the 

99 A seaport of Renfrewshire about twenty-three miles from Glasgow on the 
Firth of Clyde. At this time it was one of the chief ports for American trade. 

100 The letter is evidently very hurriedly written, a little difficult to read in 
some places, which is unusual with John Allan, whose handwriting is large, round 
and clear. The lapse into Scotch is unusual and testifies to his agitation, or the 
effect of a return to early associations. 



ISRAFEL IN ALBION 67 

heaviest rainfall in Scotland, 101 and that is saying a good deal 
for the rain. It may have been that some early memories of this 
" dewey, misty " climate and 

... the chill seas 
around the misty Hebrides 

were so thoroughly soaked into Edgar Poe that he long remem- 
bered the plashy fields about Irvine and Kilmarnock. 

Another great poet tramping through Kilmarnock only three 
years later was overtaken by a rain in the very town, from where- 
abouts John Keats writes to Reynolds on July 13, 1818, that the 
rain had stopped him on the way to Glasgow. Mrs. Allan's 
meteorological observations are therefore confirmed by great 
authority, in which His Majesty's Weather Reports concur, so 
we may be definitely sure that rain it did. 

For a 9 that, however, Irvine in Ayrshire, where the Allans 
" settled down " is in the heart of the Burns country, and was 
at that time a lovely little seaport on the north bank of the 
river of the same name crossed by a picturesque old stone bridge. 
Here Poe must often have stood to watch the ships, or have 
crossed on excursions with his father's young cousins and 
nephews, the Gait or Fowlds boys, over the river to Seagate or 
Stonecastle nearby, both picturesque ruins. An academy had 
been founded at Irvine centuries before the Allans arrived, and 
there during the Summer of 1815 he was sent to school, doubtless 
in company with several of his " cousins." 102 

The country about fairly swarmed with John Allan's relatives 
and friends, all anxious to welcome him, to see his beautiful wife 
and the " little boy," and to hear about the health of their rich 
uncle in Richmond, a theme of considerable family interest. A 
married sister and her husband, Allan Fowlds, lived at Kil- 
marnock with several children, among them Frances, the name- 
sake to whom Mrs. Allan had sent the coral bracelet some years 
before. One cannot help wondering if Mrs. Fowlds had really 



101 " 64 inches." 

102 J. H. Whitty Memoir. The rest of the information is gathered from a mass 
of family correspondence in the Ellis & Allan Papers and from competent descrip- 
tions of the places themselves. 



68 ISRAFEL 



saved some of her " nice nappy ale " for her brother, and if Jean 
Guthrie did come asking for "her Johnny," how Mrs. Allan 
took it. 108 

At Irvine itself, where the Allans seem to have set up some 
sort of housekeeping while Edgar went to the Academy, lived 
three other sisters, Eliza, Mary, and Jane, together with other 
relatives, the Walshes 104 and some friends, a Capt. James Solo- 
mon, whom Mr. Allan had befriended while a prisoner of war in 
America, 104 and Mr. Ferguson " who kept a fine gig and dashed 
about at a great rate." 106 There is also some reference to " little 
brothers," 106 perhaps a term of affection for the Gait children, 
the orphans. 

At any rate, despite the rain and the Scotch mist, we may 
be sure it was a merry little society and a pleasant home coming, 
and that young Edgar Poe and Nancy Valentine shared in the 
welcome. The bonds of family in Scotland are close, and these 
two fell within the magic circle. The country about is beautiful, 
and aroused Keats' admiration three years later, on his walking 
trip with Charles Armitage Brown. 107 At Kilmarnock, Poe could 
not escape hearing about Bobby Burns; "Highland Mary" is 
buried at Greenock; and the poet's lines and songs were at that 
time and for a generation to come on everyone's lips. Here they 
saw the strange effect of the long northern twilight and the eery 
red shadows of the sunsets long after the hour of a Virginia 
night-fall. Even in England in July the twilight docs not end 
until about 10 P.M., and Poe reveled in just such light effects 
afterward, and strange valleys 



108 Extracts from a letter to John Allan from his sister, Jane, at Irvine: 

104 M r . Walsh has purchased the great part of a galeaat and sails out of 
Irvine." There were Mr. and Mrs., and Jane Walsh in this family. 

105 "A very agreeable young man; I had the pleasure of being his brides- 
maid." 

106 " All our little brothers arc well and are making fine scholars." 

107 Extract from Keats' letter upon entering Ayrshire: We came clown upon 
everything suddenly there were on our way the "bonny Doon," with the Brig 
that Tarn o'Shanter crossed, Kirk Alloway, Burns's Cottage, across the Doon; 
surrounded by every Phantasy of green in Tree, Meadow, and hill. The stream 
of the Doon, as a Farmer told us, is covered with trees 'from head to foot' 
you know these beautiful heaths so fresh against the weather of a summer's eve- 
ning. . . ." John Keats, Amy Lowell, vol. II, page 46. 



ISRAFEL IN ALBION 69 

In the midst of which all day 
The red sunlight lazily lay 

Here, too, he was moving in the very scenes which Scott de- 
scribes. If these things did not leave a direct mark upon his 
style, his foreign experiences must at least have enhanced and 
made vivid his future delving into the literature of Britain, amid 
scenes of which he had personal knowledge. 

About thirty miles south of Irvine and Kilmarnock on the Cree 
Water, 108 in a country of beautiful private parks and small lochs, 
lived the Gaits at a handsome estate called " Flowerbanks " that 
overlooked a charming prospect in the Cree Valley where the 
fishers could be seen drawing their nets. This is close to the 
" Bride of Lammermoor " country, and is one of the most 
charming sections of Scotland. The Allans visited their relatives 
here and evidently stayed for some little time with the family, 
which seems to have consisted of an Aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Gait; 
William Gait and his wife, " Cousin Jane "; and the orphans, 
four or possibly three Gait boys, for Thomas seems to have 
gone to sea. Here doubtless Poe played about the country with 
these children, with whom he had ample time to become intimate 
then and later on, amid scenes the charm of which could not 
have been wasted, even upon his extreme youth. This was prob- 
ably in the late Summer of i8is. 100 

" Flowerbanks," however, was not the only place visited by 
the Allans. From Kilmarnock the family went to visit in Green- 
ock, and from thence to Glasgow and Edinburgh. Mr. Allan 
doubtless combined his business and pleasure at these places, 110 
but he was accompanied by his family and little Edgar Poe, who 
certainly could not have been oblivious to the attraction of 
strange sights for young eyes. Whether all of the Gait orphans 
went along is uncertain, but it is known that one of them, James 



108 A river between Wigton and Kirkudbrightshire in Scotland. The description 
of " Flowerbanks " is from a letter of Mary Allan, who says, " I could be happy 
to live here forever." 

109 As late as December 30, 1846, Poe wrote one A. Ramsay of Stonehaven, 
Scotland, inquiring after his (Foe's) Allan and Gait relatives. 

110 Charles Denny was the Glasgow merchant with whom Mr. Allan trans- 
acted much of his business. 



70 ISRAFEL 



Gait, then about fifteen years old, was of the company, and to his 
later reminiscences we are indebted for the facts. This nephew, 
it seems, was a favorite of old William Gait in Richmond who to 
some extent kept a tab on John Allan through the boy's letters. 111 

It had been John Allan's intent to leave Edgar at school at 
Irvine during this pleasure trip, and upon his return to England, 
but both Mrs. Allan and Miss Valentine objected, an attitude 
ably seconded by young Poe himself, so that it was agreed to 
allow Edgar to make the Scotch " grand tour " and return to 
London with the ladies, provided he would go back to Scotland 
later to attend school at Irvine with young James Gait. This 
early rift in the family over Edgar's care and whereabouts is not 
without significance as it shows plainly that Mrs. Allan was still 
the main protagonist for the boy, while her husband was anxious 
to settle matters, even then, by packing him off to school, a de- 
vice to which he was to resort later on when the household be- 
came divided over more important matters in Richmond. 

In the Fall, the family returned to England, stopping at New- 
castle and Sheffield on the way, and landing in London on Octo- 
ber 7, 1815. Here was another sea voyage, part of the way, amid 
notable scenery, at a time when Poe was beginning to awaken to 
himself and the world about him. It may have been that he saw 
Ailsa Rock glimmering far out at sea of which Keats wrote about 
the same time: 

. . . thou art dead asleep; 

Thy life is but two dead eternities 

The last in air, the former in the deep; 

First with the whales, last with eagle skies 

These coasts seem to have affected the sea poetry of Keats, 
and it is certain that much of the poetry of Poe deals with a 
craggy and mist-veiled region. 

The Allans did not immediately find lodgings, but, upon their 
arrival at London, stopped at Blake's Hotel, where on October 
10, 1815, John Allan wrote Charles Ellis that they had arrived 
three days before from Glasgow, and that their satisfaction with 

111 J. H. Whitty, Complete Poems, large edition, Appendix, page 302. 



ISRAFEL IN ALBION 71 

the Scottish sights was, "high in all respects." A few days 
later they found a satisfactory residence in Russell Square, on 
the present site of the Bedford and West Central Hotels. From 
here on October 15, 1815, John Allan writes that he is sitting 
before " a snug fire in a nice little sitting parlor in No. 47, South- 
ampton Row, while Frances and Nancy are sewing and Edgar is 
reading a little story book." How we should like to know what it 
was! Evidently Edgar read a good deal even at seven years of age. 

Sometime later, probably about the end of 1815, Poe returned 
with James Gait to Scotland to attend once more the grammar 
school at Irvine. 112 Edgar, it seems, was very unwilling to part 
with the family and the women folks pled to keep him in London, 
but in vain. Poe's character even at this time began to manifest 
its wilful characteristics. James Gait says that on the voyage 
back from London to Irvine, Edgar made " an unceasing fuss all 
the way." Young Poe had started for Scotland very unwillingly, 
and he evidently intended to let the world know the state of his 
feelings. 

At Irvine, Edgar Poe and James Gait lived with Mary Allan, 
John Allan's sister, while the two boys went to school. The house 
where they stayed, called the Bridgegate House, was till lately 
still standing. There, James Gait and the young Edgar Poe occu- 
pied the same room, and from the lips of the older boy we begin 
to get a definite impression of young Israfel. He was, it seems, very 
mature for his age, full of old-fashioned talk, filled with a great 
self-reliance and absolutely devoid of fear. Life with "Aunt 
Mary" and at the Academy did not suit him, and he made 
" plans " to go back to America, perhaps with Catherine in mind, 
or to run away to London, probably back to his dear " Ma," and 
" Aunt Nancy," but certainly not back to his dear " Pa," who 
had so nonchalantly packed him off from all those he loved. This 
is the first of Edgar's many plans to run away, and in a little 
lad of seven or eight years at most, it shows a spirit of adventure, 
self-confidence and obstinancy that is to be remarked. Evidently 
" Aunt Mary Allan," who, from her letters, seems to have been a 
kindly and knowing person, had a rapid time of it with the fiery 
little boy storming about her quiet old house. 



72 ISRAFEL 

In the canny and dour atmosphere of the Scotch village, Poe 
undoubtedly missed the note of gaiety and the warm, generous 
influences of his Richmond home. Frequent services at the Irvine 
and Kilmarnock kirks were long and lugubrious; the discipline 
at the Academy, a school with medieval traditions, was strict 
and probably corporeal; one of the exercises in writing was the 
copying of epitaphs from the old graves in the kirkyard close by, 
and there was doubtless no lack of " atdd licht " sermons by Dr. 
Robertson, to the accompaniment of frequent reversals of the 
hour glass, all the atmosphere of Protestant piety which had 
so outraged Burns a few years earlier. Indeed, in the very square 
with the Allan house at Irvine, was Templeton's book shop where 
Burns had gone to turn over many a sheet of old songs. 118 

There were mitigating circumstances, however; visits to Allan 
Fowlds, the merry nurseryman, and his family at Kilmarnock 
a few miles away; games in Nelson Street with Jock Gregory 
and Willie Anderson, who, as an old man in 1887, recalled Edgar 
Poe as, much fussed over by the Allans, and a lively apt youngster 
with a will of his own; and there was a ghost-walk just opposite 
in the garden of Lord Kilmarnock's mansion which the lord's lady 
was said to haunt. 

Certainly Edgar was restless, and much affected the old, red, 
creaking-wheeled riding carts of the country upon which he rode 
gaily beside the driver; a little grey-eyed, dark, curly-headed 
boy dressed in a green duffle apron and thick-napped, red Kil- 
marnock tarn o'shanter, drinking in the strange sights of 
the old Scotch villages all about but still making trouble for 
" Aunty Mary." She, at last, poor soul, could stand it no longer, 
and in a burst of exasperation packed up his clothes and shipped 
him back to London, 112 doubtless to the annoyance of John Allan, 
and the rapturous kisses of " Ma " and " Aunt Nancy." James 
Gait seems to have gone with him, for, not long after, there are 
letters to Richmond from the former. Mrs. Allan was very fond of 



112 For the facts detailed here I am for the most part frankly Indebted to the 
excellent Memoir of Poe by J. H. Whitty, large edition, section VI, Appendix, 
pages 201-209. Also to the illuminating article in the Dial for February, 1916, by 
Prof. Killis Campbell, and to extracts from the Ellis 6* Allan Papers. 



ISRAFEL IN ALBION 73 

these Gait children, too, and in October, 1818, the curtain lifts on 
the little family for a brief glimpse, when Mrs. Gait of " Flower- 
banks " writes to John Allan in London, and encloses a message 
to his good wife. 

Oct. 24, 1818 

. . . Tell Mrs. Allan that her attention and great kindness to my chil- 
dren can never be forgotten as in every letter they are extolling her 
goodness. . . . My kind love to Miss Valentine and if she is half as 
good as she is represented to me she must be everything that anyone 
would wish. Compliments to Mrs. A., Miss V., little Edgar and 
Jane. . . . 

Your affectionate Aunt 
ELIZABETH GALT 113 

This letter is interesting as supplying the names qf the persons 
in John Allan's household in London, and is one of the many 
proofs of the love for children shown by Frances Allan. " Jane " 
is John Allan's own sister. 

There is an earlier glimpse than this, though, some two years 
before. Edgar could not have remained very long at Irvine, for 
he seems to have returned early in 1816 to London where a let- 
ter reached him written from Richmond in the Spring. It was 
from his little sweetheart Catherine Potiaux, Mrs. Allan's god- 
child. As the first of the many love letters that Poe received, and 
from a little girl seven or eight years old, now dead for nearly 
a century, it is not without a quaint interest of its own. 

Richmond, 18, 1816 

. . . Give my love to Edgar and tell him I want to see him very much. 
... I expect Edgar does not know what to make of such a large City 
as London, tell him Josephine and all the children want to see 
him. . . . 114 

Evidently Edgar was missed and remembered! 
Upon his return to London in 1816, Poe was sent to the Misses 

113 The extracts from this letter of Mrs. Gait to John Allan have been sup- 
plied the author by the kindness of Mr. Edward V. Valentine of Richmond, who 
has the correspondence in his possession. 

* l * Ellis & Allan Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. 



74 ISRAFEL 



Dubourg's 116 boarding school at 146, Sloane Street, Chelsea, not 
far from the South Kensington Museum, where he continued to 
live, making short visits to the family, probably until the end of the 
Spring of 1817 or later. The Misses Dubourg were the sisters of 
a clerk in the employ of ElUs & Allan during 1816 and 1817, but 
of them little is known. The record of Poe's life at this school is 
now confined to the following bill for tuition, which tells a rather 
complete story for such a document. Among other things we 
learn that Edgar was known as " Master Allan." 

Masr. Allan's School Acct. to Midsummer 1816 

Board & Tuition \ year 7 17 6 

Separate Bed i i o 

Washing o 10 6 

Seat in Church o 3 o 

Teachers and Servants o 5 o 

Writing o 15 o 

Do. Entrance o 10 o 

Copy, Books, Pens, etc., etc o 3 o 

Medicine, School Expenses . o 5 o 

Repairing Linen, shoe strings etc. . . o 3 o 

Mavor's Spelling o 2 o 

Fresnoy's Geography o 2 o 

Prayer Book o 3 o 

Church Catechism Explained . . . . o o 9 

Catechism of Hist, of England . . . o . o 9 

12 2 o 

Receipted, July 6, 1816 
sgd. GEORGE DUBOURG 

On the back we find that, " School recommences Monday the 
22nd of July." 110 

During the stay of the family in England there are several 
mentions of Mrs. Allan's being in ill health, a more or less 
chronic condition, judging by other frequent references in family 
correspondence of later date, that was to play a considerable part 

115 "Pauline Dubourg" is the laundress in the Murders in the Rue Moraue 
310 This receipt has been published in the Dial for February, 1916, and is to 

be found in the Ellis 6- Attan Papers, Washington, D. C. Courtesy of Prof Killis 

Campbell. 



ISRAFEL IN ALBION 75 

in the relations later between Edgar Poe and John Allan. In a 
letter written to his uncle in Richmond as early as 1816, John 
Allan specifically states that his wife is in poor health. The 
earliest mention of any letters of Poe occurs in connection with 
his foster-mother's illness. In August, 1817, John Allan took his 
wife Frances to Chettingham where she seems to have improved, 
and on August 14 of that year he writes his bookkeeper George 
Dubourg in London, enclosing a letter from the boy, and saying 
that if Edgar, who was evidently left behind at school, wishes to 
write at all he must send his letters to his mama, " as I do not 
think she will return with me." Mrs. Allan, finding the waters of 
benefit, wished to give them a longer trial. Why John Allan 
should have returned the letter is not clear unless it was to place 
it in the office files (sic). In any event it appears he did not wish 
to receive the boy's communications. Such incidents as these 
would be trivial did they not show definitely from which direction 
the warm and cold winds blew, even as early as this. 117 

In the Summer of 1817 about the time that Edgar left the 
Misses Dubourgs' school, John Allan moved from 47, Southamp- 
ton Row to what is now number 83. This house was still standing 
in 1915, and is the same one that Poe mentions in Why the Little 
Frenchman Wears Ins Hand in a Sling, as " 39, Southampton 
Row, Russell Square, Parish o' Bloomsbury." 6C7 Here they re- 
mained till shortly before they left London. 

While in that city, John Allan had his place of business at 18 
Basing Hall, 118 under the name of Allan & ElUs, a reversal of 
style that is said not to have pleased his partner at home. Most 
of his business was with Thomas S. Coles, and A. Saltmarsh, his 
" inspectors," and with the firm of John Gilliat & Co. His affairs 
did not prosper, and that certain other worries followed him over- 
seas, this rather snappy glimpse of home correspondence not 
without direct interest in itself, and bearing directly upon Poe, 
will testify. The letter is from William Erwin, Edgar's former 

117 The full text of Allan's letter is in the Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia, 
and a quotation from it is given in the Valentine Museum Poe Letters (published 
in 1025), on page 17, introduction. 

118 From addresses m letters to John Allan at that date. Also Mary Newton 
Stanard to the author on August 21, 1925. 



76 ISRAFEL 



schoolmaster in Richmond, which reached Mr. Allan in London 
March 7, 1818. 

Richmond, Novr. 27th, 1817 

DR. SIR 

I take upon myself the liberty of writing to you this note, relative 
to Master Edward Collier, whom you placed under my tuition in the 
spring of the year 1815 and who has regularly attended my school 
since that period. His mother informs me that she has frequently re- 
minded your partner Mr. Ellis to mention Edward's situation to you, 
but thinks that amid the hurry of important communications he had 
omitted the subject altogether. She has accordingly solicited me to 
write to you, and to present a statement of Edward's account from his 
first entrance to the end of the year. It is as follows; 

Mr. Allan To Wm Erwin, Dr. 

For Master Edward Collier's tuition from March isth 

1815 to March 14 1818 at $42 per annum $126.00 

Cr. June 1815 by cash from Mr. Allan $12.25 

Oct. 1816 by cash from Mr. Ellis $29.75 42.00 



To Balance 84.00 

Thus there will be a balance due me of $84 on the i4th of March next 
You will confer a favor on me, and equally so on Mrs. Collier, by 
dropping a few lines to me through the medium of your firm, first op- 
portunity, expressive of your concern for the tuition and education of 
the above child, as far as you may deem proper in regard to the future. 
It is proper here also to add, that no improper step was taken by me, 
or any call made on any of your friends here for the payment of my 
bill, but on Mr. Ellis, who informed me, that some teacher had war- 
ranted the firm of Ellis and Allan, which induced him to refer any 
claims of this sort to your own inspection I mention this, lest you 
might have imagined it to have been done by me. 

I trust Edgar continues to be well and to like his school as much as 
he used to when he was in Richmond. He is a charming boy and it 
will give me great pleasure to hear how he is, and where you have 
sent him to school, and also what he is reading. There is no news here at 
present, . . . Poor Potter ended his earthly joy and miseries last week, 
so also died. L. Joseph and Miles L., the latter was found dead by his 
own door supposed to have fallen in drink and to have expired under 
the consequences. . . , Let me only beg of you to remember me re- 



ISRAFEL IN ALBION 77 

spectfully to your Lady Mrs. Allan and her Sister who I hope are well 
and do not forget to mention me to their august attendant, Edgar. 

I am, etc., 

WILLIAM ERWIN 

To this, in a somewhat less merry mood, John Allan replies, 

London March 21, 1818 
Mr. WILLIAM ERWIN 
SIR 

I received your favor of the 27th Nov. last post the " Albert " that 
arrived here on the yth inst having your account for the education of 
Edwin Collier . . . which sum Mr. Ellis will pay you; but I cannot 
pay any more expense on account of Edwin, you will therefore not 
consider me responsible for any expenses after the i$th of the month. 

I cannot conceive who had a right to warrant Ellis and Allan on my 
account. 

Accept my thanks for the solicitude you have so kindly expressed 
about Edgar & the family, Edgar is a fine Boy and I have no reason 
to complain of his progress. 

I am etc, 

JOHN ALLAN 119 

Mr. Allan's solicitude for his progeny was evidently in inverse 
ratio to their distance. But we do not hear what Edgar is read- 
ing which would, indeed, have been an interesting thing to know. 

Probably in the Fall of i8i7, 120 Poe was entered at the Manor 
House School of the Reverend " Dr." Bransby at Stoke Newing- 
ton, then a suburb of London, which still retained the separate 
identity and the antique atmosphere of an old English village. 
The Academy was exclusively for young gentlemen, of the fairly 
well-to-do, and it was here that the young poet laid the first firm 



110 Both of these letters are from the Ellis 6* Allan Correspondence, Library 
of Congress, Washington, D. C. 

120 The reasons for supposing this date, are arrived at by the dates of corre- 
spondence and the fact that the Allans were In Scotland during most of 1815. 
In 1816, when they seem to have returned to London, Poe first attended the 
Misses Dubourg's school and would probably remain for the full term. This would 
bring his entry at the Stoke Newington Academy to some time in 1817. Poe 
afterward spoke of a " five years' schooling in England." The " year * at Irvine, 
a year with the Misses Dubourg, and three years with " Dr." Bransby covers this 
satisfactorily as to the time elapsed. The Allans sailed for home in the late Spring 
of 1820. 



78 ISRAFEL 

basis for an education. 121 He was now upwards of ten years of 
age and entering upon that period of life when the lineaments of 
character begin to make themselves visible and reflect most 
forcibly the modelling of environment. 

From Poe's own lips in the strange autobiographical and 
tragic story of William Wilson we have the poet's confession 
that in the old school at Stoke Newington began one of those 
spiritual struggles in the personality of a genius, the results of 
which have become significant to literature. Both the school 
itself and its haunted surroundings were well calculated to stir 
his imaginings, and despite his extreme youth, the capacity of 
the boy to be moved by it cannot be doubted. " In childhood I 
must have felt with the energy of a man what now I find stamped 
upon my memory as the exergues of the Carthaginian medals " 
this was written years later about his school days at Stoke 
Newington , and " Oh, le bon temps que ce si&cle de jer" says 
Poe, sighing in nostalgic retrospect in spite of the shadow of 
loneliness which he claimed had been cast upon him! 

In 1818 the ancient village of Stoke Newington which has 
since been absorbed by the growth of London, was a dream-like 
and spirit-soothing place, " a misty village of Old England/' as 
Poe recalled it, rambling along an old Roman road bordered with 
a vast number of gnarled elm trees and ancient houses dating 
from the days of the Tudors. " At this moment," he says, writ- 
ing many years later, "I feel the refreshing chilliness of its 
deeply-shadowed avenues, inhale the fragrance of its thousand 
shrubberies, and thrill anew with indefinable delight, at the deep, 
hollow note of the churchbell, breaking, each hour, with sudden 
and sullen roar, upon the stillness of the dusky atmosphere in 
which the fretted Gothic steeple lay imbedded and asleep." It 
does not, therefore, seem to be straining things too far to say 
that from this ancient place steeped in the memories of a millen- 
nium, where objective reminders of the past still lingered so ro- 
mantically, some of the foreign coloring, the minute descriptions 

121 The Academy stood on the northeast corner of Church Street and what is 
now Edwards Lane, Prof, Lewis Chase in the London Athenaeum for May, 1916, 
pages 221-222. 




The Grammar School at Irvine, Scotland 

Which POE attended for several months in 1815 

From a pen and ink sketch. Courtesy of R. L. McTarisb 




The Manor House School at Stoke Newington 

London, England 
Which POE attended from 1817 to 1820. From an old print 



ISRAFEL IN ALBION 81 

of ancient buildings, and the love for the " Gothic " and medi- 
eval atmosphere, in which he so often revelled later, may have 
originated. 

For just off the village green among deeply shaded walls stood 
the ancient house of that Earl Percy who was the unfortunate 
lover of Anne Boleyn, and the mansion of Queen Elizabeth's 
noble favorite, the great Earl of Leicester. To the west of the 
little open square, green, shady lanes melted into the cool and 
misty meadows, while the school itself was situated on the east 
of the town on a quaint street of Queen Anne and Georgian 
houses, " haunts of ancient peace/' carpeted about with darkly- 
shaded English lawns and bordered by hedges. Behind its own 
box bordered parterre, on this very street, stood the Manor 
House Academy, a large, white, rambling mansion of various 
architectures, with a roof that sloped away in the rear to a mas- 
sive brick wall pierced by ponderous, iron-studded gates. One 
cannot do better than to let Edgar Poe himself describe it and 
the life he led there: 

The house I have said was old and irregular. The grounds were ex- 
tensive, and a high and solid brick wall, topped with a bed of mortar 
and broken glass, encompassed the whole. This prison-like rampart 
formed the limit of our domain; beyond it we saw but thrice a week 
once every Saturday afternoon, when, attended by two ushers, we 
were permitted to take brief walks in a body through some of the 
neighboring fields and twice during Sunday, when we were paraded 
in the same formal manner to the morning and evening service in the 
one church of the village. Of this church the principal of our school 
was pastor. With how deep a spirit of wonder and perplexity was I 
wont to regard him from our remote pew in the gallery, as, with step 
solemn and slow, he ascended the pulpit! This reverend man, with 
countenance so demurely benign, with robes so glossy and so clerically 
flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast, could 
this be he who, of late with sour visage, and in snuffy habiliments, ad- 
ministered, ferule in hand, the Draconian Laws of the academy? Oh, 
gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution 1 At an angle of 
the ponderous wajl frowned a more ponderous gate. It was riveted and 
studded with iron bolts, and surmounted with jagged iron spikes. What 
impressions of deep awe did it inspire! It was never opened save for 
the three periodical egressions and ingressions already mentioned; 
then, in every creak of its mighty hinges, we found a plentitude of 



82 ISRAFEL 

mystery a world of matter for solemn remark, or for more solemn 
meditation. The extensive enclosure was irregular in form, having many 
capacious recesses. Of these, three or four of the largest constituted 
the playground. It was level, and covered with fine hard gravel. I well 
remember it had no trees, nor benches, nor anything similar within it. 
Of course it was in the rear of the house. In front lay a small parterre, 
planted with box and other shrubs; but through this sacred division we 
passed only upon rare occasions indeed such as a first advent to 
school or final departure thence, or perhaps, when a parent or friend 
having called for us, we joyfully took our way home for the Christmas 
or Midsummer holidays. But the house! how quaint an old building 
was this! to me how veritably a palace of enchantment! There was 
really no end to its windings to its incomprehensible subdivisions. 
It was difficult at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of 
its two stories one happened to be. From each room to every other 
there were sure to be found three or four steps either in ascent or 
descent. Then the lateral branches were innumerable inconceivable 
and so returning in upon themselves, that our most exact ideas in 
regard to the whole mansion were not very far different from those 
with which we pondered upon infinity. During the five years of my 
residence here, I was never able to ascertain with precision, in what 
remote locality lay the little sleeping apartment assigned to myself 
and some eighteen or twenty other scholars. The school room was the 
largest in the house I could not help thinking, in the world. It was 
very long, narrow, and dismally low, with pointed Gothic windows and 
a ceiling of oak. In a remote and terror-inspiring angle was a square 
enclosure of eight or ten feet, comprising the sanctum, ' during hours, 7 
of our principal, the Reverend Dr. Bransby. It was a solid structure, 
with massy door, sooner than open which in the absence of the 
' Dominie,' we would all have willingly perished by the pcinc forte ct 
dure. In other angles were two other similar boxes far less reverenced, 
indeed, but still greatly matters of awe. One of these was the pulpit 
of the ' classical ' usher, one of the ' English and mathematical.' In- 
terspersed about the room, crossing and recrossing in endless irregu- 
larity, were innumerable benches and desks, black, ancient, and time- 
worn,^ piled desperately with much-bethumbed books, and so beseamed 
with initial letters, names at full length, grotesque figures, and other 
multiplied efforts of the knife, as to have entirely lost what little of 
original form might have been their portion in days long departed, A 
huge bucket with water stood at one extremity of the room, and a 
clock of stupendous dimensions at the other. 122 



122 The quotations descriptive of Poe's school days are from his story Wittiam 
WUson. 



ISRAFEL IN ALBION 83 

This description, however, is not to be taken too literally. It 
is quite possibly a synthesis of both Irvine and Stoke Newington, 
and in one particular quite misleading, the description of the 
headmaster, Dr. Bransby. 123 

In the first place the good man was not a " Doctor " at all, or 
so only by courtesy. He appears on his bills as the " Rev*. John 
Bransby." Nor was he " old " when Poe was at his school, being 
at that time, 1817, only 33 years of age. The Reverend John 
Bransby was an M. A. of St. John's College, Cambridge. He 
seems to have been a merry, Tory clergyman with a large family 
and convivial habits, very fond of field sports; the cleaning of 
his gun was a signal to the boys that he was off for the day. 
" He was a classical scholar of no mean stamp possessing a large 
fund of miscellaneous information, both literary and scientific 
. . . and combined an enthusiastic love of nature with an ex- 
tensive knowledge of Botany," and gardening. " Dr." Bransby 
wrote political pamphlets and looked upon the days at Stoke 
Newington as " a bright spot in his life." He was much beloved 
by his scholars. 

These facts give us quite a different picture, indeed, from that 
drawn by Poe in William Wilson. John Bransby in after years 
was said to have been considerably nettled by the use of his name 
in the story, and to have been quite reticent about Poe, remark- 
ing, only, that he had liked the boy, who went under the name 
of " Allan," but that his parents spoilt him by allowing him too 
much pocket money. " Allan, 7 ' he said, " was intelligent, way- 
ward, and wilful," which testimony agrees with James Gait's. 

Of Poe's associations with his schoolmates nothing definite is 
known. We have his own statement, however, to the effect that, 
even thus early, his dominant characteristic of pride began to 
make itself felt. " The ardor, the enthusiasm, and the imperious- 



123 The description of Poe's schoolmaster, the Reverend John Bransby is 
taken from the London Athenaeum No. 4605 for May, 1916, pages 221-222, an 
article by Prof. Lewis Chase, part of which is quoted. In this connection note 
that the pictures in several biographies of Poe purporting to be those of " Dr." 
Bransby are in reality a likeness of Dr. William Cooke, a rector of Stoke Newing- 
ton who died when Bransby was thirteen years old. John Bransby was born in 
1784 and died March 5, 1857- 



84 ISRAFEL 



ness of my disposition, soon rendered me a marked character 
among my schoolmates, gave me an ascendency over all not 
greatly older than myself." Master Erwin, his former Richmond 
schoolmaster, had desired himself to be remembered to the 
"august" Edgar, so that there is some confirmation of the 
statement. Pride is not a trait that would have tended to make 
him companionable, and it is probable that much of the com- 
plained-of loneliness sprang from this. There is also some indi- 
cation that the boys revenged themselves upon him for his over- 
bearing attitude by an annoying repetition of his name which 
probably, from the Southern twist of his Virginian accent, gave 
them ample opportunity for a rather obvious and humble pun 
upon his patronymic. 124 The results upon his diction of a long 
residence in England and Scotland, and of the Scotch dialect so 
frequently heard in his foster-father's house are not to be over- 
looked. 

Bills from the Manor House School rendered for "Master 
Allan," which have recently come to light, 125 give us the only 
direct insight to the life of the schoolboy, Edgar Poe, at Stoke 
Newington that we possess. From these it appears that like other 
lads he played hard, and was ruthless on shoe leather. A pair of 
shoes evidently lasted him a month, by which time they went on 
the docks for repairs. The total bill for the summer term of 1818, 
it appears, was i. 155. 6d. which includes two new pairs, three 
mendings, and no less than six shillings worth of laces consumed 
in that period! For the rest, Poe's memoirs of the Reverend 
John Bransby's sermons in William Wilson are confirmed, and we 
learn in addition that the boys were charged extra for listening 
to them, as John Allan is billed 33. 6d. for pew-rent, and a 
charity sermon for Edgar's share. Poe had a single bed at this 
school, as he had at the Misses Dubourg's, and for " board and 
education" was charged 23. I2S. 6d. a term. He took dancing 
as an extra at 2. 2S., and had the services of a "hairdresser " 



124 David Poe was listed on the tax returns in Boston for x8oq as " David 
Poo," with taxables of $300 in personable property. 

126 Valentine Museum Poe Letters, Bills from Reverend John Bransby to John 
Allan for " Master Allan," see pages 319-327. 



ISRAFEL IN ALBION 85 

or barber for 2s. a term. The school allowance of pocket money 
it seems was 53. the term, which, as it is certainly not the " ex- 
travagant amount" that "Dr." Bransby mentions, must have 
been supplemented by "dear Ma," and "Aunt Nancy." On 
August 31, 1 8 1 8, he seems to have hurt his hand somewhat 
badly, for his foster-father is charged with an item xos. 6d. for 
having it dressed, and 25. 6d. for ointment and lint a month 
later. The boy is charged with two large slates, but there is no 
mention of school texts by title. The whole cost for the term at 
this excellent English school came to 33. 23. nd. By January 
25, 1819, Poe was back at school from the Christmas holidays 
which he must have spent with the Allans in London, for at that 
date the vacation came to an end. 

Unfortunately, then, we do not know what, if any, were the 
books that Edgar may have read at Stoke Newington. Master 
Erwin's inquiry shows that he was reading. There must have 
been something more than mere text books about the school 
somewhere, although English grammar schools of the period were 
amazingly innocent of anything but the dog-eared Latin gram- 
mars, spellers, cheap editions of Homer, Vergil, and Caesar, and 
the ponderous arithmetics of the period. Whether the boys ever 
went to the theater is doubtful, although Edgar probably saw the 
sights of London with his " mother " during the holidays, the 
Tower and Westminster, at least, and perhaps the Elgin Marbles, 
then newly arrived. 

Let the searchers for the literary inspirations of Poe's boy- 
hood make the most of the fact that he was in London at school 
when the first edition of Christabel and Kubla Khan appeared 
from John Murray's; but it is not likely that any of this magic 
fell upon his ears until years later. That was " modern poetry " 
then, and so we may be sure taboo in the schools where Pope 
still reigned. " Byron " was a thing for young gentlemen ushers 
to chuckle over in a knowing way, and conceal from the innocent 
eyes of their charges. As for Shelley, if he were known at all, 
to any of the faculty at Stoke Newington, what chance would the 
works of an avowed atheist have under the watchful, churchly 
eye of the Reverend and forceful " Dr." Bransby? That Poe was 



86 ISRAFEL 



in the same city at the time when Coleridge, Wordsworth, and 
Keats were meeting about the same fire with Haydon, is a tem- 
poral and geographic fact without literary significance, despite 
the attempt to make it so from some quarters. 120 

On Christmas, mid-term holidays, and week-ends Edgar must 
have visited the Allans at their London lodgings. One thing is 
certain, John Allan is not likely to have become acquainted with 
any of the literary figures of the day. The Virginia tobacco trade 
and the social circle which it implies, cannot by the wildest 
stretch of imagination be advanced as a source for even juvenile 
literary inspirations or associations. If Edgar saw anyone at his 
guardian's house while in London, besides the immediate mem- 
bers of his family, they were probably merchants who had bust 
ness with the firm and discussed, in a broad lowland accent, the 
prices current of Virginia leaf, or the vicissitudes of American 
ships* Mrs. Allan, however, seems to have gathered about her a 
more congenial and interesting group, for, while Edgar was at 
school, Mrs. Allan, whose health continued to be precarious, 
traveled about from place to place, in company with Jane Gait 
and others, as a letter from Damlish written by Miss Gait to 
" Miss (Mary) Allan " at 38, Southampton Row, Russell Square, 
London, on October 24, 1818, shows. At that time Mrs. Allan 
did not intend to return to London till November. 

. . . I think she regrets leaving this part of the country. Mr. Dunlop 
has been persuading her to remain for some time he will leave her 
in charge of the beaus (army officers) who winter here, Major Court 
and Captain Donnal who she is sure will take good care of her and he 
would take a nice little cottage for her. What do you think of that 
arrangement? Don't you think we plan very well. Mrs. Allan drank 

120 Owing the the fact that John Gait, the Scotch novelist, and a friend of 
Byron, hailed from Irvine and Kilmarnock and was a connection of the Gait 
family, cousins to the Allans, some attempt has been made to connect Poe's f osier- 
parents with the literary life of the London of the lime. There is not a shadow 
of proof, however, on which to rest the assumption. John Gait wns, however, in 
London at the same time as the Allans. The following occurs in a letter from 
Byron to John Murray dated Bologna, September 17, 1819. 

" Dear Sir: I have received a small box consigned by you to a Mr. Allan 
with three portraits in it." etc. The Works of Byron, edited by Rowland E. 
Prothero, M. A., John Murray, London, 1900, page 353. 



ISRAFEL IN ALBION 87 

tea last evening at Mr. Dunlops. They leave this Monday. Mr. Leslie 
who has been with them for some time is quite delighted with the 
country. He has been very busy taking views of the different places 
around. Mrs. Allan is much about the same as when I wrote, I regret 
often that we have not you all here to enjoy the beauties of Devon- 
shire. . . . There is one view here which reminds me very much of 
the first look you get at Ayrshire from . . . accept our best re- 
gards to Miss Valentine and Mr. Allan. . . . 

By which it would seem that Edgar's " Aunt Nancy " kept 
house in London, while his invalid foster-mother was in Devon- 
shire, assisted by one of John Allan's sisters. A little glimpse 
into the family circle of ever a century ago in England is thus 
afforded. Evidently Edgar was then well tucked away at " Dr. 
Bransby's." 

Leslie, the artist referred to, was E. C. R. Leslie, R. A., who 
was born in London of American parents in 1784. His parents 
returned to America and he was later a student at the Royal 
Academy, exhibiting there the year this letter was written. He 
later returned to America and became professor of drawing at 
West Point. It is just possible that Leslie who was in close 
touch with the Allans painted a portrait of " Master Allan " in 
England. 127 

The references to Mrs. Allan's constant ill health continue 
steadily in nearly all the correspondence from now on until she 
died over a decade later in Richmond. 

Before leaving England, John Allan's affairs were in bad shape 
and generally complicated. The tobacco market was poor, and 
he had adventured considerably with a merchant by the name of 
William Holder who writes in January, 1820: 

I cannot express my dear Sir what I feel at this moment for your 
kind, humane & feeling conduct toward me & my two unprovided 
daughters at present I can only offer you my sincere thanks. ... It 
would be the proudest hour of my life to make you ample restitution 
. . . etc. 



127 The letter from Jane Gait and the reference to Leslie came from Edward 
V. Valentine, Esq., of Richmond, Virginia, from his diary, and from letters given 
him to copy by Miss Sallie Gait on July 12, 1915, from the Gait-Allan corre- 
spondence. 



88 ISRAFEL 

In March, Mr. Allan was attacked by a dropsy, of which he 
nearly died, and he was not able to get to the counting house 
until April 3rd to wind up his affairs. He found that in the mean- 
time he had been robbed by a clerk by the name of Tayle, and 
gives the details in a letter to Charles Ellis marked " private," in 
which he adds, London, April i8th, 1820: 

Would say we are all tolerably well, I certainly am much better, 
Frances complaining a good deal & Ann & Edgar are quite well. . . . 

The final crash financially came over the confusion between 
Ellis & Allan in Richmond and Allan & Ellis in London, both 
of which firms tried to collect a sum of 2700 due from the estate 
of a Mr. Guilles of Glasgow, debtor to William Gait. Gravely in 
debt and cast down by his failure, Mr. Allan rented his household 
effects, and house (for he hoped to return), took Edgar out of 
school, and prepared to depart for America. Had he been success- 
ful, Edgar Poe would have been raised in England. On May 2oth, 
Mr. Allan writes home from London: 

... I trust to be off by the June Packet & when I arrive I shall use 
every exertion of which I am capable to complete our engagements to 
our creditors. . . . Mrs. Allan is in better health than usual, Ann 
quite well & so is Edgar, as for myself I was never better. . . . The 
arrival of the Queen produced an immense sensation. Few thought she 
would return, but the bold & courageous manner by which she ap- 
peared . . . has induced a vast number to think her not guilty. She 
was received with immense acclamation & the populace displaced her 
horses, drew her past Carlton House and thence to Alderman Wood's 
House South Audley St. The same day the King made a communica- 
tion to the House of Lords charging her with High Treason. , . . 

From which it is quite plain that Edgar Poe, just before he 
left England, probably saw the unfortunate Queen Caroline 
drawn through the London Streets. It was probably his first and 
last glimpse of royalty, and his last of London. 

On June 9th we find the family at Liverpool where they ar- 
rived the day before, waiting for the Packet. 

(Mrs. Allan) , . . felt much indisposed. I hope the trip to Virginia 
(?) will be of service to her, she has yet to learn what a pleasing sen- 
sation is experienced on returning Home Even in verry Hot weather. 



ISRAFEL IN ALBION 89 

We will trust to God that our congratulations on the Birth of another 
Daughter to your family will be ... finally realized . . . make my 
best respects to our dear Margaret (Mrs. Ellis) & all the children. 
Mrs. A. & Ann desire their love to you, Margaret & the young ones. 
Remember us all to Mr. and Mrs. Richard, Doct. and Mrs. Thornton, 
the children, Rose (Poe), Mr. and Mrs. Mackenzie. . . . Mrs. Mac- 
kenzie of Forest Hill called and addressed her love to Mrs. Mackenzie, 
they are all well. 

In a few days, apparently about the end of June, 1820, Mr. 
Allan and the family with young Edgar set sail for New York. 

The net result of Poe's boyhood experience in England and 
Scotland seems to have been a precious store of rather distinct 
and romantic memories, a lively young body hardened by the 
sturdy games of the English school ground and climate, a little 
Latin, some mispronounced French, and an ability to work prob- 
lems in simple arithmetic. Perhaps also, a too well developed 
self-confidence and boyish pride. In addition, young Poe had 
seen, long before most American youths, the beginnings of the 
age of industrialism, in England and Scotland, factories operated 
by steam, and the beginnings of railways. 128 His horizons had 
been widened, the provincialism of a Virginia-bred youth inoc- 
ulated with a valuable antidote, and he had heard and been 
instructed in English spoken at the source. 

In June, 1820, however, he left behind him forever the quaint 
English town, and the rambling mysterious corridors and alcoved 
dormitories of the old school where he had spent a considerable 
portion of his boyhood, to return with Mr. Man and his family 
to the United States. 



128 "Railways" sec a letter from Allan Fowlds written from Kiimarnock, 
Scotland, as early as January 4, 1812, to John Allan at Richmond, Virginia, in 
which Fowlds says, ..." we are getting a fine new Harbor at the Troon with 
3 or 4 fine dry docks, the railway from the Troon to Kiimarnock is almost com- 
pleted, they are shipping great Quantity of Coals for Ireland " etc. Steam en- 
gines were not used there at that time. 



CHAPTER VI 
Israfel Meets Helen 



THE voyage from England to America was made in 
thirty-six days, a fairly average passage for the time. 
Mr. Allan and his family arrived in New York on 
July 21, 1820, accompanied by young James Gait, then about 
twenty years old, who came to Richmond apparently at the behest 
of his wealthy uncle there. 129 

Ships and the sea, which always have a fascination for boys of 
an adventurous turn, and by this time Edgar was certainly 
that, exercised a peculiar charm for young Poe if one can judge 
anything -from his later stories, so many of which have their 
scenes laid in a maritime setting. Along with young Gait he 
would not have failed to take delight in the always-to-a-lands- 
man novel incidents of a transatlantic voyage, and to have be- 
come somewhat familiar with the picturesque setting and life of 
the jack-tar on the sailing ships of the age. Nor could the busy 
life of the London and New York docks and water-fronts have 
been lacking in an appeal to his imagination. 

A port of the early twenties of the nineteenth century, filled 
with the square-riggers, barks, Indiamen, Blackwall frigates, and 
men-of-war of the time, presented a romantic aspect even to con- 
temporary eyes. Gleaming sails, black and yellow hulls careening 
to the wind, and painted with white stripes along the rows of 
square grinning port-holes, flashing brasses, bells and cannon, 
and the chanteys of sailors as the capstan clanked ancl the 
anchors walked home to the catheads, would not have been 
waste material upon the retina of Edgar Poe even when only 
twelve years of age. A great full-rigged ship under all sail, with 
a " bone-in-her-teeth," graceful gilded figure-head and fluted 



120 Woodberry, 1909, vol. i, page 24. 

" Gait " J. H. Whitty, large edition, Appendix, page 206. 



ISRAFEL MEETS HELEN gi 

stern galleries, home from the Indies with all her national bunting 
and house-flags flying, was a good thing for a young poet to see, 
something which has unfortunately perished from the earth. 

Poe's sea stories, even the most fanciful, such as The Narrative 
of Arthur Gordon Pym, exhibit a familiarity with nautical ways 
and terms which much actual experience at sea was the cause of 
supplying. Two transatlantic voyages before the age of manhood, 
and a life spent about the docks, and in seaports, was an unusual 
and valuable experience for one of the coming figures in American 
literature. In his voyages upon army transports from Boston to 
Charleston, and upon his return thence to Hampton Roads, Poe 
was at a later time to renew his direct acquaintance with the 
ocean for a considerable time. 130 The magic sights and sounds 
of the sea have been caught up into lines of his prose and poetry, 
notably in Annabel Lee and The City in the Sea. One can hardly 
quote even the titles without making the fact self-evident. In 
this, Poe has carried on one of the great traditions of English 
verse, the sea influence, and, that he was able to do so, is largely 
the happy result of experience rather than a literary tour de force. 

The letters of Mr. Allan's partner, Charles Ellis, written from 
the new offices of the firm on i$th Street opposite the Bell 
Tavern (whither they had moved in September, 1817) to his 
wife, then in the mountains, afford an unusually intimate glimpse 
into the events upon the return of the Allans and young Poe to 
Richmond, and of the kind of a world with which young Israfel 
was about to renew a long broken tie. 

It was a hot, fever-ridden community to which they were 
returning, with customs quite different than those current at 
Russell Square or Stoke Newington. 

Mr. Hughes of the house of Hughes & Armistead stabbed a Mr. Ran- 
dolph son of Wm. Randolph of Cumberland the other night, at the time 
it was thought to be mortal, as the dirk punctuated the left side just 
above the hip to a considerable depth, but Dr. Nelson who attended 
him, tells me no unfavorable symptoms exist now. Mr. H. is out of 
town & perhaps will not return. . . . 



"0 See Chapter XI. 



92 ISRAFEL 

Of the slaves working about the docks and ships in the swelter- 
ing summer weather, Mr. Ellis remarks June 27, 1820, shortly 
before the Allans returned: 

. . . The Richmond gang look as if they would rather be at home, but 
all goes on very well except the elopement of that troublesome fellow 
Nelson who went off last Wednesday and has not been heard of since. 
He is one of the best hands for work I ever saw, but he vexes me ex- 
ceedingly when he goes off, especially in busy times, little Bill goes 
about and does some light work, but still complains a good deal, 
Africas feet is nearly well and indeed I hear no complaining among 
any of the People except Caty's child, it is very poor. She says it is 
very sick. It has no fever nor complaint of the bowels. I fear it is neg- 
lected, I have sent it some chicken every day sence I have been 
up. ... 

So the days had been going on in the little town along the 
James to which the young Poe was returning to spend the rest 
of his boyhood and to become familiar with the life of a planta- 
tion founded community. On July 3rd Mr. Ellis writes his wife: 

. . . Mr. and Mrs. Allan are at last arrived in New York, and as soon 
as they get on, and settle down a little I shall leave them the bag to 
hold, and flee to the mountains. . . . Mr. Allan would set out from 
New York last Friday via Norfolk and I suppose will be here on Fri- 
day or Saturday. Mrs. Allan was rather unwell & was resting. The rest 
was hearty, don't give yourself any uneasiness about my health. . . . 
The inhalation of the exhilirating nitric acid gas in this place has 
gained some amusement among the curious and idle, I have not seen 
or felt the effects. 

The city is healthy, except for children teething, and many of them 
suffer greatly. . . . 

CHARLES 

The Allans with Miss Valentine and Edgar arrived at Richmond, 
after a voyage down the coast to Norfolk, on August 2nd, and 
went to stay at the house of Mr. Ellis as this letter shows. 1511 

Richmond, August 7th, 1820 

Your letter of the 4th inst. by last nights mail affords me great pleas- 
ure, and that of Mr. and Mrs. Allan who are at our home receiving the 

isi Also Woodbenry, Weiss, etc. 




The Home of Charles Ellis, partner of John Allan 
Franklin and Second Streets, Richmond, Virginia 

Here POE lived with his foster-parents a short while after returning from England 
in August, 1820. "The Enchanted Garden" was directly across the street from 
this house. This was one of POE'S boyhood haunts 

Courtesy of the Edgar Allan Poe Shrine, Richmond, Virginia 




"The Mother's Chamber'' in the Ellis House 
Occupied by Frances Allan in 1820 

Photograph 1877 
Courtesy of the Edzar Allan Poe Shrine* Richmond* firzinia 




acrftej 

'fijlSIZr&exsrvT^f 



~/t&j$& 

.';'- ;**\\ 
_ ^^ . * 





<* 




A Poem by Edgar Poe 
Found in the 1822 files of Ellis & Allan 

This poem, obviously in a childish hand, was found by Prof. Killis Campbell. The 
lines are not signed but arc almost certainly I'oe's. The treatment of the 
theme is characteristic. The poem may belong to the early * 4 lost volume" 



ISRAFEL MEETS HELEN 93 

congratulations of their friends. Mrs- Allan could she be as even tem- 
pered and as accommodating as she has been sence her return, she 
would make the path through life much more even to herself. ... I 
find Mr. Allan can't do much yet, it will take some time to obtain a 
knowledge of our affairs & he is engaged in seeing his old friends. 
Mr. and Mrs. Allan will continue at our home, they are all well but 
complain of the warm weather. . . . 

On August 8th Robert S. Ellis writes to congratulate Mr. and 
Mrs. Allan upon their safe return, and on August i4th 'from 
Charles Ellis, in another letter to his wife, we learn that: 

Our friends Mr. and Mrs. Allan, Nancy, and Edgar are very well & 
you would be surprised to see what health and color Mrs. A. has. They 
are quite well and satisfied at our house & make out pretty well altho 
not as well as you would do. They are a little Englishised but it will 
soon wear off. They talk of going to Stanton. . . . 

Edgar Poe remained for the entire Summer at the Ellis house. 
" Nancy and Edgar stay well," says John Allan in September. 
He was now " holding the bag " in good earnest, and not very 
much in it and goes on to gossip about cleaning up the old 
garden across the street, about an old slave who could work no 
more as her hip " seemed to be dislocated "... and prices cur- 
rent on tobacco. The old house on Tobacco Alley and i4th Street 
was still rented. Mr. Allan set about looking up a new house and 
secured one fronting West on Clay Street beyond old St. James 
Church. Nearby lived Dr. Ambler and Bishop Moore "right 
across on the corner from Clay Street." It was probably now 
that Edgar first took to swimming in Shockoe Creek with young 
Ambler, and to wandering about again with Ebenezer Burling, 
whose father Thomas printed the Journal of the State Senate. 
"Aunt" Nancy Valentine was 'a pleasant companion with a 
broad humorous face, good for a ramble with the boy out to the 
Hermitage, or for a game of chess with him when " Ma " was 
ill, or on rainy days sat sewing by her mahogany work stand. 
"Pa" was no longer so pleasant as in times past, even more 
stern than before. A great many things financial and domestic 
preyed upon his mind. Edgar began more and more to step over 
to the Mackenzies to see " Rose " and to play with Jack, to stay 



94 ISRAFEL 

at Burling's over night or with the Ellises. England seemed a 
dream, a new life had begun. Somehow he was already quite 
lonely and beginning to wonder about it all. Not long afterward 
he began to write poetry. 

Richmond in the i82o's was a good place for a boy to live in. 
The meadows, streams, swamps, and forests around about were 
beautiful, and the valley of the James from Church Hill and the 
Bluffs, with the yellow river winding away into the distance, or 
dashing among the wooded islands at the Falls, would present to 
European eyes, perhaps, a magnificent spectacle, for it is at least 
five times as large as the Marne and several times greater than 
the Thames, like the rest of America upon a continental scale. 

The little capital of Virginia had, at that time, a population of 
about twelve thousand souls. The porches of its pillared churches 
and political 'buildings looked down, with a semi-classic stare 
from its hills, over Georgian houses set amid spacious gardens 
and green lawns. At its foot ran the key-like flanges of docks, 
and the black warehouses edged with a tangled fringe of masts, 
sails, and flags; while around the curve of Penitentiary Hill 
came gliding the canal boats drawn by tinkling bell-hung mules. 
Boys swam in the river and creeks; over the fields sounded the 
plantation bells, or the sonorous roar of the conch-bugle calling 
the slaves from the fields; the tobacco waved, and the fortunes 
of the planters grew. 

No community in America had retained more of its pre- 
revolutionary traditions than tide-water Virginia. It was the 
home of an aristocracy born in the great houses of gentlemen, sur- 
rounded by servants and family portraits, the life of a flourishing 
colony projected forward into another time. 

Upon Poe's return to Richmond in 1820, save for the domestic 
chimneys, there could scarcely have been a smoke stack in the 
place. 132 Planters rode about the streets on blooded horses; the 
carriages of -the local gentry whirled by with black coachman 
and footman; the governor, if he was so minded, and he often 
was, kept at least a provincial court; the legislature met, and 
great lawyers argued at the bar. There was a brilliant round of 

182 Many old prints of Richmond show this delightful condition. 



ISRAFEL MEETS HELEN 95 

social activities in which the Allans were soon to take their part, 
an intense local pride, a taste for the arts, and a respect for tra- 
dition and inherited rank. In all this, the young Edgar Poe 
moved and breathed, and had the roots of his being. 

Immediately across from Mr. Ellis' house at Second and 
Franklin Streets there was then, and for many years later, a 
beautiful landscaped garden filled with lindens and the scent of 
winter-blooming roses. Amid its walls and nooks took place many 
of the incidents of one of the great romances of the poet's life, 
and it still flourishes in the lines which have fixed some of its 
scenes permanently upon the memories of men. But of that here- 
after. 183 

The family did not remain very long with Mr. Ellis, but moved 
in the Autumn of 1820 into their new home, 134 where Edgar must 
have renewed with peculiar intensity many of the scenes of his 
earliest recollections, and greeted with mutual curiosity the now 
budding young ladies and gentlemen with whom he had played 
as a child. 

One of these was Ebenezer Burling whom Poe had met at the 
Memorial Church. He resided with his widowed mother at a 
house in Bank Street, and seems to have played a not unimpor- 
tant r61e in some of the major incidents of the poet's youth. 185 
With Burling, Poe read Robinson Crusoe and the boys then had 
a boat on the James which seems to have been the genesis of the 
little pleasure yacht mentioned at the beginning of Arthur Gordon 
Pym. Burling, it is said, had previously taught Poe to swim. 136 
In 1836 Poe wrote the Southern Literary Messenger, harking 
back to old " Robinson Crusoe days ": 

How fondly do we recur in memory to those enchanted days of our 
boyhood when we first learned to grow serious over Robinson Crusoe! 
when we first found the spirit of wild adventure enkindling within 
us, as by the dim firelight we labored out, line by line, the marvelous 
import of those pages, and hung breathless and trembling with eager- 



133 See Chapter VIIL 

134 E. V. Valentine to the author, Richmond, July, 1925. 

135 J. H. Whitty Memoir, large edition, page XXIV. 

136 J. H. Whitty Memoir, large edition, page XXV. 



9 6 ISRAFEL 

ness over their absorbing over their enchanting interest. Alas! the 
days of desolate islands are no more. 

At any rate, the boys had many a lark together in " Richmond 
City " and the country about. A Mrs. C. E. Richardson afterward 
kept a tavern in Richmond which at one time sheltered Poe in 
a day of adversity, and Ebenezer, it is said, developed the drink 
habit early, which may have had some influence upon Poe in 
company with him there, but that was later on. 137 This Eben- 
ezer Burling, or Eerling, as it is sometimes spelled, was not a 
schoolmate of Poe but attended the school of one William Burns, 
a Scotch gentleman, who boarded at Parson Blair's house. 138 

If by some magic we could return to Richmond, Virginia, in 
the late Autumn of the early twenties after the harvest had been 
gathered, we might come across Edgar Allan Poe, a well-knit, 
broad-browed, curly-headed lad with astonishing long-lashed, 
deep grey eyes, seated with his best chums Jack Mackenzie, 
Rob Sully, little Bobby Stanard, and Robert Cabell upon a rail 
fence like so many crows, each munching a tender juicy turnip, 
or a raw sweet potato with a little salt on it, which, as many a 
Southern boy knows, is not half bad. On Saturdays there were 
fish-fries by the river and tramps through the luxuriant Virginia 
woods above the James after wild grapes and chinquepins. 

Edgar was well to the forefront in all of this. Much of the 
delicate timidity of his baby days had been, superficially at least, 
cast off. The playgrounds of the schools at Irvine and Stoke 
Newington had made him an able runner and jumper, 180 and had 
given him the English schoolboy's technique and readiness in 
fisticuffs which must have compelled the respect of his com- 
panions and have enabled him to indulge to the full a merry 
propensity for practical jokes. At one time he appeared as a 
ghost in the middle of a late card party in Richmond at which 
General Winfield Scott was present. It is worthy of note that 
Jack Mackenzie, the foster-brother of Rosalie, who knew him 



137 J. H. Whitty Memoir, large edition, page XXIX. 

138 Information gathered from the Ingram Papers. 

130 There are several stories and authentic ones of Foe's powers as a runner 
and jumper. 



ISRAFEL MEETS HELEN 97 

extremely well, and saw him often in his own house where Rosa- 
lie Poe had been given refuge 'and tender care, remarked of him, 
" I never saw in him as boy or man a sign of morbidness or 
melancholy, unless it was when Mrs. Stanard (" Helen ") died, 
when he appeared for some time grieving and oppressed. Aside 
from this, cards, raids on orchards and turnip patches, swimming 
in Shockoe Creek, and juvenile masquerades seem to have been 
the normal order of life. 140 

That there was another side, though, is abundantly evident 
from other accounts. The truth is, that even at this early date, 
Edgar Allan Poe began to develop that strange diversity, and the 
contradictory sides to his personality that have so puzzled and 
will long continue to intrigue the world. That he was a merry" 
companion in minor ways, many of his little friends have left 
their testimony. But that he was also a lonely and sometimes a 
morbid little boy, already torn and troubled by the riddles of 
existence, the demands of an esthetic nature for the unattainable, 
and satisfactions not to be found in the objective life of his com- 
panions, is equally certain. We hear of long lonesome tramps, of 
attempts at juvenile self-expression with both the pen and brush, 
which only secrecy could save from the inevitable ridicule of 
boyhood and the ponderous misunderstanding of adults. He was 
much given to day-dreams and reveries, and to the plucking of 
flowers and the reading of books. Where the University of Rich- 
mond now stands was once a meadow where the young Israfel 
culled violets. These, with other " feminine " characteristics, 
must inevitably have relegated him to a world apart from men 
and little boys. It was the world of vision and of dear-bought 
dreams. 

Considerable mention is made of Poe's enthusiasm for draw- 
ing, and there remains at least one drawing of his own hand, 
around which cluster the tenderest and saddest of memories. 
Poe seems always to have visualized with a keen eye for shadow 
and color, and with sufficient vividness to make him desire to 
reproduce his impressions. In this propensity he doubtless met 



140 Mrs. Susan Archer Weiss in her Home Life of Poe, not always reliable, gives 
John Mackenzie's own account of the intimacy between Poe and himself. 



98 ISRAFEL 



some sympathy at the hands of young Robert Sully 141 who came 
of a family of artists, and became a creditable one himself in 
after life. From Sully one gets a softer and more endearing pic- 
ture. Young Sully was somewhat delicate, and so sensitive and 
irritable that few of his companions could remain on good terms 
with him for long periods. In view of this, the little glimpse he 
gives us of Poe is doubly interesting. "I was a dull boy at 
school," Sully says, " and Edgar when he knew that I had an 
unusually hard lesson would help me with it. He would never 
allow the big boys to tease me, and was kind to me in every way. 
I used to admire and envy him, he was so bright, clever and 
handsome. He lived not far from me, just around the corner, and 
one Saturday he came running up to our house, calling out, 
' Come along, Rob! We are going to the ' Hermitage Woods ' for 
chinquepins, and you must come, too. Uncle Billy is going for 
a load of pine-needles, and we can ride in his wagon/ " In the 
shadow that soon falls over the life of this child of misfortune, 
the picture of the "bright" young Edgar and his little friend 
Rob rattling off with their childish arms around each other in 
Uncle Billy's old wagon, is like a gleam of sunlight across a 
somber landscape. In the future it was not often the clouds 
parted, even for so brief a glimpse as this. No wonder that later 
he was to look back upon these halycon days in Richmond as a 
Utopia of memory in which to take refuge from a cruel world. 

That the friendship with the Sullys was a close one is shown 
by the fact that Robert's uncle, Thomas Sully, the well-known 
American artist, some time later made a miniature portrait of 
the young Poe, then at the beginning of his fame, in the attitude 
of one of the portraits of Byron. 142 

Immediately upon his returning to Richmond John Allan 
placed his foster-son in the English and Classical School of one 
Joseph H. Clarke, of Trinity College, Dublin, who has been de- 
scribed as a fiery, pompous, and pedantic Irishman, making his 
living by assuming the r61e of perceptor to the sons of the more 



141 Nephew of the American artist, Thomas Sully. 

142 The author has certain intelligence of the existence of this portrait but is 
not at liberty to divulge full information owing to the conditions of the owner. 



ISRAFEL MEETS HELEN 99 

fashionable families of Richmond. 148 Like most Irishmen, how- 
ever, indications are not lacking that he possessed a softer and 
more genial side. 

The curriculum was that of the old fashioned preparatory 
school of the day, a continuation of the Latin, French, and pri- 
mary mathematics of the English Schools which Poe had already 
attended. In America, perhaps, there was even then some at- 
tempt at actually teaching the spoken language, and of reading 
some of its more classic literature, Johnson, Addison, Goldsmith 
or Pope. That Edgar was well advanced in Latin for a boy of 
his years, and that the cost of his education was not unduly 
heavy, this interesting receipt found among his foster-father's 
papers will testify: 

Mr. JOHN ALLAN, Dr. 

To present quarters tuition of 

Master Poe from June nth to Sept n 1822 . . . $12.50 
i. Horace 3.50, Cicero de Off. 62> 
i. Copy book, paper Pen & Ink 



$17-50 
Rec'd pay. 

JOS. H. CLARKE 143 



On another bill dated March 11, 1822 there is a charge of $i 
for a " Portion of Fuel." 148 No further text books are mentioned. 

At this rate young Edgar's schooling could not have cost much 
over $60.00 a year. Even this, however, is paid in installments 
during 1822, which jibes with the accounts of Mr. Allan's finan- 
cial embarrassment at the time. 143 

Mr. Allan's English ventures had not been successful, and had 
displeased both his partner, Charles Ellis, and his uncle, William 
Gait, upon the backing of whose fortune in the final analysis, 
rested the credit of the firm. Mr. Allan, was at one time forced 
to a personal assignment to his creditors, but, by a special ar- 
rangement, was left in actual possession of his various proper- 

143 Receipts for Poe's tuition under Master Clarke in the Ellis & Allan Papers. 
Photostats in possession of the author. Also see Woodberry, 1909, page 24- 



ioo ISRAFEL 

ties. 144 The record of mortgages upon the family real estate im- 
mediately prior to the year 1823, show that, to say the least, 
Edgar's guardian must have been forced to live with consider- 
able prudence and an eye to the pennies. 144 This in conjunction 
with the legends as to the early pampering of Edgar by "a 
princely merchant/' and the possible result of the effect of 'busi- 
ness worries upon John Allan's none too affable temper, may 
have a direct bearing upon the early life of Poe. There must 
have been times when the atmosphere of the family circle, de- 
spite the gentle presence of Frances Allan and the gaiety of Anne 
- -Valentine, reeked with Scotch gloom. 

During these periods of gloom and family friction, Edgar 
would spend the night at Burling's house which met with strong 
disapproval from Mr. Allan. 

As to what went on in the garret of the house on the corner of 
Clay and Fifth Streets, it is not hard to hazard a fairly accurate 
guess. There can be no doubt that it was very early Edgar Allan 
Poe's ambition to be a poet. 14B Some of his schoolmates in Rich- 
mond early noted in him a certain aloofness, and a tendency to 
withdraw to his room and shut himself up to scribble verses. That 
the desire for creative writing was so strong upon a lad of four- 
teen or fifteen that he would leave the games and pastimes of his 
schoolfellows to go alone to his room and write verses is some- 
thing of major importance in the story of his life. 

Poetry, in the frankly objective civilization of the United 
States, which has largely given itself over to the conquest of a 
continent and a preoccupation with things for their own sake, is 
a lonely, and in all save its last honorable stages, a discounted 
art. The physical form in which it congeals is expensive to pro- 
duce, requires the cooperation of others, is silent in itself, and 
has almost no marketable value. Hence, the young person who 
chooses the art of poetry in which to embody the forms and 



144 Woodberry, 1909, page 27, etc., the assets of Ellis & Allan were bought 
in at public auction by John Allan's uncle William Gait who in 1825 returned them 
by bequest. See Appendix. 

145 For the statements here, I am relying on statements in the preface to 
Poe's first book in 1827, and many other indications gleaned from various sources 
too numerous to list. 



ISRAFEL MEETS HELEN 101 

enginery of his imagination, is suspected to be doing nothing at 
all, or to be a little mad. In any case, his interruption upon any 
pretext whatsoever is thought of as being of no importance what- 
ever. The inevitable and unhealthy conclusion is therefore forced 
upon such a one by the entire world that he is a being set apart. 
That his art may be part and parcel of his surroundings and of 
vital importance to his neighbors, is usually a posthumous dis- 
covery. To write poetry he must dream with an intensity that 
transcends reality; to focus his dreams he requires uninterrupted 
leisure; and to find this he must hide himself. The result is only 
too often the feeling of a hunted thing, a sense of remoteness 
from the life about, and a nervous system jangled by the million 
interruptions of family 'and economic life. Above all there is no 
one to whom he may go to learn his art; or if there is, the result 
is usually fatal. It is essential, then, that any great poet should 
begin young, or by the time he has mastered his tools he may 
be too old to produce. That all of this, including the nervous 
stress of contempt and interruptions, played its part in the ex- 
perience of Poe is an almost inevitable conclusion. 

It is pertinent to note, therefore, that like Keats and Shelley, 
Poe began to write very early. Some of the contents of his first 
book, he claims to have composed at the age of fourteen; nor is 
this at variance with what we know of his rather precocious de- 
velopment which James Gait noticed even in the conversation of 
the little boy at Irvine. That he was encouraged at home by 
Frances Allan, both tradition and the knowledge of his foster- 
mother's character seem to definitely indicate. Even John Allan 
is said to have taken a secret pride in the boy's effusions and to 
have read them upon occasions to the amusement of his friends, 
who pronounced them " trash." 14C At any rate, sometime toward 
the end of Edgar's attendance upon Master Clarke, John Allan 
is known to have shown the Irish schoolmaster a whole manu- 
script of collected verses by his youthful ward. 147 

These do not seem to have been simply the occasional doggerel 
which all sentimental young fellows at some time during their 

140 R. H. Stoddard Memoir, page 27. Stoddard is to be taken with a grain of salt. 
147 Statement by Master Clarke. 



102 ISRAFEL 

life write to the eyebrows of their calf-loves, but a whole " vol- 
ume " of verses to an entire townful of young ladies. The object 
cannot have been to make all the girls love him at once, such 
Mormon propensities in an adolescent boy would, indeed, have 
been alarming. Even at the risk of rating the attraction of the 
ladies to be secondary, it looks very much as if the primary in- 
terest of the young poet must have been in the poems themselves. 
These must have been completed before Edgar was fifteen, as 
old Master Clarke, the schoolmaster, said that Mr. Allan showed 
them to him with a view of getting his judgment upon the wis- 
dom of their publication, before the Fall of 1823 when that 
worthy Irishman retired from the headship of the Academy, vice 
Master Burke. As to what his comments were, we can guess. It 
has since been claimed that some of these early verses were 
those printed in Baltimore in 1823, signed " Edgar," but since the 
verses themselves show no literary evidence to warrant the as- 
sumption, the " fact " can be dismissed. 

More amorous verses, however, continued to drip from the 
enamoured pen of the young author, if the statements of several 
Richmond ladies are to be relied on. These particular ones about 
1823 or 1824 seem to have been addressed largely to the belles 
of a fashionable boarding school kept by Miss Jane Mackenzie, 
the sister of the Mrs. William Mackenzie who had taken Rosalie 
into her home. " She was," says a lady biographer, 148 " tall and 
stately, prim and precise, and was attired generally in black silk 
and elaborate cap and frizette, a very lady-prioress sort of per- 
son. . . . When Edgar was about fifteen or sixteen he began to 
make trouble for Miss Jane." 

This " trouble " took the form of clandestine correspondence 
with the fair virgins immured behind the walls of Miss Jane. 
The missives were, it appears, supplemented by candy and of- 
ferings of "original poetry." It was Edgar's habit to make 
pencil sketches of the girls who had most smitten his fancy, and 
to request these favored maidens to attach locks of their hair to 
the cards. Little sister, Rosalie, who is described at this time, as 
a " pretty child with blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and of a sweet dis- 

** 8 Mrs. Susan Archer Weiss. 



ISRAFEL MEETS HELEN 103 

position," was the postman for Eros until the indignation of Miss 
Jane and the slipper of Mrs. Mackenzie rudely discouraged the 
messenger of romance. 

Rosalie appears to have been very fond of her brother, whom 
she saw frequently at church and as a constant visitor at the 
Mackenzies, the home of one of Edgar's closest chums, young 
Jack. She followed the two boys about after school, and romped 
with them whenever she could. Later on this propensity to follow 
Edgar was to become embarrassing, due largely to an unfortu- 
nate development, or rather lack of development, which came 
over the girl when she was about twelve years old. Up to that 
age she seems to have developed in a healthy and usual way, 
but from then on she ceased to function as a normal human be- 
ing. Probably due to a defective heredity, the sister of Edgar 
Allan Poe, while apparently healthy physically, retained the men- 
tality of an adolescent. To the extent that Edgar was plus, Rosa- 
lie was minus. Viewed in the cold light of modern psychology, 
there can 'be little doubt that they were both abnormal types. 
Poe was a genius; Rosalie was a moron. 

The recollections of this period of Poe's youth, both apocry- 
phal and genuine, are many and various. Even some of those 
which are well authenticated, however, are not all pertinent to 
his development, and for the most part assume the nature of 
irrelevant small-talk and gossip. But a few of the memories of 
Col. Thomas H. Ellis, the son of Charles Ellis, who was on pe- 
culiar terms of intimacy with both Poe and the Allans are worth 
recording. 140 

Among other things about Poe, he says that "He was very 
beautiful, yet brave and manly for one so young. No boy ever 
had a greater influence over me than he had. He was indeed a 
leader among his playmates." Tom Ellis remembered that one day 
Edgar Poe took him off into the fields and woods near Belve- 
dere, an estate that then belonged to Judge Bushrod Washington, 
and kept the little fellow there all day, while he shot a lot of the 
good judge's domestic fowls. For this Mr. Allan gave his " son " 
a good whipping when he returned late that evening. Poe also 

14 *> Harrison's Life of Poe, pages 23, 24, 25. 



104 ISRAFEL 

taught Tom how to shoot, swim, and play bandy, and once " res- 
cued " the little chap from drowning after throwing him into the 
river 'at the Falls in order to teach him to swim. Edgar also 
chased Tom's little sister Jane into hysterics with a toy snake 
which caused considerable family difficulties. The Allans it 
seems, significantly enough, would have liked to adopt this little 
girl as their daughter, and showered the family of the " senior 
partner " with the " largest Christmas and birthday gifts which 
they received." Colonel Ellis recalled Poe's having taken first 
prize in elocution when he competed with Channing Moore, Gary 
Wickham, Andrew Johnston, Nat Howard and others. " He was 
trained in all the habits of the most polished society. There was 
not a brighter, more graceful, or more attractive boy in the city 
than Edgar Allan Poe." Of the social affairs in the Allan house- 
hold about this time, however, we get a somewhat different pic- 
ture from young Jack Mackenzie. 

That young gentleman, it appears, could not abide the ordeal 
of a meal at the Allans. " Mr. Allan was a good man in his way," 
he said, " but Edgar was not fond of him. He was sharp and 
exacting, and with his long, hooked nose, and small keen eyes 
looking from under his shaggy eyebrows, he always reminded me 
of a hawk. I know that often when angry with Edgar he would 
threaten to turn him adrift, and that he never allowed him to 
lose sight of his dependence on his charity." The Allans, who 
were fond of giving teas and " sociables," required Edgar to be 
present, usually with one or two boy friends, and occasionally he 
was given a party of his own when both boys and girls were in- 
vited. On such occasions, despite the charm of Mrs. Allan and 
the good fun of "Aunt Nancy" Valentine, a rigid etiquette 
reigned, and Mr. Allan used these occasions quite obviously to 
cultivate in Edgar the stilted manners which the code of the time 
prescribed, a type of social behavior more consonant with the in- 
clinations and training of Mr. Allan, than that of higher Virginia 
society. 

Formalities, important as Mr. Allan may have thought them 
,to be, could not have troubled Edgar very much at this time. 
He seems to have led a double life of dreaming and verse mak- 



ISRAFEL MEETS HELEN 105 

ing on the one hand, and a thoroughly harum-scarum existence 
on the other. He was fond of stealing off with three of four 
cronies to swim in the James near Rocketts or the pool below 
the Falls, where he met, and apparently enjoyed, the society of 
the young toughs of that neighborhood known to all boys of 
Richmond as " Butcher Cats." When the water was low, they 
would wade over the rocky bed of the James to the far bank 
and set fish-traps along the shores of its willow-islands. Here 
Edgar with Burling and others led a more or less " Huck Finn "- 
" Tom Sawyer " kind of existence during the summers, and de- 
veloped a wholesome, and, for a boy of his years, an unusual 
physique in muscle at least. On the James, indeed, occurred 
the " great " feat of his boyhood, when he more than satisfied 
the Byronic tradition. Poe himself was proud of his athletic ac- 
complishment, and as late as May, 1835, wrote to Mr. White 
the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger about some men- 
tion of the incident which was remembered for years in Rich- 
mond: 

The writer seems to compare my swim with that of Lord Bryon, 
whereas there can be no comparison between them. Any swimmer ' in 
the falls ' in my days, would have swum the Hellespont, and thought 
nothing of the matter. I swam from Ludlow'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 of attempting to 
swim the British channel from Dover to Calais. 100 

Edgar was evidently considerable of a hero. Quite a little 
crowd gathered to see him start. Master Burke, the schoolmaster, 
followed in a boat; with Robert Cabell, little Robert Stanard, 
and some others trying to keep abreast of them along the banks. 
Poe succeeded in reaching his goal and walked home afterwards 
apparently none the worse for wear, and in triumph. Such, how- 
ever, was not the experience of little Rob Stanard who returned 
home very late, covered with mud and soaked. His excuse to his 
father, Judge Robert Stanard, was that " he had been walking 



o Published in the Southern Literary Messenger and also quoted by Ingram. 
For the incident see also Harrison, Woodberry, etc. 



106 ISRAFEL 

down the river bank watching Edgar Poe swim to Warwick." 151 
As to what followed immediately history is silent. Yet the ac- 
quaintance of these two lads was important. Out of it sprang 
the first great emotional experience of Edgar Poe's life, and one 
of the supreme lyrical utterances of romantic poetry. 

The tie which often exists thus between an older and a younger 
playmate, is one of the dearest and most serene of human asso- 
ciations* It is not a complicated one, and there are no selfish 
motives in it. The recognition and protection of the older boy, 
whose superior mental and physical development give him an al- 
most magic superiority, the recognition of which is delightful, is 
returned whole-heartedly by the younger partner in the form of 
undisguised admiration, trust, and affection, to which only the 
term, " hero worship," can apply. Between Edgar Poe and Rob 
Stanard such a friendship seems to have existed. It is probable 
that Poe found in the high bred delicacy and sensitive nature of 
the younger boy, for such from many accounts he appears to 
have been, a refuge from the more boisterous and insensate na- 
tures about him. What more natural then, than that little Rob 
should take his hero Edgar home and exhibit him proudly to the 
family, who had doubtless been regaled with accounts of his 
charm, prowess, and virtues. It is the essence of a hero that he 
has no faults. 

So it came about, one important day for poetry, that Rob 
Stanard took Eddie Poe home to show him his pet rabbits and 
pigeons. After these were duly, and no doubt satisfactorily ad- 
mired, for Edgar was always very fond of pets, considering that 
animals were in many respects superior to men, young Bob prob- 
ably invited him into the house to meet his mother, Mrs. Jane 
Stith Stanard. One can imagine the two quaintly dressed boys en- 
tering the old house together to meet " mother," That meeting 
was to be the awakening encounter and emotional inspiration of 
his manhood. 

~Mrs. Stanard was in one of the front rooms standing by a 
window niche. The light falling upon her, caught in her dark 

161 Reminiscences of John C. Stanard furnished to the author by W. G. 
Stanard, President of the Virginia Historical Association, August, 1925, 




The House of Poe's " Helen ", Jane Stith Stanard 

Capitol Square, Richmond 

(The house behind the statue of Henry Clay.) 

The chimney to the right was on BUSHROD WASHINGTON'S office. It was in 
this house that POK met the mother of his schoolmate, ROBERT STANARD. This 
lady influenced his whole life, and has hcen immortalized in one of POE'S greatest 
poems, To Helen 

Probally the only extant photograph 
Courtesy of the Edgar Allan Poe Shrine, Richmond, Virginia 



ISRAFEL MEETS HELEN 107 

ringlets crossed by a white snood, glowed in the classic folds of 
her gown, and flowed about her slenderly graceful figure. Her 
face, the lineaments of which were turned toward Poe, was tinted 
by the gold of leaf-filtered sunshine. To the astonished boy her 
very being and body seemed to radiate light. 152 " This is Edgar 
Poe, mother," said little Robert. " This is ' Helen/ Edgar," said a 
voice in the boy's soul, "in her behold the comfort of great 
beauty." On the bewildered ears of the young poet fell the sweet 
voice of Mrs. Stanard thanking him for his kindness to her little 
son and bidding him welcome with gracious words to her house. 

Poe went home in a dream from which he never fully aroused 
himself. 158 In Mrs. Stanard he had found the chivalrous ideal of 
a young boy's first idolatry and the material comfort of sym- 
pathy and appreciation, for it is probable that to Mrs. Stanard he 
read his verses, and received from her both helpful criticism and 
wise encouragement. What she meant to him, only an aspiring 
young poet, left an orphan, and a worshiper of beauty could 
know. That there were many visits to her house during the course 
of several years, and not one only, as has been so often stated, 
is certain. 

Judge Robert Stanard's house, where Poe's " Helen," and his 
little friend Robert lived, is still standing. It is on Ninth Street 
facing Capital Square in Richmond, and in the days of Poe's 
boyhood had a portico and marble stoop with brass rails in front. 
Its garden, which was a beautiful one, occupied almost the entire 
square. Here in the midst of fragrant Southern bloom and. the 
sudden wings of little Rob's pigeons, Edgar must often have sat 
in some quiet nook with Rob and his mother, read his poems, and 
listened to the words of encouragement which fell with a double 



102 There is, of course, no precise contemporary account of the actual scene 
of this meeting. I am giving the descriptions from a knowledge of the house and 
descriptions of a portrait of Jane Stith Stanard. The poem To Helen seems to 
be the first hand impression of a beloved person bathed in and radiating light. 

ics Poe's own statement to Mrs. Helen Whitman that Jane Stith Stanard was 
Poe's " Helen " is attested beyond all dispute by the knowledge of the Stanard 
family, and a copy of the 1845 edition of Poe's poems given to Mrs. Whitman by 
him. On page 91 of the first volume, the poem To Helen appears, besides the 
title of which is the word " Stannard " written in Poe's own hand in pencil. Cata- 
logue of American Artists' Association, April 28, 1924. 



io8 ISRAFEL 



value from such beautiful lips. There are many recollections in 
the Stanard family of young Poe's intimacy with all the in- 
mates of the house, and the sweet tie of sympathy existing be- 
tween Mrs. Stanard and the handsome young lad was remarked 
by all. John C. Stanard, a nephew of Robert's father, remembers 
coming to the house one day and knocking for some time with- 
out any response. He finally heard steps as if someone inside 
were trying to make as little noise as possible. Then the door 
was opened by little Robert Stanard and Edgar Poe, both of 
whom looked embarrassed. He found that the family was out, 
and that the servants had taken advantage of their absence to 
go out, too. The two boys had been playing a forbidden game of 
cards, and after his knock were hiding the pack before they let 
him in. In the face of such testimony it is idle to say that Poe 
met " Helen " only once. 151 

Both Mrs. Stanard and Edgar Poe were types of those super- 
sensitive natures whose higher inner processes take place in that 
holy land of sensibility, the western border of which so often 
marches with the kingdom of insanity. Both of them were to 
trespass over this boundary in the dark caravan of melancholy, 
Edgar for occasional sojourns, but " Helen " to be lost perma- 
nently amid the strange gleams and shadows of that realm only 
a few years later. Between these kindred there had arisen an in- 
stinctive and instant bond of sympathy. For an instant before 
they passed into the night, their fingers touched, and Edgar for 
once was completely happy in another's presence. 

I have been happy, tho' but in a dream. 

I have been happy and I love the theme, 

Wrote Poe three or four years later in his first book. 

Thus to have found this first real love and the maternal ten- 
derness, which filled the greatest need in his life, combined in a 
single person was a piece of psychic good fortune of momentous 
import to Poe. What was said in their conversations is too 
long in the past to know, probably nothing of great verbal im- 
port. These talks, however, seem to have marked those periods, 
when for a few instants the clock ticked off a few moments 



ISRAFEL MEETS HELEN 109 

when Edgar Allan Poe found himself completely at home in 
this world. 

They were interrupted by the advance across the dial of the 
shadow which was to completely envelope " Helen " and to wrap 
her from the sight of Edgar. Mrs. Stanard was going insane. In 
April, 1824, she died at the age of thirty-one. Azrael had scored 
two in what was to be an increasingly intimate association with 
Israf el. Jane Stith Stanard was buried in Shockoe Cemetery where 
she now lies with the other members of her family, among whom 
is " little Bob." A pall of violets, those " myriad types of the 
.human eye " have filled the little inclosure with eternal spring. 154 

There is an immortal story that Poe haunted the spot. He said 
that he did, in a confession to another Helen years later, and 
tradition seems to confirm the tale. That his great grief was noted 
even by his companions, is a matter of record. Undoubtedly be- 
hind the little gate rests the most ideal love of the man's soul. 
There is another inscription upon the stone, but for posterity 
there is only one epitaph 

- TO HELEN 
Helen, thy beauty is to me 

Like those Nicean barks of yore, 
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea 

The weary, wayworn wanderer bore 
To his own native shore. 

On desperate seas long wont to roam, 

Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, 
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home 

To the glory that was Greece, 
And the grandeur that was Rome. 

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche, 

How statue-like I see thee stand, 

The agate lamp within thy hand! 
Ah! Psyche, from the regions which 

Are Holy Land! 

16 * The epitaphs of the Stanard family read: " Jane Stith Stanard . . . departed 
this life on the 28th of April, in the year 1824, in the sist year of her age." 
"Robert Stanard (husband) born xyth Aug. 1781, died i4th May, 1846." 

" Robert Craig Stanard (Poe's playmate) born on the 7th of May, 1814 and 
died in Richmond on the 2nd of June, 1857." Hence Poe was about fifteen when 
he first saw " Helen," and little Rob, ten. 



CHAPTER VII 
Israfel Salutes the Marquis 



OVER a third of the span of the days allotted Israfel had 
already flashed their way through the kaleidoscope of 
their seasons, before "Helen" was borne to her final 
refuge. The fiery, sensitive young boy was fast 'budding into the 
even more sensitive man, a process which seems to have taken 
place rather precociously in Poe, for all accounts agree that, 
both mentally and physically, the young poet developed " beyond 
his years." That his heredity and temperament completed them- 
selves in an accelerated, but accentuated, and rather brief period, 
the history of his parents and the evidence about him seems to 
indicate. He was a lamp which burned intensely in response to 
the current of a life which was so strong, and which alternated 
so violently between hope and despair, that the filament was soon 
burnt out. In the course of the next few years, from 1823 on, he 
was to experience a nervous tension and undergo trials, the nerve 
racking effect of which undoubtedly left him unstrung, and fol- 
lowed him through the remaining lustra of his life. To a finely 
organized body and intellect, the trials of adolescence are often 
sufficient in themselves to dictate the future motions of the man; 
add to this the body-blows of death, an unhappy and harassed 
love affair, a complete change in the methods of living of one's 
family, with all the adjustments of environment involved, accom- 
panied by an agony of domestic dissensions, and it does not re- 
quire the prophetic offices of a psychologist to predict the re- 
sult. 155 Through such an experience the young Poe was about to 
pass. For several reasons, then, the year 1823 may be said to 
definitely mark the end of his childhood. 
One of the minor changes, but, nevertheless to a youth, an im- 

105 The evidence of the growing tension from this time on in the Allan house- 
hold rests upon such a variety of indications that, to present all the proof, would 
turn this chapter into an exhibition of stray phrases and hints from documents. 
A few of the more important will be presented. 



ISRAFEL SALUTES THE MARQUIS 113 

portant one, was the resignation of Master Joseph Clarke as the 
headmaster of the school which Poe attended, the somewhat 
flamboyant regime of the Irishman giving way to that of the new 
incumbent, Master William Burke, a man of sounder learning 
and more rigid discipline, the rod being by no means a stranger 
to his strong right hand. In the Fall of 1823, Edgar Allan Poe 
was the star pupil in the ceremony attendant upon the change 
of school administrations, and addressed his retiring master in 
an English ode, written by himself for the occasion. 156 The de- 
lighted old Irishman never forgot this, and, years later in Balti- 
more, recalled of his famous pupil that " Edgar had a very sweet 
disposition, he was always cheerful, brimful of mirth and a very 
great favorite with his schoolmates. I never had occasion to speak 
a harsh word to him, much less to make him do penance. He had 
a great ambition to excell." Master Clarke also remembered that 
during the vacation of 1822 two of his pupils, Edgar Poe and 
Nat Howard, had each written him a complimentary letter in 
Latin and that Edgar's had been in verse. That before he was 
sixteen, Poe could manage Latin verses, and compose and deliver 
in English a school ode for an audience of his schoolmates and 
parents, may be minor exhibits, but they are at least tell-tale 
straws on the current of his literary progress. 157 

With the advent of Master Burke, a less happy period of 
every-day and school life seems to have fallen upon Poe. Not 
that the new schoolmaster was responsible, indeed, it was noted 
by Edgar's schoolmates that Poe was almost alone among them 
in escaping condign attentions, but the young scholar seems to 
have developed an aloofness and moodiness, a tendency to with- 
draw himself more than ever from the generally all-absorbing 
activities of school life, so engrossing to the average boy, which 
was the cause of remark and distinctly remembered by his fel- 
lows. 158 Looking backward, it is not hard to understand what 
must have been a mystery to his schoolmates. 

ice Woodberry, 1909 edition, vol. I, page 25, and others. 

167 Recollections of Joseph Clarke, Poe's schoolmaster, when interviewed by a 
Baltimore reporter. 

8 Recollections of John Mackenzie and Dr. Creed Thomas of Richmond, 
Poe's schoolmates. 



H4 ISRAFEL 

Mrs. Stanard was going insane and dying. About this time the 
visits to her house must have had to cease, and we can imagine 
Edgar's anxious inquiries morning after morning of little Robert 
before school, the mournful replies of his little friend, and the 
vision of a loved face, seen through a haze of secret tears, glim- 
mering vaguely upon the pages of Latin texts. Decidedly, this 
would not be understood by the boys on the benches about him, 
nor was it a subject which he desired to have discussed. The 
repression and depression of secret sorrow had already begun to 
erect its barrier between him and the bright juvenile world about. 
There were also, in all probability, other reasons for sullen irri- 
tation and disquiet, reasons the most profound. 

About this time the health of Poe's foster-mother again be- 
comes the subject of anxious remarks in the annals of the family 
correspondence, 150 and it seems probable that Frances Allan be- 
gan about now to pass into the state of ill health and decline 
which in the space of three or four years was to stretch her not 
far from Mrs. Stanard in Shockoe Cemetery. 

Poe loved Frances Allan with one of the greatest loves of his 
life, 100 the ties of gratitude and natural affection which bound 
him to her were as great as can exist. In addition, she possessed 
that quality of physical beauty which he worshiped, and by this 
time he must have long known that it was to her and her sister, 
to his " dear Ma, and Aunt Nancy " that he owed his preserva- 
tion and his continued cherishing in the house of John Allan. 
What were the physical causes of Mrs. Allan's continued illness, 
and whether they were connected with her childlessness, is a 
question which 'by its inevitable and proper privacy precludes 
both the material for and the desire to discuss it. That Poe pon- 
dered it, however, in his heart seems hardly problematical He 
was now a man, possessed of the mature knowledge and feelings 
which often come early to Southern youths, and he lived in an 



1W > See Mis & Attan Papers, Washington, D. C., in the letters between John 
Allan and his sisters about the Gait will this subject is incidentally mentioned, 

100 The letters of Poe to his foster-mother a few years later were said to have 
been couched in terms of passionate endearment. 



ISRAFEL SALUTES THE MARQUIS 115 

age and place where the frankness and outspoken habits of the 
late Eighteenth Century still lingered strongly. What he knew, 
or thought about this problem which affected him and his family 
circle so vitally, we can never know, but it is possible that re- 
sults of his speculations may have strongly affected him in his 
attitude towards his foster-father. They were facing each other 
now in the same house as man to man. It was no longer, as in 
England, " little Edgar " and " Pa," but Edgar Allan Poe, poet, 
looking searchingly into the eyes of John Allan, merchant. Upon 
occasions it must have been a type of scrutiny which even John 
Allan found somewhat disconcerting. 

In 1823-1824 Richmond, Virginia, was a small town according 
to modern standards, of whose inhabitants a large proportion 
were slaves. The conventions of society were strict, and the con- 
fines of the white community in the city were numerically nar- 
row. The wireless was yet to be invented, but news of a certain 
character undoubtedly radiated rapidly, and, from the nature of 
the conditions existing in the Allan household from about this 
time until the death and the filing of the will of John Allan, 
which confirmed certain rumors, it seems warrantable to infer 
that Frances Allan was by now aware of the fact that she had 
not 'been the sole object of her husband's affections. 101 

That the intelligence would be disturbing to her, and to the 
little circle over whose destinies she had watched with tender 
love and solicitude, it seems fatuous to remark. Whether she 
confided immediately in Edgar no one can know. It seems un- 
likely. Her loyalty to her husband, and her regard for the tender 
feelings of the sensitive schoolboy would probably forbid, but 
Poe would be quick to sense the electricity in the atmosphere of 
trouble, and in the inevitable family alignment which was to fol- 



101 Just when, or how, Frances Allan came to suspect this cannot, of course, 
be shown. From all indications, the life of the family while in England had been 
very happy. Between 1820 and 1824 something occurred to change this. Mrs. 
Allan's health began seriously to fail, we find John Allan and Poe at serious odds, 
and Edgar very gloomy. From later correspondence it is known that Poe took his 
foster-mother's part in the family dissensions. Miss Valentine's sympathy was 
naturally with her sister. It appears that about this time Edwin Collier or one 
of the other illegitimate sons of Allan was taken from Richmond and sent to school 
in Washington, D. C. 



n6 ISRAFEL 

low, he could not have helped but take the side to which sym- 
pathy, and, a little later, full knowledge of the facts impelled 
him. It was, of course, that of his " mother." 

During the period of financial embarrassment leading up to 
the mortgaging and assignment of his property 1G2 after the return 
from England, John Allan's temper could not have been of the 
best, and this too would have added to the stresses in the house- 
hold. Two years later, on March 26, 1825, however, Mr. Allan was 
relieved of the shadow on this side of his affairs by the death of his 
uncle, William Gait, who left him the bulk of a great fortune, the 
Allans, Gaits, and other relatives in both America and Scotland 
coming in for minor shares. It was an event which had been an- 
ticipated with various feelings by a large number of those who 
expected to benefit. Poe afterwards stated that the fortune 
.amounted in all to $750,000, whether that is substantially cor- 
rect or not, it is difficult at this date to ascertain. 103 Suffice it to 
say, that John Allan found himself the recipient of a fortune 
in cash, merchandise, slaves, securities and real estate, which 
would in modern times entitle him to be described as a mil- 
lionaire. The readjustments involved in his life, status and so- 
cial ambitions, and the effect of these upon his immediate 
family were various and not altogether restful, nor entirely 
happy. 

As one of the richest men in Virginia, he would inevitably be- 
come the object of considerable attention and remark, a condi- 
tion which, owing to certain aspects of his private affairs, was 
not altogether to be relished. Envy was, as always, present to 
drop a little vitriol into the Falernian. John Allan was troubled 
with a lame foot and raised his cane high when he walked " So 
Gait has left all his money to old swell-foot Allan " was the 
remark made by a Richmond acquaintance in a letter to a friend 



102 The year 1823 had been one of extreme financial depression amounting to 
panic. William Gait's death later, came in the nick of time to save John Allan. 

103 Letter from Poe to William Poe dated, Richmond, August soth, 1835, 
"Brought up to no profession, and educated in the expectation of an immense 
fortune (Mr. A. having been worth $750,000) the blow has been a heavy 
one. . . ." etc. See Harrison, vol. II, page 15. See also the will of William Gait, 
Appendix. 



ISRAFEL SALUTES THE MARQUIS 117 

when he heard the news. 164 Perhaps the feeling of such an attitude 
in the background, brought the cane down a little more firmly, 
and gave a firmness and breadth to certain plans for the future 
in which a grand family mansion played a part; plans that might 
otherwise have been conceived upon a somewhat less impressive 
scale. There was trouble in Scotland over the administration of 
the will, too, and threats to appeal to the law. In the eyes of cer- 
tain relatives the shares which they received appeared attenu- 
ated, 165 and the 'brisk correspondence which ensued reeked with 
Caledonian frankness, to which the replies were carefully pon- 
dered. 

All this was not conducive to the peace of mind of John Allan 
or Edgar Allan Poe. The world about was troubled by many 
things, its vistas were suddenly strangely widened, the prime af- 
fections upon which it hung were becoming frayed, and in the 
background She of the agate lamp was awfully dying. Of these 
days, Creed Thomas, Poe's schoolmate, says 106 "It was a no- 
ticeable fact that he never asked any of his schoolmates to go 
home with him after school. The boys would frequently on 
Fridays take dinner or spend the night with each other at their 
homes, but Poe was never known to enter into this social inter- 
course. After he left the school ground we saw no more of him 
until next day/' Where was the merry and popular Edgar Poe 
of other days? The shadows, it would seem, had already begun 
to fall. 

In April, 1824, occurred the death of Mrs. Stanard. It is not 
known definitely whether her unhappy young admirer was pres- 
ent at her burial or not. He was a close friend of little Rob, and 
well liked by the family, but the chances are against it, as the 



le* The author does not fed at liberty to quote the source. See also a letter 
concerning William Gait printed, Appendix. 

* w Letter from John Allan to one of his sisters, even some years later, from 
Richmond, March 27, 1827. " . . . Perhaps the four first Legatees named in my 
Uncle's Will do not attach sufficient importance to Capt. and Jane Walsh's 
lawyer's letter, you are out of the scrape, unless indeed Capt. Walsh can prove 
as he has written that there can be no doubt but Jane is entitled to the whole 
residue. I think this rather too absurd, but will scuffle for her third in place of 
a Seventh. . . ." etc., for three long pages. EUis & Allan Papers, Washington, D. C. . 

i 6 Dr. Creed Thomas, afterward a well-known Richmond physician. 



n8 ISRAFEL 

nature of " Helen's " taking off had been so peculiarly tragic that 
even the presence of dear " strangers " would have been painful 
to the family. If Poe haunted her grave at night as tradition as- 
serts, the nature of his experiences in a dark cemetery with the 
sound of the night wind through the funereal gratings and tall 
grave grasses must have been searing to the soul of one who was 
scarcely more than a boy. Nor could a reckless abandonment to 
even so extreme and natural a grief have failed to give a morbid 
cast to his thoughts, and have tried his already taut nervous 
system. The truth is that Poe's weeping "by night at the grave 
of " Helen " is one of the episodes in his life which probably can 
never be reduced to a certainty. The main evidence 'for it rests 
upon his own account given years later to Mrs. Helen Whitman, 
when he was under every inducement to render as romantic as 
possible every association which hung about the name of 
" Helen," past and present. The story is almost too dramatically 
pat, and episodically fortunate, to be taken as wholly true. It 
agrees too well with the legend which he built up about himself 
later, and with the lugubrious sentimentality of the time. It is 
what he would like to have happened, and that, only too often, 
was sufficient for Poe to " make it so." That he was afraid of the 
dark and a prey to terrifying visions, is against the probability 
of his watching by a new made grave at night, nor was the 
cemetery in those days of medical license without proper care- 
takers. It is also true that other sad associations of the place 
were later added to burden his memory. 107 A visit to the spot 
with the facts in mind will best enable one to decide. That his 
grief was a great one, and lasting, no one can ever doubt. 

About this time Poe seems to have first been haunted by night- 
mares, of which John Mackenzie heard him say afterward, " that 
the most horrible thing he (Poe) could imagine as a boy was to 
feel an ice-cold hand laid upon his face in a pitch dark room 
when alone at night; or to awaken in semi-darkness and see an 

IOT The author ventures it as his opinion here that Poc's terrible grief upon 
returning from the army in 1829 and finding Frances Allan dead, and his well 
authenticated despair at her grave after the funeral, was later on confused in his 
own mind, and in the recollections of others, with a more romantic legend about 
Mrs. Stanard. The reader is left to his own inferences. 



ISRAFEL SALUTES THE MARQUIS 119 

evil face gazing close into his own; and that these fancies had so 
haunted him that he would often keep his head under the bed- 
covering until nearly suffocated." Here at least is something to 
make the psychologist ponder and the philosopher start. What 
may be the significance of cold, dead hands laid at midnight upon 
the brow of a shuddering boy must be left to them. The dead, 
however, at this time were by no means the entire preoccupation 
of young Poe. 

In the Autumn of 1824 not only the City of Richmond but the 
entire State of Virginia was looking forward feverishly and pre- 
paring dramatically for the approaching visit of the Marquis de 
La Fayette. 108 It was the greatest national event of a personal 
nature since the death of Washington, and it occurred at a period 
when there was nothing of much importance to occupy the mind 
of the public politically or internationally. By the end of the first 
quarter O'f the Nineteenth Century La Fayette had outlived nearly 
all of his great revolutionary contemporaries, and he personified 
to the new generations, and to the already awakening giant of 
the young Western Republic, the ideals which in theory at least 
were held most dear. No doubt had as yet been entertained as 
to their efficacy to bring about the millennium, and in the ro- 
mantic, affable, and intriguingly hawk-like little Frenchman, the 
sons and daughters of the generation of the Revolution beheld 
the foe of tyrants, the friend of Washington, a great soldier, and 
the symbol of the triumph of the doctrines of Jefferson, and the 
philosophy of Rousseau. Here was a perfect hero in fact and 
body, and the reception tendered him throughout the Union took 
on all the guise of a patriotic triumph. Nor was it without justifi- 
cation. It was received on the part of the honor guest with a tact 
and grace, the memory of which played its part in one of the side 
shows of the World War a century later. In the life of Poe, it 
provided the first opportunity for the young poet to participate 
in the affairs of this world in the r61e of a man. What he learned 
while La Fayette was in Richmond, and the effect of his active 



168 jf the reader should think that the incident is given undue prominence 
here, let him turn to the newspapers and letters of the time. The importance of 
La Fayette's visit as a turning point in Poe's experience has never been made dear. 



120 ISRAFEL 



part in the military pomp and ceremonial display of the occasion, 
bore fruit in the future actions and movements of the man. It was 
his confirmation into the affairs of adult life. 

Virginia was under peculiar debt to La Fayette, his campaign 
against Arnold and his gallantry at Yorktown were remembered 
as a part of her history, and the Old Dominion determined to 
surpass herself in the tradition of open-handed hospitality. Let- 
ters began to pour in to Governor Pleasants from all over the 
State. 

Frederickbwg, Oct. 6th, 1824 
JAMES PLEASANTS, Esqr. 
DEAR SIR: 

Under the impression that Genl La Fayette on his route to York 
will pass through this town the citizens are making preparations to 
receive him. 

Connected with these arrangements, it is wished to know the views 
of the Executive of the State on this subject after the example of other 
States, is it intended that you meet him at the State line in person or by 
deputation, and what mode of conveyance is intended for him? I am 
requested by our Committee of arrangements here to ask your reply to 
the above. 

Should you pass through this town to meet him on the Potomac, our 
citizens will be pleased of the opportunity of testifying the respect 
which they entertain towards you. 

Respectfully, 

GARRETT MINER lco 

To a great soldier the chief honors were, of course, to be mili- 
tary, and in addition to the letters from patriotic citizens, there 
were many from the commanding officers of the State Militia 
asking to be provided with arms for the occasion from the State 
Arsenals. The helpless state of the militia, indeed, is not without 
its alarming and amusing sides. 170 

In Richmond the excitement and anticipation were intense, and 
in no circles more so than among the young gentlemen of Burke's 

100 This and the letters immediately following are from the archives of the 
Virginia State Library. 

170 See a characteristic letter from Yorktown, Virginia, dated 25 September, 
1824, to George Pleasants requesting arms for the local militia unit, signed John B. 
Christian, Capt, Virginia State Library Archives. 



ISRAFEL SALUTES THE MARQUIS 121 

Academy and other well-born youths of the town. A military 
company, called the " Richmond Junior Volunteers " or " Morgan 
Legion/' was organized and provided with a uniform of the 
fringed hunting shirts of the frontier. Of this proud little com- 
pany John Lyle was elected Captain, and Edgar Allan Poe Lieu- 
tenant, a distinct tribute to Poe, for the offices were doubtless 
much coveted. The next thing on the tapis was to provide the 
organization with arms, the details of which transaction seem to 
have been managed by the two young officers. 

In the carefully fostered legend of the faithfulness and con- 
tentment of the slaves under the ancient regime in the old South, 
it has been conveniently forgotten that one of the ever present 
fears under which a slave-holding community lived was the night- 
mare of a rebellion of the blacks. Nor was it an idle dream. 
There had been in Virginia already several alarming, though 
abortive, attempts on the part of the negroes which, however 
futile, had sufficed to raise the " goose flesh " of the planters and 
the inhabitants of towns. In Richmond a regiment of the State 
Guards was kept ready for emergencies at all times, and a portion 
known as " the guard," was always under arms at the penitentiary 
where the barracks were. The officers were required to appear 
upon all occasions in uniform. In order to welcome La Fayette it 
was proposed to march the igth, Richmond, Regiment out of the 
city. As it would never do to leave the town entirely unguarded, 
an arrangement was made to distribute arms to volunteer militia 
which this letter records. 

SIR 

Dr. Adams the Mayor of the City of Richmond has suggested the 
propriety on my part as the Col. of the ipth Regiment of applying to 
the Executive for a number of arms to be used by the militia during 
the absence of the many persons who are about to leave the City for 
York, which can be returned after the particular necessity for them 
ceases. In furtherance of his views I have thought it proper to make 
the application and would be pleased jtf the Executive would communi- 
cate their determination to the Mayor. 

I am Sir, etc. 

L. B. DARVIE m 

Col. i$th Regt., Va. Inf 9 



122 ISRAFEL 



The permission was granted and among those applying for arms 
was the Company of Junior Morgan Riflemen, the application 
being signed by John Lyle, Captain, and Edgar A. Poe, Lieu- 
tenant. The matter-of-fact indorsement on the outside 

Richmond Oct. 13, 1824 

TO THE GOVENOR AND COUNCIL 

GENTLEMEN: 

The subscribers to the inclosed list having associated for the purpose 
of forming a patrol, for the protection of the City during the absence 
of the Volunteer Companies, respectfully ask through me that they 
may be furnished with the necessary Arms and Acoutrements. 

Respectfully 

INMAN BAKER, JR. ICO 

can scarcely convey tfie pride and sense of rapture which must 
have filled the hearts of the Richmond Junior Volunteers, who 
were included in the list, as they put real guns over their 
shoulders, or of Lieutenant Edgar Poe as he girt a sword on his 
thigh and sallied forth to meet La Fayette. 

La Fayette, 171 clad in a cocked hat and short trousers, a style 
then almost extinct, arrived on a steamer from Norfolk. " Along 
with John C. Calhoun and two members of the visiting committee, 
he was drawn in a carriage by four horses while the Fayette 
Guard marched in front, and young George Washington La 
Fayette followed in similar state behind. This procession of car- 
riages, filled with officers and worthies of the Revolution, passed 
to a double arch of evergreens, in front of the Union Hotel, at the 
corners of which were four beautiful young ladies posed as liv- 
ing statues." Here the Marquis was greeted by forty officers of 
the Revolution, his comrades in arms of as many years before. 
Not the least moving sight of the procession which followed, and 
certainly the proudest of all, was the company of " pretty boys " 
called the " Richmond Junior Volunteers," which headed by Cap- 
tain John Lyle and Lieutenant Edgar Poe, with their swords at 
salute, now passed in review. 



171 For a complete and excellent description, of La Fayette's visit to Richmond 
see Richmond, lt$ People and Us Story, by Mary Newton Stanard, chapter XVI. 



ISRAFEL SALUTES THE MARQUIS 123 

The boys of this company, as representing some of the best 
families of Richmond, seem to have acted as a bodyguard for the 
old patriot, and there is a well-founded tradition of their escort- 
ing him to the Memorial Church with Chief Justice Marshall, 
where Captain Lyle and Lieutenant Poe accompanied him up the 
aisle to the Marshall pew. 

Poe would have been doubly proud, for he must have been 
noticed and have become personally known to La Fayette as 
the grandson of " General " David Poe of Baltimore, On his visit 
there La Fayette is said to have gone especially to the grave of the 
old Revolutionary hero and exclaimed, "Id repose un coeur 
noble" 172t The knowledge of this fact, which could scarcely have 
been unknown to Poe who was in correspondence with his brother 
William Henry, 173 and other relatives in Baltimore, must have 
quickened his sense of family pride on his paternal side, and have 
drawn his attention to a military career. At any rate, less than 
three years later we find him joining the Army. 

The effect of a boys' cadet company upon the psychology of its 
members is more lasting and goes deeper than most casually 
minded parents realize. The pride of gold lace and brass buttons, 
the fine feathers of the young warrior, their affect upon the young 
ladies of his acquaintance, and the gang spirit engendered by the 
organization which develops the chief virtue of youth, loyalty, is 
often character-fixing in its effect. Poe, as an officer, had exercised 
authority, its taste was sweet, beyond doubt, and his pride and 
self reliance had been aroused. That the "Richmond Junior 
Volunteers " were a great success is evident from the fact that they 



172 Here, indeed, rested a noble heart David Poe, Assistant Deputy Quarter- 
master for Baltimore during the Revolutionary War, had been one of the fore- 
most of the young patriots who had cleared the British out of Maryland. Notable 
among his deeds was the leading of a mob that drove out the Royal Sheriff and 
made one William Goddard, editor of a Tory sheet which had attacked Washing- 
ton, feel the weight of patriotic wrath. " General " Poe, as he was called, not 
only fought for his country but, out of his own scant savings, advanced certain 
sums to the cause which were never repaid. In 1814, at the age of seventy-one, 
he again volunteered and saw active fighting against the British in the Battle of 
North Point. Many years after his death in Baltimore, his widow, then in greatly 
reduced circumstances, received a pittance from the Republic. 

ITS dgar had received a letter from Henry Poe in Baltimore while La Fayette 
was in Richmond See John Allan's letter to Henry Poe page 125. 



124 ISRAFEL 

did not disband, and, a month after La Fayette's visit, they 
are to be found still drilling and petitioning for the permanent 
possession of their arms. 

Richmond, Nov. 17, 1824 
To THE GOVERNOR: 

At the request of the members of the Richmond Junior Volunteers, 
we beg leave to solicit your permission for them to retain the arms 
which they lately were permitted to draw from the Armorey. We are 
authorized to say that each individual will not only pledge himself to 
take proper care of them, but we ourselves will promise to attend 
strictly to the order in which they are kept by the company. 

We are, etc. 

JOHN LYLE 
EDGAR A. PoE m 

As to Governor Pleasants 7 reply, the records are silent, but for 
Poe the end of his military juvenilia was not yet. 

During his association with the members of other military 
organizations and various persons with whom this new freedom 
of experience brought him in contact, young Poe seems for the 
first time to have ranged the city rather freely, and to have been 
treated as a man. It cannot be positively stated, but it seems 
highly probable, that the effect of this experience at a time of 
open house and mardi gras while La Fayette was being fgted, 
was to bring him in contact with new acquaintances of a type 
who regaled his ears in no uncertain terms with the details and 
circumstances of his foster-father's indiscretions; so that he 
gathered from a portion of the community, with which he had 
not heretofore been familiar, a more precise idea of the estima- 
tion in which, in some quarters, his guardian was held. 
I Be this as it may, at any rate there is direct evidence of the 
/fact that about this time his moodiness and general attitude began 
'to give his guardian considerable alarm. Inference seems to war- 
rant the assumption that the severe visitations of John Allan's 
discipline could not Have been received at this time by Edgar 
with the purely regretful protests of childhood. As the rod fell on 
shoulders which had just worn epaulets, or upon that humbler 

1T * Calendar of Virginia State Papers, X, 518, (1892). The original letter has 
been lost. 




The Earliest Known Lines of Poetry 
with Signature of Edgar A. Poe 



lj 0#!Srw 
Weary .. I hid me on a conch to reit " 



ISRAFEL SALUTES THE MARQUIS 125 

locality where the rods of parents are wont to descend, it is highly 
probable that the hurt pride of " Lieutenant Poe," lately attached 
to the Marquis de La Fayette, replied to the reproaches of his 
guardian in a truthful but disrespectful manner; or that he 
sulked like a young bear and indicated that there were good 
reasons why. John Allan was not only displeased, he was alarmed; 
and shortly after the departure of the Marquis we find him 
justifying himself to the Almighty and fortifying himself in the 
regard of Edgar's brother in Baltimore in a rather interesting 
style. The letter is to William Henry Leonard Poe then seventeen 
years old. 

Richmond Nov. 1824 
DEAR HENRY: 

I have just seen your letter of the 2Sth ult. to Edgar and am much 
afflicted he has not written you. He has had little else to do, for me he 
does nothing and seems quite miserable and sulky and ill tempered to 
all the Family. How we have acted to produce this is beyond my con- 
ception, why I have put up so long with his conduct is little less won- 
derful. The boy professes not a spark of affection for us, not a par- 
ticle of affection for all my care and kindness towards him. I have 
given (him) a much superior Education than ever I received myself. 
If Rosalie has to relie on any affection from him God in his mercy 
perserve her I fear his associates have led him to adopt a course (?) 
of thinking and acting very contrary to what he professed when in 
England. I feel proudly the difference between your principles and his 
and hence my desire to stand as I ought to do in your Estimation. Had 
I done my duty as faithfully to my God as I ought to Edgar, then had 
Death, come when he will have no terrors for me, but I must end this 
with a devout wish that God may yet bless him and you and that suc- 
cess may crown all your endeavors and between you, your poor Sister 
Rosalie 175 may not suffer. At least she is half your sister and God for- 
bid my dear Henry that we should visit upon the living the errors of 
the dead. Believe me Dear Henry we take an affectionate interest in 
your destinies and our United Prayers will be that the God of Heaven 
will bless and protect you. Rely on him my Brave and excellent Boy 
who is ready to save to the uttermost. May he keep you in Danger, 
preserve you always is the prayer of your 

Friend & Servant 
(JOHN ALLAN) 

176 In the Ellis & Allan Papers, from which this letter is taken, are found 
about this time nine charges by John Allan against both Edgar and Rosalie for 
small amounts of postage. 



126 ISRAFEL 

On the back of the copy of this note, there is characteristically 
enough, a calculation for compound interest of a certain sum at 
six per cent in the same pious hand. 176 

Perhaps the cold palm which Edgar had felt upon his brow 
was not altogether a dream. To be able in the same breath to 
defend oneself, by endeavoring to cause dissension between 
brothers, while casting a slur on the mother of the same youth 
on whose head the divine blessing is invoked and to calmly 
turn over the same sheet of paper and calculate the amount of 
compound interest due, is to proclaim oneself in the possession of 
qualities which, if not human, are certainly not divine. Such was 
evidently the spirit of the man who devoutly consigned the future 
of the Poe orphans to the mercy of God. 

Keeping the spiritual vista thus opened to us by John Allan's 
own pen in mind, his more mundane proceedings can now be 
chronicled. The old house at the corner of Fourteenth Street and 
Tobacco Alley once more comes into view. It had been left John 
Allan as part of the Gait estate, and to it the family now moved 
once again for a while, but not for long. It is this house, still 
standing, with which the most intimate and earliest memories of 
Poe must be associated when thinking of his boyhood in Rich- 
mond. Strangely enough it has been almost overlooked, doubtless 
eclipsed by the traditions of Edgar Poe which gathered about a 
grander and more impressive mansion to which the family next 
removed. 

Naturally enough the inheritance received from William Gait in 
1825 changed the social outlook and the mode of life of John Allan 
and his family. Coincident with the turn for the better in their 
circumstances there had been, despite Mrs. Allan's precarious 
health, an increase in the round of social gaieties, and the old house 
at Fourteenth Street, so convenient from a business standpoint, 
was found inadequate for their different needs. 177 

376 Photostat of this letter in the possession of the author. The letter was a copy 
kept in the JEHKs & AUan FUes, the original, of course, having gone to Henry Poe. 
No doubt the copy was retained to show to Edgar. The copy is unsigned, but is 
in John Allan's own hand. 

177 William Gait's will was signed March 25, 1825 and probated March 29, 1825. 
The house at Tobacco Alley and Fourteenth Street was a bequest to John Allan. 
See appendix III. 



ISRAFEL SALUTES THE MARQUIS 127 

On June 28, 1825, only three months after the probating of his 
uncle's will 7 Mr. Allan bought at auction a large house on the 
southeast corner of Main and Fifth Streets for the sum of 
$i4,95o. 178 It was a good bargain as the former owner had paid 
$19,100 for it, but died before he completed payments. The 
house had been built by David Meade Randolph, but was after- 
ward purchased and much improved by Sefior Joseph Gallego, a 
rich Andalusian merchant of Richmond, who had indulged his 
Spanish fancy for landscaping by planting a double garden below 
the house; that on the east being for vegetables, while the slope 
of the hill on the south, which the house overlooked, was green 
with abundantly bearing grape-vines, fig trees, and raspberry 
bushes; nor were flowers, vines, and shrubs lacking with bloom 
and sweet scent. Here was a garden, indeed, for a certain young 
poet who loved flowers, and was doubtless not averse to figs. 

In this house, since torn down, occurred the most momentous 
passages of Poe's early life; it is forever connected with his name 
and that of John Allan in Richmond; some of its furnishings have 
achieved a permanent place in our literature, and to it, in his 
thoughts, Israfel forever returned "home." In view of this, a 
description of it, as a background for the life he led there, will 
assume more than an antiquarian interest. 

From its windows there was a magnificent sweep of scenery to 
be seen, a view of the valley of the James stretching away into 
Henrico and Chesterfield Counties, and of Manchester, on the 
south bank, then a delightful little village. This with its bridges, 
its islands, its river, falls, meadows, woods and hamlets was the 
country of Poe's boyhood. The generous doorway of the mansion 
opened into a spacious hall, on the right of which was the morn- 
ing reception and tea room. Just across the hall from the front 
room was the dining room, octagon in shape, and beautifully 
lighted. On the second floor was the large octagon parlor or ball 
room, famous for many a brilliant affair, while John Allan's own 
chamber was immediately over the front door, with windows that 
overlooked the drive and front yard. On the same floor were three 

Letter of Col. Thomas Ellis to George E. Woodberry dated Baltimore, 
May 28, 1884. 



I2 8 ISRAFEL 

other bedrooms, one occupied by Miss Valentine, another spare 
room for guests, and a third which was Edgar's. 

Poe's room was at the end of a hall that ended in a wedge- 
shaped alcove just beyond a rather dark twist in the stairs. 179 In 
this recess, so that it protruded somewhat beyond the door, was 
a table upon which stood an agate lamp, always kept burning at 
night, because of the dark stairs and hall. On this table it was 
Poe's habit to throw his coat as he entered the room. The cham- 
ber had two windows, one fronting north, and one east with an 
extensive view, for at that time there were no other buildings upon 
Mr. Allan's square. There was in addition to the usual bedroom 
furniture, a comfortable lounge where Poe loved to lie and read; 
a table for his books; and a wardrobe well furnished we hear 
of occasions upon which young visitors to the house were sup- 
plied with extra clothing from Edgar's store. This, especially, 
must have been grateful to Poe, who was at this time by way of 
being a bit of a dandy, neat and careful of his rather dis- 
tinguished person at all times, except when in the clutches of 
poverty later on, or during one of his sprees. In short, his ap- 
pearance was always a barometer of his mental and financial con- 
dition. By inclination and training he was orderly in his living 
and punctilious about his dress. 

We are told by one who had often been there, that against the 
walls of Poe's bedroom in the Allan house was a modest shelf of 
books, and at this time there would certainly have been more in 
his father's library. In view of the fact that many of these books 
must have been instrumental in shaping the man's imagination, 
it is interesting to speculate what volumes may have been there. 
Nor is this a mere guess, books were infinitely less numerous then 
than they are now, literary taste was more fixed, and the sources 
of the boy's lines in his first volume of poetry, most of which 
goes back to Richmond or University days, are often quite ob- 
vious. 



179 For some of the details as to Poe's room In the Allan house I am indebted 
to a Richmond antiquary, to the recollections of Thomas Boiling, a visitor to 
Poe's room, and to articles still preserved at the Poe Shrine in Richmond and 
elsewhere, and to the letter of Col. Thomas Ellis to Prof. Woodberry see note 
173. 




John Allan 
The foster-father or guardian of Edgar Allan Poe 

From a portrait by an unknown artist, probably painted after Jl/r. ALLAN 
inherited his uncle's fortune 

Photograph of the picture 
Courtesy of the Edgar Allan Poe Shrine, Richmond, I'irginia 



ISRAFEL SALUTES THE MARQUIS 129 

On the shelves and table of his room where he studied there 
were, of course, his text books, among them some of the classics, 
Homer, Virgil, Caesar, Cicero, and Horace. There would have 
been old grammars, dog-eared spellers, readers, and French 
readers, some of them perhaps brought back from England, 
English and American histories, some of the Gothic Romances, 
and probably a manual or two on military tactics. Byron, Moore 
and Wordsworth we may be sure were present, with Coleridge 
and Keats, and more doubtfully Shelley, certainly some of the old 
Eighteenth Century poets with which the libraries of Southern 
gentlemen were so liberally stocked. Don Qwxote, Gil Bias and 
Joe Miller we hear of later in a letter. Milton was there, the boy 
knew him, Burns, of course Mr. Allan was a Scotchman. 
Campbell and Kirke White can be added to the list and perhaps 
E. C. Pinkney. 180 

Of novelists, Poe would by this time have come across Scott, 
Cooper, Charles Brockden Brown, and some of the earlier things 
of Irving, and he would have made the acquaintance of Macaulay 
and other English essayists and reviewers in the pages of the 
Edinburgh Review, and Blackwood's which were largely sub- 
scribed to in Richmond. Certainly he must have read the poetical 
effusions of local and contemporary, but now long forgotten, 
" bards " and " bardesses " in both the American and British 
periodicals and newspapers of the day. 

There is direct evidence of an abundance of these. Richmond 
and his father were in close touch with England through foreign 
trade and family relations, and one of the obliging side issues of 
the firm of Ellis & Allan was to act as agents for subscriptions 
to newspapers and other publications. During part of the firm's 
history it handled popular London periodicals and even sheet 
music. These were kept upon the second floor of the Ellis & 
Allan establishment, and Poe's fondness for the spot was a matter 
of note. Although the boy was rather shy, it was remembered that 
upon occasions he would recite some favorite poem to those about 
the place. Among the periodicals which Poe is known to have 



iso For the last three names I am indebted to Dr. Thomas Ollive Mabbott. 



i 3 o ISRAFEL 



seen there beyond all peradventure, were the London Critical 
Review of Annals of Literature from 1791 to 1803 in thirty-nine 
bound volumes, and the London Ladies' Magazine for the same 
period bound in thirty volumes. Moore, Byron and Goldsmith 
seem to have greatly interested him, 181 Along with the rest of 
the world he must have been familiar with Scott. This together 
with the books in the libraries and upon the tables of his friends, 
his formal instruction at school, but, above all, the stock of 
volumes and periodicals over the offices of his " father's " firm, 
seems to have constituted for the most part the literary back- 
ground of Edgar Allan Poe. For that time, at least, it was by no 
means a scant one. He was an accurate and omniverous reader. 

Frances Allan furnished the new house lavishly but in good 
taste. There were many rich hangings and some busts by Canova 
of Dante and Mary Magdeline, both of which seemed to have 
remained in Poe's mind. The furniture was in a graceful late 
Empire style with gilt brass inlay. Poe seems to have had a desk 
in his room, or at least a table, upon which was a handsome brass 
inkstand and sand-caster, purchased by his foster-father and 
marked "John Allan '13." 182 These Poe afterward took with him 
among the few things which he carried from John Allan's home, 
and kept them by him for a long time. 

The most delightful feature of the new dwelling, however, was 
the long portico extending the full depth of the house. The re- 
ception and dining room opened out upon it on the first floor, and 
Mr. Allan's room and the parlor upstairs. Here through the long 
Virginia Spring, Summer, and Fall the family spent most of their 
time together with their constant guests. There was " a splendid 
swing " on the upstairs porch, and a telescope through which the 
young folks, particularly, loved to peep at the stars and the 
country across the James. Through its lenses the eyes of young 



181 Prof. Killis Campbell is to be credited with extracting many of these facts 
from the Ellis 6* Allan Papers. I am also in possession of book and newspaper 
lists ordered by the firm. J. H. Whitty, Complete Poems, large edition, page 200, 
also notes. 

isa NOW in possession of the Bucks County Historical Society at Doylcstown, 
Pennsylvania, with an interesting record of their history. The style of the furniture 
shows that the house was furnished by Frances Allan about 1825. 



ISRAFEL SALUTES THE MARQUIS 131 

Israfel first became familiar with those stars and constellations, 
the lovely names of which are strewn through his poetry, and, 
while his passion for astronomical and cosmic speculations was 
being aroused, through the same glass he became familiar with 
the quaint face and the dead mystery of the moon. 188 * 761 

But not all of Poe's time during the Spring and Summer of 
1825 was spent reading in his room or at ElKs & Allan, swinging 
on the porch, or peering through telescopes. There was other and 
more serious game afoot. 



188 See the Adventure of Hans Pfaall, The Balloon Hoax. In the latter story 
Poe's knowledge of astronomical perspective is mathematically correct. The 
mathematics of the stars interested him as well as their poetical names. Poe cer- 
tainly knew sufficient mathematics to navigate. 



CHAPTER VIII 
Elmira and the Enchanted Garden 

WHERE " Linden Row " now stands in Richmond, Vir- 
ginia, at the corner of Franklin and Second Streets, 
there was once a beautiful garden that Edgar Poe 
loved more than well. 184 Even its story was romantic. Thomas 
Jefferson had once sought to use the space of ground that it occu- 
pied in order to erect a prison in whidh to carry out one of his 
favorite theories in regard to the reform of prisoners, but one 
Colonel Thomas Rutherford arranged to exchange the property, 
and under the care of well trained gardeners the spot became one 
of the most beautiful on a once lovely old street. The prisoners 
which dwelt behind its high brick wall were roses, honeysuckle, 
jasmine, and the flowering myrtle. 

From childhood it had been familiar to Israfel, who on his way 
to and from school, or on play-larks with little Tom Ellis, caught 
the scent of Southern Spring as it drifted over the old walls, ar- 
resting passers-by with its perfumed invitation from many flow- 
ers, and inviting them to leave the white sunshine in the quiet, 
warm streets, and tarry for a while amid its green coolness. 

Charles Ellis, of Ellis <& Allan, lived just across the street on 
the opposite corner, in the long frame house with five dormer- 
windows and double chimneys where the Allans had visited after 
their return from England. 184 From the front windows, the whole 
of the block across the street stretched away in a green and 
flowered vista, musical with birds, a labyrinth of mystery for 
childhood, and a seat of shade for old age. The place was tended 
by Mr. Ellis's gardener a85 and must have been a favorite haunt 
for the solitary hours beloved by Poe. 

184 See Chapter VI, page g$. 

^ IBS i n p oe > s story> The Landscape Garden, the hero is Ellison, my young 
friend." It now appears that the land upon which this garden was situated actually 
belonged to Poe's guardian, for in William Gait's will amon& other bequests to 
John Allan is, " my vacant lot corner of F and 2nd Streets, opposite the residence 
of Charles Ellis." See appendix IIL 



ELMIRA AND THE ENCHANTED GARDEN 133 

In his story, The Landscape Garden, he has left us the im- 
perishable memory of its delights in the form of a phantasy upon 
the art of landscape gardening, and in a half homesick mood 
afterward recalls it by a quotation from Giles Fletcher: 

The garden like a lady fair was cut, 

That lay as if she slumbered in delight, 

And to the open skies her eyes did shut; 

The azure fields of heaven were 'sembled right 

In a large round set with flowers of light; 

The flowers de luce, and the round sparks of dew 

That hung upon their azure leaves did show 

Like twinkling stars that sparkle in the evening blue. 

Here was a retreat, indeed, where he could forget the world of 
docks and ships along the river banks below, and the interminable 
babble of prices and merchandising at his foster-father's counter 
and table. For Edgar Poe, it was the setting and the background 
of a world of dreams. 

" Helen " was dead, but Israfel was still moving in the world 
of men; he looked about him and saw that their daughters were 
fair, and he walked with them in the enchanted garden. It was 
there that he brought Sarah Elmira Royster and whispered to 
her through her tangle of unforgettable curls. She was one of the 
first, and was destined to be the last, love of a life star-crossed by 
many women. 

Elmira, for by that name the young lady was known, was the 
daughter of one of the neighbors. 180 She at one time lived just 
across the street from Edgar's school. 187 Propinquity at any rate 
was present. Young Poe was not one to overlook the charming 
because they were near, and at the time she " swims into our ken " 
she was about fifteen and dowered with a trim little figure, an 
appealing mouth, large black eyes, and long, dark, chestnut hair. 
The combination was irresistible to Poe. 

He had probably known her since 1823, certainly during 1824, 



180 The Roysters were well known to both John Allan and Charles Ellis. 
This connection afterward was probably fatal to Poe's hopes. Miss Royster became 
Mrs. Shelton. In 1810 I find that the Roysters loaned money to John Allan, 
charged to his personal account. Ettis 6* Allan Papers a receipt dated Richmond, 
December 22, 1810. 

**T Old Richmond directory. 



134 

and after the gloom of " Helen's " passing and during the days of 
change and trouble in the Allan household, the walks with Elmira, 
or " Myra," as he called her, along the quiet streets of old Rich- 
mond, or in the woods and fields about, must have been a balm, 
and have brought a glow of strange unwonted happiness to his 
lonely heart. 

But it was to the enchanted garden above all that he brought 
her, to sit there in the myrtle shades, and talk to her about his 
love and dreams. Here it was that he recalled her, in the troubled 
days of aftertimes. Looking back, the dream seemed idyllic, and 
the light that lay upon it with such peculiar glory, he has caught 
up and left for us in some of his finest lines: 

Thou wast that all to me, love, 

For which my soul did pine 

A green isle in the sea, love, 

A fountain and a shrine, 

All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers, 

And all the flowers were mine. . . 

And all my days are trances 
And all my nightly dreams 
Are where thy dark eye glances, 
And where thy footstep gleams 
In what ethereal dances, 
By what eternal streams. , . . 

The stuff that dreams are made of, in the case of Poe, has had 
a strange power of congealing. The garden, its brick walls, its 
roses and Elmira, have long vanished into the gulf that waits for 
all things, but as a memorial to the poet's dream, and to the fresh 
young beauty of the little girl who would have been Poe's wife if 
Fate had not intervened, there has arisen a memorial l88 nearby, 
which like its original, the enchanted garden, is also 

a fountain and a shrine. 

Before John Allan moved to the mansion of his better circum- 
stances on Main and Fifth Streets, the Roysters lived in a frame 



188 The Edgar Allan Poc Shrine in the Old Stone House, Main Street, Rich- 
mond, Virginia, is one of the best conceived and most beautiful memorials to 
literary genius in the United States. 



ELMIRA AND THE ENCHANTED GARDEN 135 

house still standing across lots, or as it was then, across gardens, 
on Second Street. From Edgar's window where he was then living 
to the back of Elmira's house there was at that time an unbroken 
view, and it was the custom of the two young lovers to conduct a 
handkerchief flirtation, Edgar from his window, and Elmira from 
the casement at the head of the landing on the stairs. One can 
imagine their hearts fluttering with every wave of the white 
signals, and Elmira must have looked up many a night and seen 
the lamp glowing in the room of the young boy she loved. Nor 
were these signals purely sentimental. From after events it is 
known that Mr. Royster did not look too favorably upon the 
obvious attentions of young Poe, and certainly John Allan's sym- 
pathy must at this time have been, to say the least, attenuated. 

But the canny Scot along with the other increased ambi- 
tions and more impressive mode of life which his Uncle's fortune 
brought into prospect, seems to have changed somewhat his plans 
for the education of Edgar. Up until the receipt of the Gait estate 
in 1825, it is probable that if John Allan had any plans at all for 
the future of his brilliant young foster-child, they centered about 
the store and warehouse of ElUs & Allan, where the practical- 
minded merchant probably visualized Edgar Poe as occupying a 
stool and working his way up to a possible share in the business, 
or to the point where he could start out on a mercantile career 
of his own, as he and Charles Ellis had done years before. Nor 
was it by any means an unkindly vista. That Edgar was much 
employed about the store, we know, and that he occasionally 
served behind the counter as a dry-goods clerk, or as a messenger 
carrying papers and valuables to and fro, was afterward recalled 
by many who saw him there. Of the use to which he put the book 
and periodical department we have already seen. Here he also met 
the book lovers, journalists, and literati of the town, and occasion- 
ally favored the clerks and customers about the place with the 
recitation of some favorite poem, a song for he sang well or 
a conversation upon literature, the world of which had become 
known to him in the articles and reviews between the covers of 
the magazine counter stock of ElUs & Allan. There is no record 
of his being carried upon the firm's payrolls, though. Quite reason* 



i 3 6 ISRAFEL 



ably enough, his guardian seems to have charged up his small 
services against his board and keep. Whatever pocket money he 
had, came from his " Ma " and " Aunt Nancy," their generosity, 
as his companions and schoolmates testify, supplied him with a 
more than usual amount which seems to have been as easily and 
generously spent as it was given. 

So far, Poe had received as good an education as any boy in 
Richmond. With the new house, and the higher social status to 
which his " father " aspired, seems to have come a different idea 
as to the possible future and training of the foster-son. Edgar's 
abilities at declamation, and his leaning toward literature and the 
world of the intellect, may have caused John Allan to ponder the 
manifest advantages of a professional career, the law, 180 with 
perhaps the halls of Congress in view; nor was he, it is only right 
to say, oblivious to the remarkable qualities of Edgar's mind. 
There was another factor, too. A course at the University would 
take him out of the house, and out of the house for reasons that 
we have seen, Mr. Allan was very anxious at this time that the 
foster-son should go. At any rate, the University began to be 
talked of, and in March, 1825, Edgar Poe was removed from 
Master Burke's school. 100 He was put under the care of private 
tutors with an early entrance at the University of Virginia di- 
rectly in view. 

Of the interviews with John Allan and of his life about the 
warehouse of ElUs & Allan together with the provincial and 
mercantile clap-trap of the conversation enjoyed there, Poe has 
left us a neat but sardonic picture in the thinly disguised auto- 
biographical satire of The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq. 
nor does he forget in an amused way to hint at his own naive 
literary aspirations. With even a small knowledge of his life in 
Richmond about this time, the whole thing is reasonably clear. 
Even his middle name with the ironical thoughts it afterwards 
occasioned, creeps into the satire. 

OJf one's very remote ancestors it is superfluous to say much. 101 My 



189 Both Poe and Mr. Allan specifically mention " law " in later correspondence. 

190 Woodberry, 1909, vol. I, page 29. 

191 A covert reference to his real parents seems quite evident. 



ELMIRA AND THE ENCHANTED GARDEN 137 

father Thomas Bob, Esq., stood for many years at the summit of his 
profession, which was that of a merchant barber, 192 in the city of 
Smug. His warehouse was the resort of all the principal people of the 
place, and especially the editorial corps a body 193 which inspires all 
about it with profound veneration and awe. For my own part, I re- 
garded them as gods, and drank in with avidity the rich wit and wis- 
dom which continuously flowed from their august mouths during the 
process of what is called " lather." My first moment of positive in- 
spiration must be dated from that ever-memorable epoch, when the 
brilliant conductor of the Gad Fly* 941 in the intervals of the important 
process just mentioned, recited aloud, before a conclave of our appren- 
tices, an inimitable poem in honor of the " Only Genuine Oil-of-Bob " 
(so called from its talented inventor, my father,) and for which occa- 
sion the editor of the Fly was remunerated with a regal liberality by 
the firm of Thomas Bob & Company, merchant-barbers. 195 
The genius of the stanzas of the " Oil-of-Bob " first breathed into me, 
I say, the divine afflatus. I resolved at once to become a great man, 
and to commence by becoming a great poet. That very evening I fell 
upon my knees at the feet of my father. 

" Father," I said, "pardon me! but I have a soul above lather. It 
is my firm intention to cut the shop. I would be an editor I would 
be a poet I would pen stanzas to the * Oil-of-Bob.' Pardon me and 
aid me to be great! " 

"My dear Thingum," replied my father (I had been christened 
Thingum after a wealthy relative so surnamed), " My dear Thingum/' 
he said, raising me from my knees by the ears " Thingum, my boy, 
you're a trump and take after your father in having a soul. You have 
an immense head, too, and it must hold a great many brains. 196 This 
I have long seen and had thoughts of making you a lawyer. The busi- 
ness, however, has grown ungenteel, and that of politician don't pay. 
Upon the whole you judge wisely; the trade of editor is best and 
if you can be a poet at the same time as most of the editors are, 
by the by, why you will kill two birds with one stone. To encour- 
age you in the beginning of things, I will allow you a garret; pen, ink, 
and paper, a rhyming dictionary, and a copy of the Gad-Fly. I sup- 
pose you would scarcely demand any more." 



192 Le., a merchant who gave his customers a close shave. 

193 Poe had all the delight of the day in puns. Like Keats he revelled in them. 
lw A reference to Poe himself and his editorial criticisms that stung deeply, 

and his recitations of poetry about the office. 

185 No salary was given him by the " close shaving " firm hence the irony. 

106 A study of Poe's portraits will make this literal description of himself 
plain. 



i 3 8 ISRAFEL 

" I would be an ungrateful villain if I did," m I replied with enthu- 
siasm. " Your generosity is boundless. I will repay it by making you 
the father of a genius." 
And he did! 

Here we have the whole bucketful in a thimble, the cursory 
allusion to his real parents, " the remote ancestors of whom it is 
superfluous to say much," "my father, the close-shaving mer- 
chant," the cheap lather of conversation about the warehouse, the 
Genuine Oil-of-Bob of family pride, and the applause of the 
clerks which aroused Poe's ambition and John Allan " rais- 
ing me from my knees by the ears/' It is all quite palpable, and 
very, very tragic. How could he demand more than a garret, pen 
and paper; would he not be an " ungrateful villain " if he did? 

John Allan had provided the garret, the pen and paper, the 
. clothes, and the food. That as he grew older he was incapable 
. of providing more for " the immense head that must hold a great 
many brains," and for the heart that was beating so highly and 
proudly, was the beginning of a tragedy that has had no end. 108 
The duel between these two giants, for they were both that, and 
duel it was, echoes even now in a subtle way in the melancholy 
and morbid cast of much of Poe's work. Without a thorough 
understanding of the relations of these two extraordinary men 
there can be no comprehension whatever of the motions of Poe. 
For almost a full half of its life one of the most delicately ad- 
justed and sensitively organized nervous systems that the world 
has ever seen was subject to the ceaseless and exacting dominance 
of a potent, a massive and a gigantically virile will. It was not 
Ariel at the beck of Caliban, the colors will not stand that, but 
it was Hamlet fostered by a northern Shylock, a central fact in 
Poe's life that the world, which is seldom subtle, will probably 
not take the trouble to understand. 

The relation of father and son is one that has been left 
strangely undisected in our literature, while its feminine counter- 
part has been unduly exploited. In John Allan vs. Edgar Poe the 

187 " Ungrateful was John Allan's favorite reproach of Poe. 
198 From his influence upon Poe's life, John Allan becomes automatically one 
of the great secondary characters of literary annals. 



ELMIRA AND THE ENCHANTED GARDEN 139 

perturbations of father and son were raised by circumstances to 
the nth degree of possibilities and the result was in proportion 
to the cause. The relation between them was one of the most 
perplexed, complicated, and subtle in the whole range of life or 
literature, and therefore doubly hard to understand. But it is 
also one of the most interesting, for as always in the case of Poe, 
it was cast dramatically and carried in its involved ramifications, 
domestic secrets, hidden and damaging letters, unforgiving pride, 
and the sorrow and death of a beautiful woman beloved by both 
of them. As we have already taken some pains to look at the physi- 
cal furnishings in the Allan house, let us for a few moments retire 
behind the arras. 

When John Allan permitted his wife to take the infant Edgar 
Poe into her house and arms, it was, as we have seen, on his part, 
reluctantly. Once the fact was accomplished, however, it must 
also be said that his acceptance of it was more than generous. 
The child, and John Allan was fond of children, seems to have 
undoubtedly crept very deqply into his affections, to such an 
extent that there can be little doubt that for many years he ac- 
cepted him as his son. In England he went by his foster-father's 
name, and John Allan made statements to his Scotch relatives 
that can only indicate that he regarded him then as his heir. 
Tradition as to Mrs. Allan's coddling and Mr. Allan's undue 
severity with frequent corporal punishments, in reality means 
little. Frances Allan was a childless woman whose indulgence her 
husband corrected in the universal manner of mankind. In plain 
English, Edgar was probably a naughty and wilful little boy who 
took no harm from being spanked. The situation thus created, 
however, grew more serious later as a basis for a dangerous 
family alignment, one which John Allan could not help but resent 
more than if the boy had been his own. The charges that the 
older man wounded the pride of the boy by constantly reminding 
him of his dependence upon charity are more serious, and from; 
much direct testimony appear to be true. 

As they grew older, the gulf between their temperaments began 
to widen. Most men, even of a thick fiber, have a tenderness and 
fondness, though a hidden one, for little children. Edgar's beauty 



i 4 o ISRAFEL 



and " his vivacious ways " no doubt appealed for a while to John 
Allan. As the boy became more of the man, the natural indif- 
ference and antagonism of male for male began to play its part 
in his foster-father's attitude. There was, too, probably unknown 
to them both, a jealousy for the affection of Frances Allan so 
strongly concentrated on Edgar, one which even a real father 
sometimes experiences, as his part in the life of the woman is 
replaced by the advent of children; and in John Allan's case this 
was accentuated by the actual fact of the extra parentage of the 
child. 

As he increased in years, the older man seems to have lost, as 
often happens, some of the more endearing and easily youthful 
sides of his nature which he undoubtedly, at one time, possessed; 
and he became harder-grained, closer, short-tempered and obsti- 
nate. Quite incapable, in short, of appreciating the possibilities 
in the more delicate aspects of Edgar, and perhaps dissatisfied in 
a certain way with his wife. He had wronged her, but by that 
very fact he knew the reason why he had no legitimate children; 
as he became less attached to Edgar and the possessor of a great 
estate, he was more than ever desirous of a natural heir. In the 
meantime, while his wife's affections for young Poe increased 
with the fine promise of Edgar's young manhood, his own had 
waned. This seems to have been about the situation when he fell 
heir to the Gait fortune, and to have warranted Poe later in his 
statement that, " He treated me as kindly as his gross nature 
would permit." Edgar had been provided with a home and educa- 
tionthe garret and the pens and ink but he missed in his 
foster-father what was of much more importance to a boy of 
genius, the sympathy and understanding of a generously respond- 
ing temperament. 

The situation was tragic and, as is nearly always the case, an 
ironical one. Into the house of a hard-headed, literal and com- 
mercially-minded Scotch merchant, the eccentricities of Fate had 
introduced one of the most cunningly and highly strung instru- 
ments that has ever trembled to the delicate breath of song, com- 
bined with an esthetic ego that later could not bear to contem- 
plate the idea that even God was its superior. Add to this, the 



ELMIRA AND THE ENCHANTED GARDEN 141 

ugly noise of domestic dissension under the stress of secret sor- 
row, and the curious stage is set for an inevitable tragedy, a 
favorite one of the Infernal Mimes, known as the " Breaking 
Heart of Youth." 

For it was not mere incompatibility of natures that brought 
about the inevitable; that, perhaps, as in many an other family, 
might have spent itself in minor ways, but sometime between the 
return of the family from England and La Fayette's visit to 
Richmond, Frances Allan seems to have become aware of her 
husband's unfaithfulness, and the knowledge which was then 
or afterward shared by Edgar, brought the two together in 
an aggrieved compact that was inevitably against, and prob- 
ably supremely exasperating to, John Allan. Miss Valentine's 
"position as a dependent upon her brother-in-law's bounty was 
anomalous, but it is not hard to guess where her sympathies lay, 
and upon occasions they must have shown. But this was by no 
means all. 

When Mrs. Poe, Edgar's mother, died, John Allan had come 
into the possession of her letters, and, among these, there was 
some family secret that was extremely damaging to the Poes. 
Mrs. Clemm, Poe's mother-in-law, said that years later she de- 
stroyed the correspondence after her " Eddie " died, in order to 
keep the fact from ever becoming known to the world. 199 Just 
what it was, can therefore never be proven, but there is a strong 
suspicion that it in some way compromised David or Elizabeth 
Poe and dealt with the paternity of Rosalie. In the family scenes 
which occurred, for under the conditions they were bound to, it 
was this secret which John Allan reserved to add the last sting 
to the reproaches of ingratitude, which he heaped on the foster- 
son who now dared to sympathize with her whom he had come to 
regard as his mother. No scribe was present to record this as a 
fact for posterity, but what John Allan had written albeit shame- 
facedly, in a letter to Henry Poe, 200 he would scarcely in his 
rage withhold from Edgar. To have stones cast at his dead mother 



199 See the mention of these letters Chapter II, page 4, note 41, 

200 Letter of John Allan to Wflliam Henry Leonard Poe, quoted page 125, 
ante, " God forbid, my dear Henry," etc. 



I42 ISRAFEL 



and his little sister, from the hands of one who should have been 
the last to throw them, was something which no lad of spirit 
could stand. That Edgar replied ably, and perhaps out of all 
bounds, is a warrantable guess. 

In the Spring of 1824, Mrs. Stanard had died; Mrs. Allan's 
health was failing through sorrow or some other cause; and the 
gloom in the privacy of John Allan's house must have been quiet 
and deep, when it was not stormy. A few months later, we find 
John Allan writing Henry Poe that Edgar is moody and adding, 
hypocritically enough, " I cannot imagine what we have done to 
deserve this." 20 There is not a word of pride over Edgar's escort- 
ing La Fayette, or of his excellent record at school. Only a vague 
and irritated reproach. In the light of all the facts, it can now 
only seem that the letter to Baltimore was a gesture of precau- 
tion, on the part of John Allan, and a deliberate attempt to malign 
Edgar Poe. 

Sometime in the Summer of 1825, however, Henry paid a visit 
to his brother Edgar in the new house on Main Street. Doubtless 
the brothers had much to talk about. They had seen each other 
at most, only upon two or three occasions before. Some of the 
contents of John Allan's letter may well have been on their 
minds. Henry, it seems, was considerably upset and impressed by 
the inuendoes, and as late as 1827 published in the North Ameri- 
can in Baltimore a poem entitled Lines on a Pocket Book in which 
" Rosalie " is addressed as being of doubtful paternity. This poem 
constitutes the closest approach to an explanation of the Poe 
family mystery that exists. 2 * 1 

" William Henry Leonard Poe was a rather delicate and tubercu- 
larly inclined boy of some literary plromise, as his few pub- 
lished poems show. He and Edgar may have had a good deal in 
common and enjoyed each other's society. It was only upon rare 
occasions that Poe could " open up " with the freedom and con- 
fidence that a blood relative of sympathetic temperament inspires. 
At this time Henry Poe seems to have been in the Navy or the 
merchant marine. On this visit to Richmond he wore a nautical 

201 gee Poe's Brother, by Hervey Allen and Thomas Ollive Mabbott, Doran, 
1926. 



ELMIRA AND THE ENCHANTED GARDEN 143 

uniform and, upon one occasion at least, in company with Eben- 
ezer Burling, the boys called upon Elmira Royster. If Rosalie 
came over from the Mackenzies' to visit her two big brothers, it 
was one of the few occasions upon which the children of Elizabeth 
Poe sat together in the same room. 

Rosalie was at this time a dull and undeveloped little girl of 
about fourteen or fifteen. She could have been in her condition 
only an annoyance and a sorrow to Edgar Poe. He was on close 
terms of friendship with the Mackenzies, whose kindness and 
care of Rosalie had continued, and was a frequent visitor in their 
house. Mrs. Mackenzie he often called " Ma," and upon several 
occasions was heard to remark that he wished he had been 
adopted by them instead of the Allans, words which could not 
have failed to reach his guardian's, by this time, burning ears. 
About this time, too, it is said he began to talk to the Mackenzies 
about running away to sea, and to complain frequently of 
Mr. Allan. 202 To the Mackenzies, Mr. Allan replied that Edgar 
did not know what gratitude was. Nevertheless, Mrs. Allan 
and Mrs. Mackenzie were still fast friends and continued so till 
the end. 

Through the Summer and Autumn of 1825 Edgar Poe con- 
tinued this work with tutors, looking forward to his entrance at 
the University of Virginia. Despite the trouble in the background, 
he could not have eluded a certain joy in the new variety of con- 
tacts in the life which surrounded him now in the new house. 
The Allans, as part of the social campaign for the position to 
which their wealth now entitled them, gave many entertainments 
and the house was noted for its hospitality. John Allan's gen- 
erosity in the manner of his way of life is not to be impugned. 
Thomas Ellis speaks of the many young folks and children who 
ran in and out, to peep through the telescope, or to see Edgar. 
Doubtless Elmira's curls were no strange sight in the garden on 
the slope of the hill when the grapes were ripe. An arbor is an 
excellent place to exchange kisses. Poe seems to have idolized 



202 New light is thrown on Edgar's desire to go to sea by the fact that, shortly 
after the visit to Richmond noted above, Henry sailed as a midshipman (sic) on 
the U.S.S. " Macedonian " for South America. See note 201. 



144 ISRAFEL 

her, and a study of the changes in the text of Tamerlane will re- 
sult in some interesting speculations about this little girl. 208 

Poe's family moved in the best of Richmond society. Some of 
John Allan's neighbors were Thomas Taylor, whose daughter 
William Gait married; Mr. Joseph Tate, Major James Gibbon, 
Mr. Joseph Marx and Thomas Gilliat. " These gentlemen were 
of the highest social position in Richmond " and were associates 
of Chief Justice Marshall, Colonel Ambler, Dr. Brockenbrough, 
Judge Cabell, Judge Stanard and others, famous for good dinners 
and whist parties. In such houses young Poe was welcome, and 
the associations of such an environment stamped upon him the 
attitude and the mode of conversation of a gentleman. It was the 
Virginia of the Old School, a school for manners. 

Doubtless the possibility of Edgar's being Mr. Allan's heir did 
not escape the speculation of certain mamas with eligible daugh- 
ters, young people married early then, but young Poe was becom- 
ing more and more interested in Elmira and the visits to her 
house were frequent. From her lips we get a fresh and vivid ac- 
count of Israfel. 203 

'It was Edgar's habit, during the Summer and Fall of 1825, 
to slip over to the Royster House nearby and to spend long hours 
in the parlor with Elmira. She played the piano and they would 
sing together, Edgar in a fresh young tenor voice, or he would 
accompany her upon the flute which he played quite well. Some- 
times, but not often, Ebenezer Burling would go along. But 
Elmira does not seem to have cared much for him. The conversa- 
tion was of the news of the younger set of the day. Once, upon 
her repeating a brisk remark of a young lady acquaintance, Poe 
replied that he was surprised that Elmira would associate with 
anyone so unladylike. Years later she remembered this. There 
must also have been certain moments upon the sofa, or upon the 
window seat on the landing upstairs, when the conversation was 
of a decidedly endearing nature and more than mere words were 

203 In the accounts of Elmira (Mrs. Shelton) and her accounts of Poe, I have 
followed carefully the letters from her to Ingram, published in his biography of 
Poe, and other letters of interviews with Mrs. Shelton by Edward V. Valentine 
of Richmond, later sent to Ingram and now at the University of Virginia. Some 
of these latter have never been published. 




OJ 



Sarah Elmira Royster at Fifteen 

Poe's own sketch of his Sweetheart 
Made in the parlor of the Royster House in Richmond, Virginia, in 1826 

Miss ROYSTER is the heroine of Tamerlane 

The little girl who was engaged to POE just before he left for the University in 
1826 In 1849 Miss ROYSTER, then Mrs. SHELTON and a widow, again promised 
to marry POE. His death in Baltimore in 1849 prevented the consummation of 
the early romance of his youth 

Courtesy of the Edgar Allan Poe Shrine, Richmond, Virginia 




"A Fountain and a Shrine'' 

Garden and Fountain of the Edgar Allan Poe Shrine, 
Richmond, Virginia 

Showing the rear of the "Old Stone House" fronting on Main Street not 

far from where Mr s. POE died 

The Poe Shrine at Richmond is the legitimate center of interest and activity in 
preserving material and relics connected with EDGAR ALLAN POB, and in 
perpetuating his memory 



ELMIRA AND THE ENCHANTED GARDEN 145 

exchanged, for before Poe left for the University, Elmira had 
promised to be his wife. A promise which was kept a secret, prob- 
ably on account of the parental attitude toward the match. 

Elmira said that Poe was shy but very handsome, with large 
dark grey eyes and rather august manners. In short, we get the 
feeling that little Elmira was carried off her feet by quite an 
impressive and princely young man. There was talk of books and 
poetry, and perhaps some verses in Elmira's album, 204 the custom 
of the day, and when other amusements failed, Edgar drew pic- 
tures and sketches for his sweetheart. One of these, a portrait of 
Elmira herself by Poe's own hand, has come down to us as a 
record of some of the happiest hours of his life. One can 
imagine the little girl sitting on the sofa in the Royster parlor, 
the sheets of music and the flute lying upon the open pianoforte, 
while Edgar Poe, pencil in hand, sketched the wistful little face 
that still looks out at us from the yellow paper, after more than 
a hundred years. There is certainly a very fetching flaunt to the 
tangle of pretty curls. One can almost hear their fresh voices 
blending in The Last Rose of Summer, through the half -open win- 
dow; or the tinkle of the piano and the low bubbling notes of the 
flute. 

Mrs. Allan does not seem to have looked upon Edgar's ap- 
proaching departure with anything but sorrow. Doubtless, her 
husband's anxiety to have Edgar out of the house could not be 
concealed, and she may have had a feminine foreboding that it 
was the beginning of the end. Her health was rapidly failing, and 
the thought of being left alone in the house, to confront the 
Scotch harshness of her masterful husband, was probably more 
than she could bear. Perhaps she had some inkling of his future 
intentions as to Edgar, and knew that although his means for 
charity were now ample, the will for bounty had run out. That 
it was a gloomy time, the servants have testified. The antagonism 
between John Allan and his ward was extreme. On this account, 
and because of her great love for Edgar, Frances Allan seems 
to have deferred her parting with him to the uttermost. She re- 
solved to accompany her son to Charlottesville, and to see him 

204 This is inference. Mrs. Shelton does not say so. 



I46 ISRAFEL 



settled at the University. Christmas that year, despite the ample 
setting at the Allan house, must have been, at best, a gloomy 

affair. 

Of Foe's parting with John Allan there is no record. Let us 
hope there was a gleam of the old affection. Of admonitions and 
promises we can be certain. Perhaps Elmira's kisses and avowals 
served somewhat to soften the admonitory thumping of the lame 
man's cane; there was at least a fond farewell from " Aunt 
Nancy" Valentine. One of the new Allan carriages was ordered 
out, Edgar's small baggage lashed at the back, and with old Jim 
on the box, 205 Frances Allan and Edgar Allan Poe drove away 
from the great house down Main Street. The black coachman re- 
membered that they were both very sad. It was just about Valen- 
tine's Day in February, 1826. 

^ While they trotted along in the new family carriage, perhaps 
Mrs. Allan remembered another ride down Main Street, in a 
hired hack, some fifteen years before, and once again clasped 
warmly the hand of the same orphan who still sat by her side. 
She at least had given him all that any mother could. It was the 
end of the first momentous act. As Jim cracked his whip over 
the straining horses along the road to Charlottesville, and the 
spires and pillared porches of Richmond disappeared behind the 
snowy hills, Edgar's boyhood with its homes, and warehouses, 
ships, " Helen," Elmira and the Enchanted Garden, disappeared 
into the irrevocable past. As if in final farewell Poe entrusted a 
love letter for Elmira to be delivered to her by the hands of James 
Hill, the coachman. It was the last message which she was des- 
tined to receive from him for a long time. 200 In addition to the let- 
ter Poe left with Elmira a mother-of-pearl purse marked with her 
initials in which the engraver had made an error. On February the 
fourteenth, 1826, Poe matriculated at the University of Virginia. 207 

205 James Hffl was the name of Mr. Allan's coachman. Edward V. Valentine 
to the author at Richmond, July 16, 1925. The carriage belonged to Mrs. Allan 
having been left to her by William Gait. See his will, appendix III. 

206 J. H. Whitty Memoir, large edition, page xxvii. 

207 Entry in the University of Virginia Records. 



CHAPTER IX 
Israfel in Cap and Gown 



THOMAS JEFFERSON, that dreamer of dreams and 
political-romanticist, had a great vision. From his 
high place of Monticello in Albermarle County, Vir- 
ginia, he looked down across the green slopes of the South-West 
Mountains and beheld 

In the greenest of our valleys 

By good angels tenanted, 

Once a fair and stately palace 

Radiant palace " rear " its head 

In the monarch Thought's dominion. . . , 208 

The valley was the little vale where the hamlet of Charlottes- 
ville nestled, and the palace was his vision of the classic courts 
and cloisters of the University of Virginia. 

During his gigantically active intellectual life, Jefferson wrote 
some thirty-thousand letters, and among these, not a small pro- 
portion was devoted to the bringing about of what has in the 
end proved to be, perhaps, his most solid and far-reaching 
achievement "The Oxford of the New World." Through the 
barriers of the ignorant indifference of legislatures and the par- 
simony of selfish individuals, the mercurial eloquence of his rest- 
less pen penetrated with a Midas touch; public and private purse 
strings were loosened for his " Educational Fund," and in the 
wild heart of the Alleghanies the domes and colonnades, the 
serpentine walls, and the five-fold terraced campus of the new 
University arose as if by magic. 

In October, 1823, near the close of his long career, we find 
Jefferson writing to his friend John Adams "Against . . . 
tedium vitae, however, my dear friend, I am now fortunately 

208 There is no attempt here, of course, to imply that Poe meant these lines 
to apply to the University. 



148 



mounted on a hobby, which, indeed, I mounted some thirty or 
forty years ago, but whose amble is still sufficient to give exercise 
and amusement to an octogenarian writer. This is the establish- 
ment of a University for the education of all succeeding genera- 
tions of youth in this Republic." 209 On Monday, March 7, 1825, 
this vision and hobby became a fact, when without ceremony 
or ostentation, the University of Virginia opened its doors and 
fifty youths matriculated, followed by sixty-six more during the 

first session. 

The second session began February i, 1826, when thirty-four 
students entered, who by the middle of the month had increased 
to one hundred and thirty-one. On St. Valentine's Day the Uni- 
versity records show that five students matriculated, and among 
them is the illustrious name of Poe. The exact entry, spelling and 
all, is as follows: 

Edgar A. Poe: / 19 January, 1809 / John Allen Richmond, Va. / and 
the Schools of Ancient and Modern Languages. 210 

Poe's entry is number one hundred thirty-six in a total enrolment 
of one hundred and seventy-seven for the entire session, which 
ended at Christmas, i826. 210 

Of the parting with Frances Allan nothing is known. No mother 
leaves her boy at a University without realizing that she has re- 
signed her complete control, and has committed her son to the 
doubtful currents of adult life. The peculiar tenderness of the 
tie which bound her to Edgar must have wrung both their hearts, 
for the future was troubled. Doubtless she saw him " settled," 
and drove back over the cold February hills with a troubled heart 
to the disturbing situation in her own house at Richmond, which 
she must now face alone; nor could her knowledge of her foster- 
son's impulsive and passionate temperament have left her with- 
out forebodings about the months to follow. For the first time in 
his life, Poe was left completely alone. He was about to be sub- 

209 The letter is given here as it was partly quoted by Edwin A. Alderman, 
President of the University of Virginia, in the Virginia Quarterly Review for April, 
1925, pages 78-84. To Dr. Alderman I am also indebted for other facts. 

210 Harrison, Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. I, page 38. Note that 
Poe did not give the place of his birth as Woodberry states vol. I, 1909, page 32. 
"Allen" is a misspelling, of course. 







The University of Virginia in Poe's Day 
West Front 

From an old print 




Professor George Tucker 

One of the Faculty at the University of Virginia at the 
time Poe attended in 1826 

Courtesy of the University of Virginia dluvnni Dissociation 



ISRAFEL IN CAP AND GOWN 149 

jected to the difficult test of freedom, and the environment into 
which he had been thrown was not without decided temptations. 

Jefferson's ideas about the University were peculiar, in some 
respects they were the most advanced of their age, and in others 
they partook of that idealistic and impractical turn of mind, 
which, arising from a too fond estimate of human nature, has in 
some of its major aspects proved almost fatal to the Republic 
over which the soul of the philosopher yearned. It was only by 
the early modification of some of his pet theories that the Univer- 
sity was saved from anarchy. 

From an educational standpoint, the organization of the new 
school was forward looking, a radical departure from established 
methods, but on the whole excellent. A highly competent and 
learned faculty had been cajoled by the glowing letters of the 
" Old Man Eloquent " into lending the luster of their foreign de- 
grees and exotic reputations to the traditionless school which 
needed them. In 1826 six out of the eight professors were foreign 
born, and were irreverently referred to by the students as " those 
damned foreign professors." The faculty in Poe's day consisted of 
Professors Blaettermann, Bonnycasitle, Dunglison, Emmet, Key, 
Lomax, Long and Tucker. Seven of these men bore the best of 
scholastic reputations, being for the most part Englishmen from 
Cambridge and Oxford, with the exception of Professor Blaetter- 
mann, who was a German of profound and pedantic classical 
learning. George Tucker had been persuaded to leave a career in 
the halls of Congress to undertake the Chair of Moral Philoso- 
phy. He was the Chairman of the Faculty, which frequently met 
for disciplinary sessions, and afterward distinguished himself as 
an economist, essayist, historian, and biographer of Jefferson. 211 

The courses were of a continental character that was probably 
too advanced to suit the preparatory and secondary education of 
the American youths who were then subjected to them, but to 
Poe, who had received a more ample and thorough grounding in 
English schools, they offered an opportunity of which he took 



211 Life and Letters of Edgar AUan Poe, J. A. Harrison, Chapter II. Also 
various other articles and pamphlets dealing with the establishment of the Uni- 
versity of Virginia. 



JSO ISRAFEL 



advantage. A field in which, as the records prove, he distinguished 
himself. This field, as might be supposed, for a young poet in 
love with words, was that of language. 

Jefferson himself, while Governor of Virginia at an earlier date, 
had first introduced the formal study of modern languages into 
America. The organization of " his " new University offered him 
the opportunity for further educational innovations. Among the 
most notable of these was the abolition of the class system in 
favor of a modified form of the elective system of German Uni- 
versities, the introduction of an optional period of training in 
military drill, the establishment of workshops for practical edu- 
cation, somewhat along the lines of modern industrial training, 
the encouragement of vaccination by gratis treatment, and the 
permission of optional attendance at chapel. Over all of these, 
the reactionary pedagogues shook their doubtful heads, and none 
more doubtfully than George Ticknor at Harvard. Some of these 
departures, though philosophically sound, were too far ahead of 
their time and went down to defeat. 212 

Above all, of course, or it would not have been Jeffersonian, the 
University of Virginia was to be democratic; the students were to 
govern themselves as individuals, and when discipline became 
necessary, it was to be by the intervention of the local arm of 
the civil law. This item in particular, naturally enough broke 
down completely, scholastic anarchy and student escapades dis- 
turbed the peace of the College, Charlottesville and the planta- 
tions about, until the faculty threatened to resign in a body and 
obtained the authority to exert a sufficient internal control from 
above, and the establishment of a more efficient method of police. 
In the midst of this era of airy confusion and adolescent non- 
sense, young Poe arrived. That, in some sense, he was its victim 
there can be little doubt. One of his college-mates has left us an 
excellent picture of the times. 212 

212 Reminiscences of William M. Burwell from the New Orleans Times Demo- 
crat for May 18, 1884. BurwelPs facts about Poe are not always to be taken with- 
out reservations, but his descriptions of contemporary life with Poe, when at the 
University, there is no reason to doubt as they are in many other ways confirmed. 
The text here is an excerpt from the Alumni Bvttetm, University of Virginia, for 
April, 1923. 



ISRAFEL IN CAP AND GOWN 151 

To the first sessions of this admirable school poured in the Southern 
youth, most of them intent upon availing themselves of the advantages 
afforded. Among them, however, were many who had little other object 
than to combine enjoyment with the preparatory routine of a liberal 
education. Some of this class arrived with unlimited means, others with 
elegant equipages. One came from the Eastern Shore with a tandem of 
blooded horses, a servant, a fowling-piece, and a pointer or two. Some 
were afflicted with habits of extravagance and contempt for the toil- 
some acquisition of knowledge. These not only indulged in unseemly 
fun in the college, but invaded the little courthouse town of Charlottes- 
ville, where they were objects of admiration, with those at least who 
had goods to sell or horses to hire. Mr. Jefferson having assumed that 
these high-spirited coadjutors in the defense of our constitutional ram- 
parts comprehended his patriotic motives, had provided no discipline 
for their scholastic deportment. He confided that the restraints of pro- 
priety would be sufficient to make them behave themselves as gentle- 
men. They certainly did behave themselves as gentlemen of the highest 
style. They gamed, fought duels, attended weddings for thirty miles 
around, and went in debt in the most liberal manner. Mr. Jefferson 
often invited some of the students to dine at Monticello, where they 
were entertained with that urbane hospitality for which he was so re- 
markable. The repasts inclined no doubt to the French style of cookery, 
which had led Patrick Henry to dose a diatribe against his doctrines 
with the crowning charge, " He hath abjured his native victuals! " 
Little is remembered of these honored entertainments except that the 
great statesman commended a Swiss wine of the most acid and as- 
tringent character, then regarded as a sorry substitute for the " peach 
and honey " of the period. . . . 

The buildings first completed stood in the midst of uncultivated fields 
and other unattractive scenery. The county of Albemarle contained 
many families of the highest worth. Indeed, it had furnished many of 
the most eminent men in the State's history. Mr. Jefferson, Lewis, the 
explorer of the Missouri, and perhaps Clark, who captured Kaskaskia 
from the British; the Minors, Gilmers, Carters, Carrs and others were 
all natives of Albemarle, but these families were scattered over a large 
country. The courthouse town of Charlottesville had been the place 
near which the prisoners captured at Saratoga had been confined. It 
had been the temporary seat of the Legislature during the invasion or 
raid by Tarleton. It had a population of several hundred, but at the 
period now spoken of Mr. Jefferson has recorded, as one of the reli- 
gious tolerations, that there being no church in the village, each of the 
principal church persuasions held its services in the court house under 
a rotation agreed on among themselves. The families of the professors 



ISRAFEL 



were too limited to furnish social facilities to the students. So far, then, 
from there being at or around the University a social intercourse of 
sufficient extent to have provided even reasonable recreation for so 
many young men, there was not even a public opinion strong enough 
to rebuke their excesses. 

In this there was nothing strange. Station an army or a belligerent 
body in a small village, and a large element in that body will be de- 
moralized by the ennui of idleness. The same body would find social 
and public enjoyment in a large city. Systematic drunkenness or per- 
sistent gaming are restrained, if not prevented entirely, by the variety 
of attractions and by the positive enforcement of law in every great 
metropolis. 

The public opinion and corporate ordinances of the village were alike 
disregarded. The disorder and dissipation of the students were subjects 
of indignant censure. The few merchants and hotels found their account 
in this extravagance, though the reckless creation of debt led to the 
enactment of a statute subsequently by which such debts, when beyond 
the reasonable wants of a student were declared void. A party of stu- 
dents on a frolic were coming along the road between the village and 
the University when they suddenly encountered the professor of moral 
philosophy and political economy. Most of the party escaped; but, one, 
afterward a distinguished advocate, disdained concealment. "I am, 
said he, " K.M.M., of Tuskaloosa, Alabama too firm to fly and far 
too proud to yield." " And," said the professor, " Mr. M. might have 
added, " almost too drunk to stand." . . . 

The habits of this jeunesse dorie had attracted the reprobation of 
the municipal authorities, and it was decided to extend the jurisdiction 
of the commonwealth over these elegant young outlaws. At a session of 
the grand jury, impaneled for the county of Albemarle, process was 
issued summoning some of the students to testify as to any violations 
of the gaming act known to them. No sooner was this summons known 
than every one who could have criminated his associates left the Uni- 
versity and took refuge in a little wooded knoll a mile or so west, de- 
termined to remain until the great inquest of the county should have 
adjourned. The rendezvous then assumed the aspect of a gypsy camp. 
There was a dear running stream, huge rocks and a surrounding forest. 
The darkies, delighted with the excitement, ran between the camp and 
the village bringing supplies of food and drink and intelligence of the 
hostile movements. With a glass, indeed, the high road and buildings 
were distinctly visible. Of course, the laws which they had violated 
received additional infractions, as there was reckless pleasure in play- 
ing cards on a table of gneiss or granite and in employing pebbles for 
counting. 




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ISRAFEL IN CAP AND GOWN 153 

The conjoint effect of legal penalties, scholastic discipline and pa- 
rental authority, however, terminated these excesses. A few of the 
richer and more reckless went away, the rest settled down to their 
legitimate duties, and in two years lie excellent faculty of the Uni- 
versity had inaugurated the system and standard of study which grad- 
ually ripened into its present reputation for solid and universal 
learning. 

Such, in some of its more objective lineaments, was the scholas- 
tic community in which Poe found himself. Like a great many 
other American Universities, then and now, the learning seems 
to have been available and the organization of social life nil. 

Upon his first matriculating, Edgar Poe was assigned a room 
on the " West side of the Lawn " from which he soon afterwards 
removed, for what cause is not known, to room number 13 West 
Range, the chamber which is now known at the University of 
Virginia as " Poe's Room," being kept vacant and sacred to his 
memory. The story that Poe first roomed with one Miles George 
and soon afterwards fought with him, the quarrel being the occa- 
sion of Poe's move, is now known to be untrue. 218 He did, it 
seems, have a fist fight with young George, with the usual result 
of a closer friendship between them, but there are no records of 
his ever having a roommate, and at number 13 West Range he 
certainly roomed alone. 

Poe's room was pleasantly situated under the second arch to 
the left, from the walk that divides the west dormitory arcades. 
It was a combined study and sleeping apartment, about fifteen 
by twenty feet, with a latticed and a solid door opening out upon 
the arcade, from which there was then a distant view of the 
Ragged Mountains. One window looked to the rear over a lawn, 
then, it seems, used as a wood yard. There was a mantelpiece 
and a small open fire place. 214 

Here the young poet undoubtedly passed most of his time while 

213 Letter of Dr. Miles George to Mr. Edward V. Valentine of Richmond, later 
sent to J. B. Ingram and now in the Ingram collection of Poe Papers at the Uni- 
versity of Virginia, printed in the Alumni Bulletin, University of Virginia, for 
April, 1923. This letter contradicts flatly and ultimately many of Thomas Goode 
Tucker's " too complete memories " which have been so often followed by Poe 
biographers. 

214 From data gathered on a visit to the University of Virginia in July, 1925. 



IS4 ISRAFEL 

at the University, held his long remembered readings and parties, 
and wrote home the pathetic letters to his family, and those be- 
seeching lover's complaints and declarations which little Elmira 
never saw, or saw too late. 2i5 The room is dark; it is on a 
level with the ground, and has in common with other dormitories 
at the University of Virginia, a quaint, but rather cell-like and 
faintly melancholy air. In the winter it could not have been 
anything but cold. The heating arrangements of the time, and 
of many Southern homes and institutions even to-day, are con- 
structed with an eye to the long Summer, and seem to ignore the 
Winter and late Fall. Of other facilities there were none. The 
architects of the period were engrossed with the facades of the 
ancients, but the baths of Caracalla remained, as in the middle 
ages, unstudied and unknown. 216 

From the mass of records and reminiscences now available it 
is possible to reconstruct, with some degree of accuracy, the char- 
acter of the life and even the daily routine of the students while 
Edgar Allan Poe was in " cap and gown," a medieval idea which, 
by the way, America had not then adopted. 

Poe was awakened every morning, probably about half-past 
five, by William Wertenbaker, secretary to the Faculty, Librarian 
and general factotum, whose duty it was to see that the students 
were up, dressed and ready for work. There were probably some 
sort of hurried ablutions, and then a rush for breakfast to some 
boarding-house nearby, followed, in Poe's case, by early morning 
recitations. His schedule shows that these fell between the hours 
of seven and nine A.M., and that his course consisted of lectures 
in Latin, Greek, French, Spanish and Italian. 2 * 1 One of his class- 
mates, remembering these occasions, afterward described Poe, 
" as having been an excellent French and Latin scholar; he could 
read and speak both languages with great ease, although he could 

215 Few of Poe's biographers seem to have realized that the young student who 
inhabited No. 13 West Range in 1826 was under stress of great anxiety about home 
matters. An unhappy love affair, plus home dissensions and great financial em* 
barrassment, all of which Poe experienced here, is enough to unsettle any college 
freshman. Henry Poe was away on a cruise. 

218 Even the means of obtaining fire was still in the flint and tinder age. 
Pocket matches, at a considerable cost, were introduced from England about a 
year later. 



ISRAFEL IN CAP AND GOWN 155 

hardly be said to have known either language thoroughly. Greek 
he read indifferently. Time and again he would enter into the 
lecture room (Pavilion V, or Pavilion VI where Professors Long 
and Blaettermann lived) utterly unprepared to recite if called 
upon. But his brain was so active and his memory so excellent, 
that only a few moment's study was necessary, and then he was 
ready to make the best recitation in the class. To have an oppor- 
tunity of ' reading ahead ' . . . was all that Poe desired when 
unprepared. As a consequence of this wonderful faculty he was 
able to maintain a very high position in his classes, and win for 
himself the admiration, but more often the envy of his fellow 
students." 21T In this account there is an indication of a certain 
superficial cast to Poe's learning which agrees well with his im- 
mense affectation of it in later times. Tradition has it that the 
classes of young Dr. Blaettermann, who had come to the Uni- 
versity via London, with a pleasant English bride, were par- 
ticularly lively. The doctor's strong German accent, penchant for 
puns, and inability to keep order, brought about, it seems, some 
memorable and amusing scenes which Poe must have witnessed 
but does not seem to have taken an active part in. Indeed, both 
his scholastic and disciplinary records were officially excellent. 
The University minute books yield these items: 

At a meeting of the Faculty, December isth, 1826, 
Mr. Long made a report of the examination of the classes belonging 
to the School of Ancient Languages, and the names of the students 
who excelled at the examination of these classes: 

Semor Latin Class: 
GESSNER HARRISON of Rockingham. 
ALBERT L. HOLLADAY of Spottsylvania. 
BERTHIER JONES of Amelia. 
EDGAR A. POE of Richmond City., etc. 

II 

The names of the students who excelled in the Senior French Class 
as reported by the Professor of Modern Languages were as follows: 
PHILIP ST. GEORGE AMBLER of Richmond City. 
JOHN GARY of Campbell. 

217 Reminiscences of Thomas G. Tucker, confirmed by similar memories o! 
other classmates of Poe, and by the University records. Tucker wrote an article 
called Edgar Allan Poe while a Student at the University of Virginia, much 
quoted from. 



i S 6 ISRAFEL 



GESSNER HARRISON of Rockingham. 
WM. MICHIE of Hanover. 
CONWAY NUTT of Culpepper. 
EDGAR A. POE of Richmond City. 
WM. SELDEN of Norfolk. 
HENRY TUTWILER of Rockingham. 

Poe also did excellent work in Italian, and was at one time 
complimented by Professor Blaettermann for a translation from 
Tasso. Evidently one poet moved another. 

The names on the class lists of these long dead lads, bring 
back vividly the air of the vanished classroom with all the pathos 
that an old teacher feels as he turns over the faded leaves of 
some dusty roll book of years before, while the names and images 
of those long-lost to conscious memory leap out at him with 
the recollection of half-forgotten incidents, recalling the ghosts 
of happy and laughing faces turned to dust, or long hardened into 
caricatures of their youthful. beauty by the grim mold of manly 
metal. Wiping such secret, but withal not unkindly mistiness 
from a pair of pedagogical spectacles, the years of a century roll 
back before us, and we stand in Professor Blaettermann's class- 
room in Pavilion VI at the University of Virginia in the Spring 
of 1826. 

The tousled heads of ten or twelve boys in their late teens, at 
their early morning recitation, are dotted lackadaisically about 
the whittled benches, trying to imbibe by inspiration from the 
puzzling text, what they should have learned by candle-light the 
night before. A mumbled conversation, despite the glare of Pro- 
fessor Blaettermann, is going on in one corner of the room; and 
on a bench near the front, seated with his cronies Tom Golson, 
Upton Beale or PhHip Slaughter, their faces shining from the 
early morning pump and the run to the classroom, sits Edgar 
Allan Poe. "Mishter Chorge," says the young German at the 
desk, are you prepart? " silence " Vel den, Mishter Longl 
Haf you prepart your Tasso? Ckerusalem Delivered, virst 
stanssa, pegin" George Long, a mild youth of some eighteen 
summers, given to dining with visiting ex-presidents rather than 
to the midnight oil, arises and fumbles out some lines. " Ach 



ISRAFEL IN CAP AND GOWN 157 

Gott! dot vill do, Mishter Long, I see you are not Long for dis 
blace " (laughter and stamping of feet). " Mishter Poe. . . ." 

Edgar gets up. He is a little flushed, his large eyes shining with 
eagerness; a rather slender and delicate boy of seventeen, with 
a mass of dark hair and an easy carriage. On the little room falls 
the spell of his low but arresting and unforgettable voice. 218 

The lines roll on with something in them of the sonorous Italian. 
The surprised class grows hushed; Professor Blaetterman beats 
time ecstatically with a muttered, "Das is gud, gu&l" then 
the bell and the whole class laughing and slapping Poe on the 
back for having actually wrung an encomium from one of those 
damned foreign professors, pours out under the peristyle and 
rushes shouting, boy-like, into the bright spring sunshine of one 
hundred years ago. 

Classes over, the day was Poe's, and the night too. There were 
certain periods of military drill taught at that time at the Uni- 
versity of Virginia by Mr. Mathews, a West Point graduate. 219 
This was one of Jefferson's hobbies, who felt that the future 
leaders in the Republic should be trained to arms, and Poe seems 
to have elected to take the drill probably from the flare given to 
his military ambition aroused as an officer in the Richmond 
Junior Volunteers. La Fayette's praise was evidently not for- 
gotten, nor the exploits of Grandfather David Poe. Edgar seems 
to have nourished the military tradition considerably, and in a 
few months it was to bear bitter fruit. The military instructor 
afterwards recalled Poe, as, "thick-set with a jerky gait and 
bandy legs," but as this jars with nearly all other descriptions of 
the young poet at this time, we may feel certain that the instruc- 
tor's recollection was at fault, or that he confused someone else 
with Poe. 220 

Monday mornings the colored washerwomen made their 
rounds, of whom no less than seven afterwards asserted that they 



218 Th e scene j^ reproduced here from contemporary accounts of such recita- 
tions and the peculiarities of Professor Blaettermann. Foe's translation of Tasso 
is specifically mentioned. 

21 * J. H. Harrison, Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, chapter II, page 39. 

220 Mr. Mathews, the drill master, seems to have followed Thomas Tucker's 
description which is at fault. 



i S 8 ISRAFEL 



had all washed for " Marse Eddie Poe," and quarreled over the 
honor much as the Greek Cities over Homer's birth. The after- 
noons were spent at the library, at the stores, or about " hotels " 
in Charlottesville, a mile or so away, and there was swimming in 
the yellow Rivanna, and rambles amid the Ragged Mountains 
nearby. Lessons, however, were not neglected, and the Reading 
Room of the Library, then located in Pavilion VI, saw Poe often 
and deeply immersed in his books. 

William Wertenbaker, the librarian, recollected Poe as, " then 
little more than a boy . . . about five feet two or three inches 
in height, somewhat bandy legged, but in no sense muscular or 
given to physical exercises. His face was feminine, with finely 
marked features, and eyes dark, liquid and expressive. He dressed 
well and neatly. He was a very attractive companion, genial in 
his nature, and familiar by the varied life that he had already 
led, with persons and scenes new to the unsophisticated provin- 
cials among whom he was thrown. . . . What, however, im- 

pressed his associates most were his remarkable attainments as a 
classical scholar. . . . Poe was often found in the Library 

which was then open from three-thirty to five o'clock where he 
seems to have revelled in the rare and fine collection of standard 
authors assembled by Jefferson himself. The records show that 
Edgar A. Poe borrowed these books from the Library, a list which 
gives us some inkling of his interests outside of class work. 
Historic Ancienne .... _ Rollin 

Historic Romaine .... _ Rollin 

***** ...... Robertson 

Washington ..... Marshall 

Historic Particuliere . . . Voltaire 

Nature Displayed . . . . Dufief 221 

The mixture of romantic history and natural science is char- 
acteristic. To the same reading room came Jefferson himself, his 
well-known figure about the University must have been familiar 
to Poe. They must have been together frequently in the Library, 



- 



ISRAFEL IN CAP AND GOWN 159 

and it is scarcely possible that at some time some conversation 
was not exchanged. For all that, Jefferson left no mark on the 
imagination of Poe. Their worlds of thought, indeed, were uni- 
verses apart* 

Poe's life at the University of Virginia has hitherto had to be 
constructed solely from the testimony and reminiscences of his 
classmates; it is now possible, however, for the first time to add 
to it the facts given in his own letter to John Allan. 222 Only two 
of these written from the University remain. It is probable that 
he wrote several others to his foster-mother but these, if they 
exist, and they probably do not, have not come to light. In May, 
1826, Poe writes to John Allan that he has received from home 
a uniform coat together with six yards of striped doth for panta- 
loons, and four pair of socks. He says that the coat, which is a 
beautiful one, fits him exactly. It seems that at this period some 
of the students, those at least who took military drill, wore a 
sort of cadet uniform which accounts for the word " uniform." 
The disturbances caused among the student body by the meeting 
of the local grand jury also comes in for brief mention. Poe says 
his guardian will no doubt have heard about them by that time, 
and tells us that those whose names had been put upon the 
sheriff's lists had gone on their travels into the woods and moun- 
tains taking their bedding and provisions along with them. Poe 
himself is evidently not among them. The Hegira, it seems, took 
place the first day of the fright. Finding that those who were 
" wanted " were thus disappearing into remote places, the faculty 
now took a hand in the affair and issued a sort of proclamation 
confining the student body to the dormitories between the hours 
of eight and ten A.M. during which time the visitation and in- 
quisition of the sheriffs was to take place. Little attention was 
paid to this, however, and those with troubled consciences took 
to the woods freely a second time. In consequence of this the 
faculty the next morning reprimanded several, suspended for 
two months James Abbot Clarke of Manchester, one of Poe's old 

222 xhe facts narrated in this and the ensuing paragraph are taken from two 
of Poe's own letters to John Allan while at the University, first published in the 
Valentine Museum Poe Letters, pages 37-44 " letters Nos. i and 2," now available 
for the first time, 



r6o 



ISRAFEL 



schoolmates at Burke's Academy, and Armstead Carter from near 
Charlottesvffle for the rest of the session. Thomas Barclay was 

dismissed. 

The constant fighting, duelling and bickering of the student 
body also comes in for mention. It was a rude age in some 
respects and among the students lingered many of the barbarous 
customs of the American frontier. Poe tells us that a common 
fight was such an ordinary occurrence that no notice was taken 
of it. A more savage and feudistic affair between Turner Dixon 
and one Blow from Norfolk attracted more lasting notice. In the 
preliminary scuffle Blow it seems had the advantage, but Dixon 
took revenge by posting him in most indecent terms. This, and 
Blow's reply, was for a week the main topic of conversation. All 
the pillars in the University were turned white with scribbled 
reminders and counter replies, until finally Dixon was provoked 
into making another assault on Arthur Smith, one of Blow's Nor- 
folk friends, by striking him on the head with a stone. At this 
Smith pulled out a pistol and would have ended the controversy 
then and there if the weapon had not missed fire. Finally the 
Proctor of the University took a hand, summoned all the ag- 
grieved parties before a magistrate, and bound them over to keep 
the peace. The picture given of the lax discipline of the student 
body at this period, and the hot-headed bickering of young 
Southern gentlemen brought up in the traditions of the duel- 
ling code is illuminating. Poe closes the letter with affection- 
ate messages home to the ladies of the household and a re- 
quest for a copy of Tacitus Historiae and a further supply of 
soap! 86 * 

In a second letter from the University, written to John Allan 
on September 2ist, 1826, Poe tells us of the consternation among 
the student body at the announcement of the examinations to 
be given in the following December. As the University had only 
been under way for two years, he thinks it doubtful whether any 
diplomas or degrees will be conferred. Other institutions require 
three or four years before a degree is conferred, he tells us, and 
there was evidently some feeling that it would be unfair to ex- 
amine those who had only been there one session, in the same re- 



ISRAFEL IN CAP AND GOWN 161 

quirements, along with those who had been attending lectures 
for two. This, of course, covers his own case. Nevertheless, he 
seems fairly confident. He has been studying hard, he says, in 
order to prepare, and expects to come off as well as the rest, pro- 
vided he is not too nervous. 

Among other things, we also learn that the Rotunda was at that 
time nearly finished and the pillars of the Portico completed, to 
the great improvement of the appearance of the campus. The 
books, of which he says there was a fine collection, had recently 
been moved into the new Library. Another, and peculiarly brutal 
fight to the finish is also described. Poe saw the entire affair which 
came off just in front of his door. 

One Wickliffe, who, it will appear from the sequel, must have 
been well-versed in the tactics of gouging and biting, then preva- 
lent in the Western settlements, retired behind West Range to 
settle his differences with another student, and being the stronger, 
soon had the latter down and completely at his mercy. Not con- 
tent with that, he then preceded to bite his antagonist from the 
shoulder to the elbow. Poe says that he saw the arm afterwards 
and that the flesh was so seriously torn as to probably necessitate 
the cutting out of pieces as big as his hand. Poe adds without 
further explanation, that Wickliffe was from Kentucky. Scarcely 
a generation before, the same customs had disturbed the consti- 
tutional convention when it met at Richmond, Virginia. With 
such wolfish tactics still lingering about, the situation of Poe 
when he enraged the young bloods among the gamblers of the 
place by failing to meet his card debts, may be imagined. Poe's 
September letter from the University also informs us that John 
Allan had already paid him a visit sometime before, and sug- 
gests that business may require his presence in Charlottesville 
about examination time in December. What that business eventu- 
ally turned out to be, and how momentous the visit was to Poe, 
must be related shortly. 

Of the life about the little hamlet of Charlottesville, then con- 
fined to the valley below the college, there remain many authentic 
traditions. With the opening of the University and the conse- 
quent influx of gilded youth, there sprang up a parasitical com- 



ISRAFEL 



mercial group which lived upon and exploited the students. 223 
Chief among these were the hotel and boarding-house keepers 
who supplied the young gentlemen scholars with apple-toddy, 
egg-nog, mint slings, and the famous " peach and honey " of the 
neighborhood, or who kept dogs for the students, and connived at 
their clandestine affairs and gambling parties. There is some men- 
tion of Poe's paying some attention to a daughter of one of the 
boarding-house keepers and taking her to dances, but he does not 
appear to have taken any unusual part in the bucolic revels of 
the place, nor to have fallen at any time under the formal censure 
of the University authorities. The legend that he was expelled 
has, of course, long ago been exploded. 224 The University records, 
however yield us this: 

The Faculty met December 20th, 1826 
Present: JOHN T. SOMES, Chairman 

DR. DUNGLISON 

DR. BLAETTERMANN 

MR. BONNYCASTLE 

MR. TUCKER 

MR. KEY 

The Chairman presented to the faculty a letter from the Proctor giv- 
ing information that certain Hotel Keepers during the last session had 
been in the habit of playing at games of chance with the students in 
their Dormitories he also gave the names of the following persons 
who he had been informed had some knowledge of the facts, Edgar 
Mason, Turner Dixon, William Seawell, E. Le Branche, Edgar Poe, 
Drummond Emmanuel Miller, Hugh Pleasants and E. G. Crump who 
having been summoned to appear . . . etc. 

Poe with some others said he knew nothing about it and the 
matter was dismissed. Evidently, in common with the other school 

228 In a letter from West Point to John Allan, dated January 3rd, 1830, Poe 
specifically states that he was compelled to borrow money from "Jews" in 
Charlottesville at exorbitant rates of interest. 

224 William Wertenbaker's recollections made in 1869 "I was myself a 
member of the last three (Poe's) classes, and can testify that he was tolerably 
regular in his attendance, and a successful student, having attained distinction at 
the Final Examination in Latin and French; and this was at that time the highest 
honor a student could obtain. The present regulations in regard to degrees had 
not been adopted. Under the existing regulations he would have graduated in the 
two languages above named, and have been entitled to diplomas " The Inde- 
pendent for September, 1900. 



ISRAFEL IN CAP AND GOWN 163 

boys, Edgar Poe did not make a very good witness. That he was 
a devotee if not an adept at gaming, however, the amount of his 
losses later bear a better witness than he himself did. 

The merchants of the town evidently did a thriving trade, 
mostly, of course, on credit. The parents of the students were re- 
quired to give surety that their bills would be settled, although 
there was also an act of the legislature that absolved a student 
from debts which were found to be " unjust." 225 The relation ex- 
isting between careless and spendthrift youths, whose expenses 
were guaranteed, and irresponsible and avaricious shop-keepers, 
was one which lent itself to exploitation. In Poe's case, the situa- 
tion was undoubtedly aggravated by conditions which have only 
lately come to light. 

Young Poe was known to be the ward, and was said to be the 
heir of one of the richest men in Virginia. 226 It was probably not 
only easy and possible for him to exploit his credit to an unusual 
degree, but he was almost certainly pressed to do so by the shop- 
keepers who were familiar with his " father's " circumstances. 
It would seem that in the matter of clothes particularly, Poe soon 
ran into considerable debt. This, in itself, would have been a 
minor extravagance all the clothes that even a young man of 
dandiacal inclinations could wear in one session would not have 
been a serious matter to a father in John Allan's circumstances 
but Poe, it seems, used his clothes and orders upon his tailors to 
pay his gambling debts. He developed a great leaning for cards 
and no less than seventeen -broadcloth coats 227 are said to have 
amply failed to satisfy his ill luck at Loo and Seven-up. This, on 
the surface, has an ill look for Poe, and that he was culpable to 
some degree cannot be denied. The real reason for Poe's " passion 
for gaming," which his classmates soon noticed has, however, 
never been told. Family letters which have recently come to light 



225 it was probably this statute that John Allan afterward took as a legal 
ground for refusal to pay Foe's debts. Bills of merchandise purchased by Poe from 
Charlottesville merchants were rendered to the firm of Ellis 6* Allan as late as 
1835. These items are to be found in the Ellis & Allan Papers, Library of Congress, 
Washington, D. C. See page 154 this volume. 

220 Poe seems to have made considerable capital of this on various occasions. 

227 R. H. Stoddard Memoir, page 34, W. J. Middleton, publisher, 1875. 



I64 ISRAFEL 

put a new face upon the matter, a face with a strange and serious 

expression. 

John Allan, it seems, retained such a lively memory of the 
household controversies prior to Foe's departure for the Uni- 
versity, that, either through previous deliberate intention, or an 
after-developed unwillingness to give where it hurt probably 
the latter his remittances to his foster-son were not only inade- 
quate but almost nil. In the light of later events, it is scarcely too 
much to say that the firm Scotch merchant and " millionaire " 
had embarked upon a policy of embarrassing his foster-son. 

Without the revelations contained in some of Poe's letters 
which have just been published (September, 1925) his embar- 
rassed and harassed condition while at the University would never 
have been suspected. 228 Upon leaving for Charlottesville, John 
Allan provided him with $110. The expenses of attendance were, 
Poe assures his foster-father, at the lowest possible estimate, 
$350 a year, and he itemizes his immediate outlay in advance as 
follows: 

For Board $ 

For lectures under 2 professors .... 

Room rent in the University 

For bed 

For room furniture 

Total $149.00 



Thus Poe was already $39.00 in debt immediately upon arrival 
at the University, and, as he says, he had the mortification of 
being regarded as a beggar because he owed for public property. 
In reply to Poe's expostulations, John Allan did not neglect 
the opportunity of reproaching his foster-son for not attending 
three lectures and subjected him to the utmost abuse as if the 
boy were " the vilest wretch on earth " for running in debt. In 
compliance with the suspicious Scotchman's " command " Poe 

228 The facts in the discussion which follows are taken from the Valentine 
Museum Poe Letters published by Lippincott of Philadelphia, in 1925, and hitherto 
inaccessible to former biographers. See particularly letter " No. 24 " dated at West 
Point, January 3rd, 1830, pages 253-258. 




ISRAFEL IN CAP AND GOWN 165 

wrote him a letter giving an itemized account of his expenditures. 
To cover the debt of $39 the merchant sent Poe a check for $40 
leaving $i for " spending money." Text books at that time were 
furnished from home. Of these John Allan sent him those which 
were evidently in stock at Ettis & Allan, among them a Cam- 
bridge Mathematics in two volumes, and a set of Gil Bias which 
had no connection with the courses which Poe was taking. 

Poe was obliged to hire a servant and pay for fuel, laundry, 
and all other expenses and as a consequence again "ran into 
debt." It was then, he says, he became "dissolute," meaning 
probably that he played cards for money, and adds touchingly 
that he calls God to witness that he never loved dissipation, but 
that even the hollow profession of friendship of his companions 
was a comfort to one whose only crime was that he had never 
had anyone on Earth who cared for him. His letter is, indeed, a 
cry of pathetic despair, and the indubitable proof of a parsimony, 
on the part of his guardian, which, if it was not premeditated, 
brands him as one of the meanest of mankind. In any event it is 
beneath contempt. 

Poe wrote a letter to James Gait asking for relief which Gait 
was unable at the time to afford him. Knowing that John Allan 
was one of the richest men in Virginia, the other Scotchman may 
well have hesitated. After this he became desperate, Poe says, 
and involved himself irretrievably in gambling. Towards the end 
of the term John Allan sent him $100, but it came too late to 
afford him relief, and he seems to have been literally hounded 
from the University. Thus, in all, during the entire year at 
Charlottesville, Poe's guardian sent him $250, a sum which, in 
toto, was $100 less than the expenses required. The inference is 
plain. The result was, that Poe returned to Richmond followed 
by warrants and under the stigma of "extravagance." Mr. 
Allan's position is clear, for he not only refused to meet the debts 
of honor but even the bills for sweeping out his "son's room" 
and making his bed. 229 

Had John Allan been in straightened circumstances, there 
might have been some excuse for this strange parsimony, but he 

229 See the letter from Geo. W. Spotswood, Chapter X, page 189, also note 263. 



i66 



ISRAFEL 



was now in the full enjoyment of his uncle's ample fortune and, 
at that time, planning expenditures which make Edgar's expenses, 
debts and all, seem a bagatelle in comparison. The plain ugly fact 
seems to be that he disliked the boy because of what he knew, 
and that Edgar Allan Poe was already cut off with a shilling, and 
a Scotch shilling at that. Between the two men and an open rup- 
ture, was only the fast-wasting form of Frances Allan. To prevent 
it, even at the last, was the prayer literally on her dying lips as 
her breath failed. 230 

To pay his way, and even at various times to obtain food and 
fuel, Poe was thus reduced to the necessity of exploiting his 
credit in Charlottesville, and to playing cards for what he could 
make out of them. As always happens in such cases, he was un- 
lucky; the debts remained unpaid, and as a consequence he 
began to lose caste. Even a gentleman gambler is supposed to 
play for the excitement and amusement, once his necessities be- 
come apparent, he enters a professional but unhonored class. 
Among the Virginia planters' sons and Southern youths with 
whom Poe played, this was particularly true. Even the labor of 
hands for gain was despised as being performed by slaves, to 
play for it was beyond the pale. 

But there was cause of more heart-torturing worry than un- 
paid debts or the unflattering opinions of his classmates; no word 
had come from Elmira. All his ardent, beseeching, and heart- 
broken letters remained unanswered at a time when, to a young 
lover, silence is despair. Mr. Royster had intercepted the lovers' 
correspondence, and both her parents were pressing upon Elmira 
the suit of an older, and, in their eyes, a more acceptable man, 
one Mr. A. Barrett Shelton, a persistent young bachelor, and a 
man of means and some social distinction. Thinking that Edgar 
had forgotten her, the little girl reconsidered her promise to Poe 
and unwillingly acquiesced. That there must have been some col- 
lusion between Mr. Royster and John Allan seems an unavoid- 
able conclusion. The two men were friends, and if Mr. Royster 
had thought that Poe was even to share in John Allan's estate 

sac See Chapter XH, page 231, also James Gait's testimony given by J. H. 
Whitty Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, large edition, appendix page 195. 



ISRAFEL IN CAP AND GOWN 167 

there can be little doubt that he would have regarded him with 
more complacence as a son-in-law. From whom he learned that 
this was not to be the case is not certain, but it is not hard to 
guess. 281 

Poe's condition at the University of Virginia was therefore a 
peculiarly trying one to a sensitive young lad of seventeen " with 
a feminine face." Outwardly he was the spoiled and petted heir 
of a wealthy man with a dangerous but enviable credit among 
the shopkeepers, a well dressed, handsome, and brilliant young 
scholar who played too much Loo; inwardly he was the prey to 
exasperating and debilitating anxieties, worried at the unexpected, 
unjust, and embarrassing withholding of funds, tortured by the 
inexplicable silence of the girl whose promise and kiss had gone 
with him when he left Richmond, and torn between his fear of, 
and duty towards his guardian, and his sympathy for his foster- 
mother. What he knew, he durst not tell, and it would have done 
him no good if he had. The letters from John Allan were worm- 
wood and gall, and there was no one to whom in this dilemma he 
could turn for advice. Then too, what of the future? This also 
was to be considered. It is not stepping out of the surrounding 
frame of facts to say that it was a situation so exquisitely per- 
plexing, that at times it was more than he could bear. In an evil 
hour he resorted to the temporary oblivion and releasing excite- 
ment of the bottle. 

The motives which first led, and later compelled Poe to resort 
from time to time to drink, are not mysterious, and are certainly 
not inexplicable, but they are difficult to discuss and to place in 
their true light especially in the United States. In a country and 
age where the vending of alcoholic beverages has become a crime 
and their interdicted consumption an event of cheap bravado, the 
visualization of an era when a glass of wine or beer was regarded 
in the same light, and as inevitable, as turkey soup after Thanks- 
giving, requires an effort of the imagination which if the average 
person possesses, he is not willing to exert. Drinking has become 
romantic; in Poe's day the spigot was associated with, and for 
gustatory reasons, preferred to the pump. The gentleman of taste 

231 See Chapter VIII note 186, page 133. 



i68 



ISRAFEL 



saw to it that his wines were old and properly served, just as the 
good housewife now exerts herself to have the fish reasonably 
fresh and not too thoroughly fried. It is true that there were 
even then total abstainers, but there were also then, as there 
are now, vegetarians. Tipsyness, especially after dinner was re- 
garded as enviable; drunkenness was unfortunate, only when 
the habit became inveterate and disgusting did it really enter the 
realm of morals. To understand the, cause and nature of Poe's 
drinking is essential to the understanding of his character; to mis- 
understand it is to ignorantly malign the man. Just as De Quincey 
is forever associated with opium, and Amy Lowell with her cigar, 
Poe has been credited with the bottle as the source of his inspira- 
tion. Mention him in any company, and like a reflex action comes 
the inevitable question, " Did he drink? " The answer is, " He 
did "; but to the moral indictment implied, it is no answer at all. 

The first mention of Poe's drinking crops up while he was at the 
University of Virginia, To be sure, some capital has been made of 
the fact that on various occasions Poe is known to have tasted 
wine before. To anyone who is not hopelessly bigoted about the 
matter, however, these stories can be dismissed as futile attempts 
by special pleading to lay emphasis on facts which, by their 
nature, can have no significance. To say that Poe on this or that 
occasion in his childhood tasted wine, a beverage which, in the 
age of its universal use must have been in the houses of his foster- 
father and his friends, is of no more significance than to say that 
he drank coffee. Had Poe not over-indulged upon occasions some 
years later, such tittle-tattle would now no more be mentioned 
than the news that he ate several meals every day. Up until the 
time of his arrival at the University of Virginia, there is, meticu- 
lously speaking, not the slightest trace or indication, nor any 
evidence upon which to base even a supposition, that he had ever 
been intoxicated, or that he cared particularly for liquor. 

That alcohol played a large and important part in determining 
the events of his career cannot be denied, but that it was the 
determining and most important factor is a false conclusion. 2 * 2 

282 Many of the "Medical," "Psychological," and "Psychoanalytical," etc., 
etc., lives of Poe are vitiated by the fact that the premise of biographical facts 



ISRAFEL IN CAP AND GOWN 169 

The proof of these statements will be found in the facts of the 
poet's life already related, and those to be set forth in the nar- 
rative which is yet to follow. 

At the University, Poe for the first time began to drink. The 
motives which led to this seem to have been somewhat involved 
and various. In the first place, from his method of imbibing, Poe 
does not seem to have liked the taste. Your drinkers may be 
grouped into four several kinds; sippers, tipplers, gulpers, and 
guzzlers. The Sipper is your exquisite gentleman who inhales the 
bouquet, is particular as to the temperature, and tastes drop by 
drop, to the last in his delicate glass, the rare aroma of an old 
vintage whose date he judges not by figures but by flavor. Tip- 
plers are those who drain the glass in private, slowly but often, 
judging the brew by the quality and duration of the dreamful 
aftermath. Gulpers are those who care nothing for the taste, but 
with a single direct motion send the drink home for the result. 
Your Guzzler is he who drinks all, as rapidly, as frequently, and 
as persistently as he can. In this convivial category our hero was 
of the third degree, a Gulper. " He would always seize the tempt- 
ing glass, generally unmixed with sugar or water, in fact per- 
fectly straight and without the least apparent pleasure, swallow 
the contents, never pausing until the last drop had passed his 
lips. One glass at a time was all that he could take; but this was 
sufficient to rouse his whole nervous nature into a state of strong- 
est excitement which found vent in a continuous flow of wild, 
fascinating talk that enchanted every listener with siren-like 
power." 288 

Edgar's revels were held in his own room. A good fire would be 
lit, the furniture or other odds and ends sometimes serving for 

from which their conclusions are drawn is at fault, due to the statements of old 
biographies that rest on legendary sources. To put the case mildly, for instance, 
very little is really known of Poe's heredity. The real character of his parents and 
immediate grandparents cannot be ascertained with sufficient clearness to warrant 
any scientific conclusions. See the appendix for a discussion of Poe's heredity. 

233 Reminiscences of Thomas G. Tucker, Poe's classmate. Peter the Great of 
Russia had caused a great furor in England in the Seventeenth Century by a 
similar method of drinking. Bishop Burnett says it was Peter's custom to drink large 
bumpers of brandy, raw, before breakfast, and to gulp them down. The Muscovite 
seems to have derived much pleasure from the performance, and in contradistinc- 
tion to Poe, "liked the taste." 



170 ISRAFEL 

fuel (if the wood yard outside the window was not privateered 
upon) the table was drawn out and the game began. Several of 
those who were present at such times, have testified to the fact 
that Poe seemed under great nervous strain and excitement. 
When the means for his daily needs depended upon the run of 
cards, we can understand this. Ill luck would make it worse. Of 
the strain he was under from other causes, his classmates could, 
of course, have known nothing. Poe's drinking, which at worst 
seems to have been very occasional at the University, probably 
took place for a variety of reasons. 

In the first place as we have seen, it was the custom of the 
time and the fashion at the University. There must also have been 
a certain amount of bravado in the young student, in common 
with many others at a similar stage of development, who want to 
" Play the man " and impress the world with their manly sophis- 
tication. Poe seems to have rather affected the r61e of the finished 
youth. His experience abroad, his coming from Richmond the 
" big town " of his group, and the reputed wealth of his " father," 
all led him to live up to the jejune ideal which he assumed the 
others to demand of him. It was the boy's aim to impress and to 
be remarkable. There was also another motive, perhaps not a con- 
scious one, but a powerful one. Poe was not to the manner born, 
In the group of " F.F.V.'s " in which he found himself, he desired 
to be accepted without question, and the social doubt that his 
birth implied drove him not only to equal, but to try to exceed 
his companions in their own modes; to be a remarkable, a strange 
and a good fellow. As always the thing was overdone. Those who 
are sure of themselves never need to impress. So the fire burned 
more brightly, the stakes were perhaps a little higher, and the 
drinking a little deeper than was necessary. Lastly, but most 
important of all, in the temporary excitement of wine came self- 
confidence and oblivion. It made him confident, and it made him 
forget. This, at all times, then and in the future, was the main 
reason for his drinking. 

The effect upon Poe of even a small quantity was out of all 
usual proportion. He seems to have been so sensitively organized, 
that a dram, which to the average man caused only a faint glow, 



ISRAFEL IN CAP AND GOWN 171 

was sufficient to make his actions and conversation unusual. One 
glass was literally too much; two or three were disastrous; and 
a continued round of potations reduced him to a quivering carica- 
ture of himself, a libel on genius, and a portent of fallen humanity. 
The aftermath was physical torture, spiritual despair, and the 
remorse of a " lost " but abnormally sensitive soul. These mani- 
festations are discussed here in the light of what was to follow 
rather than in connection with Poe's imbibing at the University, 
which is important as a beginning and a tendency rather than 
for its immediate importance. 

While at Charlottesville, Poe's drinking seems to have been 
noted for its unusual effects upon an already remarkable person- 
ality rather than for its frequency. It was not habitual but rare. 
A visit to his room while one of his parties is underway, in the 
company of one of his classmates, will perhaps serve to make 
this clear. A classmate says: 234r 

Poe roomed on the West side of the Lawn, I on the East, he after- 
wards moved to the Western Range (Number 13) I was often in 
both rooms and recall the many hours spent therein. ... He was 
very excitable and restless, at times wayward, melancholic and morose, 
but again in his better moods frolicsome, full of fun and a most attrac- 
tive and agreeable companion. To calm and qidet the excessive nervous 
excitability under which he labored^ he would too often put himself 
under the influence of the " Invisible Spirit of Wine." 



Another companion remarks: 



235 



The particular dissipation of the University at this period was gam- 
ing with cards, and into this Poe plunged with a recklessness of nature 
which acknowledged no restraint. ... It led to a loss of caste among 
his high spirited and exclusive associates. 

Tom Tucker also tells us: 2se 

Poe's passion for strong drink was as marked and as peculiar as that 
for cards. It was not the taste of the beverage that influenced him; 

2 4 Dr. Miles George in a letter to Edward V. Valentine of Richmond, May 18, 
1880. This letter is now in the Ingram collection at the University of Virginia. 

235 William M. Burwell, May 18, 1884, in the New Orleans Times Democrat. 

23 Thomas Goode Tucker to Douglas Sherley letter April 5, 1880. Also 
quoted by Prof. Woodberry vol. i, 1909, page 33. 



I72 ISRAFEL 



without a sip or smack of the mouth he would seize a full glass, with- 
out water or sugar, and send it home at a single gulp. This frequently 
used him up; but if not, he rarely returned to the charge. 

Such drinking bears all the marks of being a very juvenile per- 
formance, indeed, Baudelaire has called it potations en bar- 
bare, but it has about it, laying aside the pitiably boyish { 
bravado, a certain gesture of childlike despair that is signi- 
ficant. No letter from Blmira and several from John Allan 
down goes a nasty dram which " frequently used him up " and 
no wonder, the "peach-honey" of the University was a man's 
drink. 

West Range was known in Poe's day as " Rowdy Row " and 
there were strict rules that the students' doors must be unbarred 
when a professor tapped on them, a rule hard to enforce. But not 
all of the parties in Number 13 were given over to cards and 
convivialities; these, it seems, in the light of after events have 
been overstressed. The real boy who dwelt there was of another 
stamp, or there would not now be over the door of Number 13 
" Rowdy Row " a bronze tablet with 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

MDCCCXXVI 
Domus parva magni poeta 237 



Many a long hour in the little dormitory was spent poring over 
favorite poets, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge and Wordsworth, present 
now beyond all doubt, and the old favorites Byron and Moore. 
Here, too, first began to take shape Tamerlane, through which 
moved the ghost of Elmira as he imagined her, and longed for her 
walking with him through the wild glens of the Ragged Moun- 
tains, that, with Kubla Khan's magic on his lip, he called the 
" Mountains of Belur Taglay." Why were his letters never an- 
swered? Did he suspect the truth before the term was over 



287 The inscription seems to be after that on the house of Erasmus in the 
Hoogestraate, Rotterdam. 



ISRAFEL IN CAP AND GOWN 173 

I pictured to my fancy's eye 
Her silent, deep astonishment, 
When a few fleeting years gone by 
(For short the time my high hope lent 
To its most desperate intent,) 
She might recall in him, whom Fame 
Had gilded with a conqueror's name 
(With glory such as might inspire 
Perforce, a passing thought of one, 
Whom she had deem'd in his own fire 
Wither'd and blasted; who had gone 
A traitor, violate of the truth 
So plighted in his early youth,) 
Her own Alexis, who should plight 
The love he plighted then again, 
And raise his infancy's delight, 
The bride and queen of Tamerlane. 288 

Ah, yes! He would show her that he was faithful, he, whom she 
had thought forgetful. To her he would return and make her his 
bride and queen when fame was his! How delightful, how youth- 
ful, and how pathetic! In the meanwhile he crammed his mind 
from " many an ancient volume of forgotten lore," and treasured 
all those honeyed fancies that cloy the too sweet lines of Al 
Aaraaj. 

n?he Sephalica, budding with young bees, \ 
^Jpreared its purple stem around her knees, J 

he writes, culling the rich vowels of the flower's name from the 
pages of Nature Displayed flung at random on the table " bees 
bees " there occurs the ready rhyme of " knees " and the 
vision of a certain intriguing petticoat flaunted from a sofa in 
a parlor on Second Street in Richmond, then Elmira standing up 
to her knees among flowers in the Enchanted Garden just as they 
were said to have sprung about the feet of Sapho, and the lines 
say themselves. But that will never do. No, he is the scholar 
now, too, and the young poet solemnly notes of the sephalica, 
" This flower is much noticed by Lewenhoeck and Tournefort, 
the bee feeding upon its blossom becomes intoxicated." 239 One 

288 From the 1827 version of Tamerlane, stanza XII. 
230 See Foe's own notes to Al Aaraaf. 



I74 ISRAFEL 



wonders how anybody with a name like Lewenhoeck could have 
noticed anything so charming. Nor did he keep these fancies en- 
tirely to himself. " Poe was fond of quoting poetic authors and 
reading poetic productions of his own, with which his friends 
were delighted and entertained; suddenly a change would come 
over him; then he would with a piece of charcoal evince his 
versatile genius by sketching upon the walls of his dormitory, 
whimsical, fanciful and grotesque figures, with so much artistic 
skill, as to leave us in doubt whether Poe in future life would be 
a painter or a poet." 24 Among these sketches were grotesques 
of the plates of an edition of Byron. What an enthusiasm and a 
necessity for self-expression was pent up in these close walls! 

The company that gathered about the fire in Number 13 to 
listen. to some of the early American Short Stories and the im- 
passioned voice of Israfel reciting his own poetry, was a brilliant 
one and comprised some of the future leaders of the time. 241 
Those who listened to Poe then never forgot him. Between the 
glasses of hot apple-toddy, the bursts of laughter and the green 
oaths of youth, the anecdotes about the campus queans, the 
idiosyncrasies of the faculty, and the latest student duel, Poe 
would read something he had just written, putting his whole soul 
into his gestures and the low melodious modulations of his voice, 
while the fire flickered and the long candle shadows waved to 
and fro. Then followed an open expression of opinions. 212 " On one 
occasion Poe read a story of great length to some of his friends 
who, in a spirit of jest, spoke lightly of its merits, and jokingly 
told him that his hero's name c Gaffy ' occurred too often. His 
proud spirit would not stand such open rebuke, so in a fit of 
anger, before his friends could prevent him, he had flung every 
sheet into a blazing fire, and thus was lost a story of more than 
ordinary parts which, unlike most of his stories, was intensely 
amusing, entirely free from his usual somber coloring and sad 
conclusions merged in a mist of impenetrable gloom. He was for 

2 * Dr. Miles George to Edward V. Valentine, letter, May 5, 1880, now in 
the Ingram collection, University of Virginia. 

241 For a long list of the distinguished men who were at the University of 
Virginia with Poe, see Harrison, Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. I. 

2 * 2 Thomas Goode Tucker is quoted here. 



ISRAFEL IN CAP AND GOWN 175 

a long time afterwards called by those in his particular circle 
i Gaffy ' Poe, a name that he never altogether relished." And so, 
as might have been expected, the proud " Alexis " who was to 
come back as the conquering hero, " gilded by fame," to make 
Elmira his queen and his bride, had become " Gaffy "! The name 
followed him to West Point. But there is nearly always affection 
in a nickname, even ridicule is familiar, and Poe was evidently 
liked. "Whatever Poe may have been in after years," says a 
classmate and intimate friend, " he was at the University as true 
and perfect a friend as the waywardness of his nature would 
allow. There was never then the least trace of insincerity." 

With all of its distractions, this was seed-time for a great har- 
vest. Under Professor Long, who had a passion for geography in 
its relation to history, may have first arisen Poe's minute knowl- 
edge of the bizarre facts in the customs and landscapes of " far 
countrees," and the curiosity to continue the research out of 
which tales could be fabricated with that " imaginative-realism " 
in which he delighted. Professor George Tucker, who touched 
even the dry data of statistics and treatises on population with 
the virile wand of interest, could scarcely have failed to attract 
Poe, for while Poe was at the University, Tucker was writing a 
story called A Voyage to the Moon?** after the very manner 
followed later by his pupil in his Balloon Hoax, Hans Pfaatt, and 
the like. Poe not infrequently visited the faculty at. home and 
such things as lunar voyages may have been discussed. It was 
a topic upon which Edgar would love to enlarge. Keats longed for 
the moon like a child; Poe with his combined mathematics and 
poetry imagined that he reached it. 

And there were the Ragged Mountains! Poe knew a private 
and little-trod path that led there, to glens glistering in the Spring 
with the bleached flame of the dogwood blossoms, or brilliant 
beyond European imagination after the first frosts with the pied 
motley of the scarlet and golden Virginia Fall. Here he could find 
solitude and dream of Elmira, and make poems "upon a dim, 
warm, misty day, towaird the close of November, and during the 
strange interregnum, of the seasons which in America is termed 

248 Published in the American Quarterly Review in 1827. 



I7 6 ISRAFEL 

the Indian summer/' 244 Of what he saw and thought there, let 
him speak for himself when "... attended only by a dog upon 
a long ramble among the chain of wild and dreary hills that lie 
westward and southward of Charlottesville." 

The thick and peculiar mist, or smoke, which distinguishes the In- 
dian summer, and which hung heavily over all objects, served no doubt, 
to deepen the vague impressions which these objects created. So dense 
was this pleasant fog that I could at no time see more than a dozen 
yards of the path before me. This path was excessively sinuous, and as 
the sun could not be seen, I soon lost all idea of the direction in which 
I journeyed. ... In the quivering of a leaf in the line of a blade 
of grass in the shape of a trefoil in the humming of a bee in 
the gleaming of a dew drop in the breathing of wind in the faint 
odors that came from the forest there came a whole universe of sug- 
gestion a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and unmethodical 
thought. 

This was a very excellent classroom, indeed, for a poet, and 
there is no better incubator in the world for dreams than the 
sun diffused in warm mist. 

Thus slipped the months away. On July 4th Jefferson had died 
and Poe heard the old University bell tolled for the first time to 
mark his passing. Edgar was himself secretary of the " Jefferson 
Literary Society," 246 a type of organization that in the college 
life of the time provided not only literary and oratorical occa- 
sions, but became a convenient means for the formal recognition 
of cliques; it filled very largely the place of the modern fraternity. 
In a Southern college, the death of its great founder would not 
fail to be marked by the student orators of the time. It was still 
the age of the spoken word. 240 But the Fall of 1826 was marked 



244 The quotations here are from Poe's Tale of the Ragged Mountains, pub- 
lished in Godey's Lady's Book for 1844. 

245 Some doubt has been thrown on the authenticity of Poe's signature as the 
secretary of this society. 

246 When the History of Oratory in the United States is written, as it ought 
to be, the large part played in national political movements by the literary 
societies in American schools and colleges will become apparent. Starting as senuine 
debating groups, in which argumentation was actually studied and practised, these 
forensic-social groups gradually deteriorated; parliamentary procedure devolved 
into a patter and ritual; the laws of evidence were disregarded, and the palm 
awarded to the loquaciously-eloquent, whose flights were unhindered by the weight 



ISRAFEL IN CAP AND GOWN 177 

for Edgar Poe by an event which must have caused him more 
immediate and genuine sorrow than the death of Jefferson. Some 
time in the late Autumn of the year John Allan seems to have 
visited Charlottesville. It was no mere matter of academic inter- 
est that drew his reluctant feet to the University; certain manu- 
scripts bearing his foster-son's signature had come to light, not 
poems, but bills payable. 

As the term drew to its close near the Christmas holidays, the 
merchants of Charlottesville who supplied the University stu- 
dents, doubtless began to want to see the color of money before 
their gay young customers departed from the neighborhood. Bills 
were sent home and the usual difficulties began. Owing to his 
guardians untimely parsimony in sending Edgar almost no cash 
allowance at all, the boy had no doubt had to use his credit to 
an unusual extent to begin with. 

One can imagine the almost apoplectic effect of the cold record 
of his ward's progress along the primrose path, when presented 
in dollars and cents to the purse-careful Scotchman. John Allan 
seems to have called James Hill, ordered out the carriage, and 
driven post-haste over to Charlottesville. Nor would two days 
journey over the mountain roads of Virginia, in the McAdamless 
year of grace 1826, have served to smooth his wrath. He had 
plenty of time to think over what he would do and say, and as 
usual his action was vigorous and his remarks characteristic. 

The interview between Edgar and his guardian at Number 13 
must have been a fiery one. Poe's proceedings had been, indeed, 
most unfortunate. The result was fraught with tremendous con- 
sequences to his future. Mr. Allan no doubt found a rather re- 
calcitrant and exasperated youth to deal with; the whole story 
came out inevitably, as the bills were there to expose it; and Poe 
was curtly informed that his University career was over. 

Whatever drinking there had been, must have been made the 
most of, and the gambling debts were, of course, inexcusable in 



of logic. One of these " orators " from Buncombe County, North Carolina, who 
was elected to the United States Congress, has added a new word to the language, 
buncombe, later shortened, to bunk. The necessity for the word is by no means 
sectional. 



17 8 ISRAFEL 

the eyes of the older man. These, Mr. Allan refused to pay. He 
may have settled some of those for which he was legally respon- 
sible and afterward have driven away in high dudgeon, nor would 
it be any balm to his feelings, under the circumstances, that to 
a certain extent his attempt to put his ward on short commons 
had resulted in his having to pay more in the end. Edgar's bril- 
liant scholastic record gave him nothing to complain of, so the 
affair was entirely financial. When all is said and done, a few 
apple-toddies could not have weighed very heavily in the scale 
except to lend extra force to the older man's invective. Poe's 
predicament will scarcely be evident to modern eyes. In his day, 
imprisonment for debt was still in full force; the laws of Virginia 
were stringent, and the boy, as soon as the news of his guardian's 
attitude got about, which must have been instanter, would find 
himself pwswd by warrants. Until the debts were satisfied, he 
could not return to the county where they had been contracted, 
and in a short while processes were issued which drove him from 
the state. By simply withholding his aid, John Allan automatically 
made Poe's return impossible. Whatever indiscretions Poe may 
have committed, there is no evidence that he deserved a punish- 
ment which involved the whole of his future. Mr. Allan was not 
legally responsible for the gambling debts, but a few hundred 
dollars would have staved off the merchants at Charlottesville. 
The cold fact remains that the goad merchant did not think that 
his foster-son was worth this. The threat to his Scotch purse was 
unforgivable. A few years later he made ample provision for his 
natural children in his will, legacies which, although a long and 
scandalous litigation was involved, his second wife undertook to 
set aside. In possession of a great fortune, $250 was the extreme 
limit of his effort to carry out his promise to give Poe a liberal 
education. In short the " jig was up." Poe had lost his opportunity 
of a University education, and had to face alone the demands 
for the payment of his debts of honor, doubtless to him the most 
unpleasant aspect of the affair. As a result of the situation he 

247 In Poe's last letter to John Allan from West Point he specifically states 
that he was hounded out of Richmond by warrants. See Valentine Museum Poe 
Letters, letter No. 24, page 256. 



ISRAFEL IN CAP AND GOWN 179 

seems, as one of his classmates says " to have lost caste." The 
last of the Charlottesville episode closed in gloom. From William 
Wertenbaker, who was a close friend of Edgar, we have a vivid 
description of the final hours at the University. 

On the night of December 2oth, 1826, or thereabouts, the two 
young men spent the early hours of the evening at the house of 
one of the faculty, probably Professor Tucker, or Professor 
Blaettermann, whose conversation and young English wife must 
have attracted the boys to the fireside. After the visit, Werten- 
baker and Poe walked over to "the small dwelling of a great 
poet " in West Range, where Poe began to smash up the furniture. 
This he burned with sundry papers, and the accumulated rubbish 
of 'the term in the little fireplace, meanwhile telling his troubles, 
in a gloomy and foreboding vein, to William Wertenbaker, a 
sympathetic listener. 

It was a cold night in December, and his fire having gone pretty 
nearly out, by the aid of some tallow candles, and the fragments of a 
small table which he broke up for the purpose, he soon rekindled it, 
and by its comfortable blaze I spent a very pleasant hour with him. 
On this occasion he spoke with regret of the large amount of money 
he had wasted and of the debts he had contracted during the session. 
If my memory is not at fault he estimated his indebtedness at $2000, 
and, though they were gaining debts, he was earnest, and emphatic in 
the declaration that he was bound by honor to pay, at the earliest op- 
portunity, every cent of them. 248 

William Wertenbaker probably went home about midnight, 
leaving Edgar to fall asleep by the flickering shadows of the dying 
fire as the last sticks of his little table, upon which Tamerlane and 
Other Poems had come into being, slowly turned into ashes, the 
ashes of lost opportunity. 

The next day he climbed on the Charlottesville coach in com- 
pany with Philip St. George Ambler, Robert Hunter, Zaccheus 
Lee, Creed Thomas, and other youths of Richmond, Washington, 
and the vicinity, and started for home. They must have stopped 
overnight on the way, and arrived in Richmond the day before 

248 This is one of the most authentic glimpses of Poe at the University that 
we have. William Wertenbaker afterward became Librarian of the University of 
Virginia. It was his " profession " to cherish the literary memories of the place. 



i8o ISRAFEL 

Christinas, 1826. Poe brought with him a small trunk, in which 
were the remnants of a considerable wardrobe, the spoil of the 
Charlottesville merchants, a few cherished books, and the man- 
uscripts of some of the poems which appeared in Boston about 
six months later. 249 The prodigal had returned. As he ran up 
the steps of the big house on Main Street, dressed in a " London 
hat, a super-blue broadcloth suit with gilt buttons, a velvet vest 
and drab pantaloons," 25 he probably had no hallucinations as 
to the fatted calf, or that John Allan, under the circumstances, 
would rehearse the paternal r61e in the parable. But he seems to 
have been met with fondly welcoming arms by Frances Allan 
and his dear "Aunt Nancy." Holly was in all the windows, and 
mistletoe festooned the chandeliers, but where was Elmira? 

249 Tamerlane and Other Poems. It is also even possible that the notes and 
many of the lines of Al Aaraaf were in existence at this date as it bears the stamp 
of having been conceived where a library was available and leisure to use it. Al 
Aaraaf was published in 1829. Foe afterward used it as a mine for later poems, 
Zante, etc. 

250 Poe purchased these articles on December 4, 1826, from Samuel Leitch, 
Jr., a Charlottesville merchant. Mr. Allan refused to pay the bill, now in the 
Ellis & Allan Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D. O, Foe's name on the 
bill is misspelled Powe. 



CHAPTER X 
Alias Henri Le Rennet 



SO the prodigal found himself, suddenly, in Richmond again. 
Ill at ease, too, for he had now given John Allan real 
cause for complaint, and his position in the household was 
essentially uncomfortable; lawyers were trying to force Mr. 
Allan to recognize his foster-son's gambling debts which, it ap- 
pears, in all totalled about $2soo, 251 when the final sums came in. 
These John Allan resolutely refused to recognize, and his exas- 
peration seems to have been so extreme then, or later, that he 
would not even settle for accounts that were legitimately con- 
tracted. 352 The greeting between the two could only have been 
curt. 

Poe must have felt his position keenly. The other boys, to 
some of whom he doubtless owed money, were also home for the 
holidays. For them it was Christmas and a merry time. Poe, in 
his chagrin, would scarcely care to see them. There would be no 
happy return on a noisy coach to Charlottesville after New 
Year's. He was no longer the brilliant young student and sport 
of his set, with a literary career ahead, but the prodigal whose 
brief career of glory was over, whose social position with his own 
friends was compromised by unpaid debts of honor, with the dubi- 
ous prospects of perhaps a place on a stool in the counting house 
of Ettis & Allan. The pill was a bitter one, and it was made no 
easier by his discovery of the truth about Elmira. Luckily, it is 
not hard to piece out the events of the first day at home, the day 
before Christmas. 

Edgar must have had a long talk with his "mother" and 

26i Statement made by Col. Thomas H. Ellis in a letter to the editor of the 
Richmond Standard, April 22, 1881. Lawyers' letters relating to collection of these 
debts are still extant in Richmond, Virginia. 

252 see specifically the letter of Edward G. Crump to Poe, March 25, 1827 on 
page 200. 



Ig2 ISRAFEL 

" Aunt Nancy "; that at least we can be sure was comforting. 
On his drive to the University, the February before, it seems 
that he had even then broached the subject to Frances Allan of 
leaving John Allan's house, and making his own way in the 
world. She, however, had persuaded him to go on to Charlottes- 
ville. 258 The return of Poe in " disgrace " must have again aroused 
apprehensions that he would leave her, and she was anxious to 
soften the hard places of his fall, and make him welcome again 
by the fireside which she had done so much to make happy. 
Nothing is more indicative of her affection than the fact that 
she had arranged for him, that very night, a Christmas Eve party 
to which his friends were to be invited, as a formal advertise- 
ment of the fact that he was still at home as the beloved foster- 
son of a hospitable house. Nor was this in reality putting much 
of a strain on the circumstances surrounding Poe's withdrawal. 
That John Allan permitted it, shows that even he acquiesced. 264 
It must be remembered that Edgar had not in any official way 
disgraced himself. 255 That he had gambled, and upon occasions 
overstepped the mark in the drinking bouts, was true, but it was 
also true of nearly all the other students. He had not incurred the 
displeasure of the authorities, and been dismissed; his guardian 
had withdrawn him, not so much because of the " immorality " 
of his conduct, as on account of his debts. 250 In the final analysis 
this was what worried Mr. Allan most, as it would worry any 
Scotchman or commercial-minded man. Had Edgar's wayward- 
ness been of an inexpensive type it might have been censured, but 
no very drastic action would have followed. The tune of $2500. 



258 Statement made by James Hill, the Allan's coachman, who drove Mrs. 
Allan and Poe to Charlottesville in 1826. See Whitty Memoir, large edition, page 
xxvii. Also close of Chapter IX, this volume. 

254 Thomas Boiling, a young friend of the Allan family and an acquaintance 
of Poe, visited the Allan house in Richmond the day before Christmas and was 
invited to this party. The Boiling family was settled in Goochland County at 
^Boiling Hall," and "Boiling Island" Plantations. John Allan's plantation was 
in the same neighborhood. See page 859. 

255 See John Allan's letter to the Secretary of War from Richmond, May 6, 
1829. " I have much pleasure in asserting that he (Poe) stood his examination at 
the close of the year with great credit to himself." 

288 John Allan says in the same letter referred to in note 255, " He left me in 
consequence of some gambling at the University at Charlottesville," etc. 



ALIAS HENRI LE RENNET 183 

for one term was a melody which did not appeal to a Scotch ear, 
however, and as Mr. Allan had to pay the piper, he had decided 
to put a period to the dance. It was, in the opinion of him who 
had to bear the expense, not worth the cost. At best, Mr. Allan's 
enthusiasm over a liberal education for the foster-child must have 
been limited. That limit had already been exceeded during the 
first year of the cultural interlude, and, as a consequence, Master 
Edgar found himself suddenly very much at home. It was this 
financial aspect, too, in a more personal and proud way, rather 
than the pricking of bad conscience, which appears to have 
worried young Poe the most. The drinking escapades, on which 
so much emphasis has been laid, could not have caused him 
much self reproach at the time. He could not see them as the 
evil portents of the future. He must have been a little ashamed 
of the fact that his head was not as hard as the heads of his mates 
who could carry their liquor better than he, but, that he had taken 
a not unusual part in what was then expected and practised by 
every live young gentleman at college, did not cause him much 
spiritual dismay we may be sure. Drinking in all its aspects stood 
on a different moral plane in 1826 than in 1926. What did worry 
and cause him chagrin, perhaps even a feeling of disgrace, was 
the remembrance that a goodly number of ex-college mates 
possessed certain I. O. U.'s for not inconsiderable amounts, notes 
which his foster-father had refused to honor. These in the boy's 
eyes were debts of honor; in Mr. Allan's they were debts of dis- 
honor, and in legal fact to him did not exist. The fact that his 
disappointing and troublesome foster-son might lose prestige 
among the members of a fast young set, whose good opinion Mr. 
Allan did not think worth having, especially at a great price, left 
him unmoved. 

Edgar, on the other hand, like most boys of his age, probably 
felt, and valued more keenly, the attitude of his fellows than the 
opinions of his parents. 267 This, coupled with an inability to ap- 
preciate the nature and difficulty of acquiring what was so easy 



257 One of the main motives for Poe's leaving Richmond and assuming an 
alias was undoubtedly his desire to avoid the unbearable contacts with those to 
whom he owed debts of honor. 



l84 ISRAFEL 

to spend, undoubtedly contributed the main stress in an already 
strained condition of affairs. 

With the women of the household this monetary consideration 
could not have been the most important one. Like most women, 
they regarded the situation in its purely human and personal 
aspect as a conflict of personalities. They were more apt to con- 
done what in their eyes was, at worst, the result of the natural 
exuberance and inexperience of a handsome boy under whose 
more manly clothes beat the romantic heart and pulsed the warm 
body which they had loved and cherished since childhood. It is 
scarcely possible that Mrs. Allan ever forgot the purple cap with 
the gold tassel, the Nankeen trousers and the buckled shoes. No 
good woman ever would. 

So there was to be a party! We can imagine Edgar's reception 
of the news, his appreciation of all that it meant, and his passion- 
ate gratitude to his " mother." What would he do without her? 
She who was frail and ill, his " dear, dear Ma!" Now he would 
run over and see Elmira. . . . 

The blow was a staggering one. " No, she was not at home. 
Miss Royster has left Richmond." The door closed, shutting out 
the little parlor where the flute had once warbled and the piano 
tinkled, leaving him, can we doubt it, in tears. Someone must have 
told him, and someone must have left him in despair. 258 

It was all plain now. He could hear John Allan and Mr. Roy- 
ster talking it over, see all of his pathetic letters opened by an 
unfeeling hand, the amused grins over the ardent lines, and a 
little girl in tears. Then the advent of the unwelcome Mr. Shelton, 
his plausible talk, and Elmira at last sent away where her lover 
could not find her to tell her he still loved her, that it was all a 
cruel lie, and that her Prince Charming had come back to claim 
his princess after all. How dreary the Enchanted Garden now, 
and how cold the snow looked on the roofs as he looked across 

258 There is, of course, no " document n describing this visit to the Royster's. 
Poe may have learned of Elmira's plight even before he left the University, or 
from the servants or his foster-mother. In any event, the result of the news would 
have been the same. If the story was held from him, as seems likely, his first 
instinct would have been to visit Elmira. At the Royster house further conceal- 
ment would have been impossible. 



ALIAS HENRI LE RENNET 185 

to the Roysters' and saw the empty window where a handkerchief 
had once waved! It was all like a bad dream. As he unpacked the 
mementoes of his lost room at the University, who can doubt that 
the lines of certain manuscripts indited to a lost little lady swam 
dizzily before him through the mist of his despair. Could she, had 
she actually forgotten him? Most of Poe's historians have dis- 
missed the " Elmira incident " as an amusing story of puppy-love. 
They forget that in 1826-27, especially in the South, marriage 
took place commonly in the 'teens. Poe had not simply lost a nice 
little sweetheart but his promised wife. Elmira married Mr. 
Shelton the next year. She had two children by him, both named 
Sarah Elmira, who died in infancy, and a son. This " affair " was 
in reality a great emotional crisis, and a frustration in the life of 
Edgar Allan Poe. The home-making instinct here received its 
deathblow, with a consequent tendency towards wanderlust. It 
was one of the deepest sources of Poe's melancholy. 

In considering Poe's parting and break with his guardian, dur- 
ing the months of December, 1826, and January, 1827, the fact 
of his broken engagement and the resulting irritation and wound 
to his pride and hopes must be included. The spectacle of a 
pretty young girl, from whose lips both the promises and pledges 
of affection have been freely received but a few months before, 
in the arms of an ardent young rival, is not one well calculated 
to sooth the smart of misfortune. For with even the affectation 
of Byronic pride and passion, and Poe had more than that, it was 
a choking piece of humble pie. Hence the little Song from poems 
written in youth and dated 1829. 

I saw thee on thy bridal day 259 
When a burning blush came o'er thee, 
Though happiness around thee lay, 
And the world all love before thee; 

And in thine eye a kindling light 

(Whatever it might be) 
Was all on Earth my aching sight 

Of loveliness could see. 



259 written after the marriage of Elmira to Mr. Shelton and undoubtedly 
addressed to her. 



l8 6 ISRAFEL 

Nor were a few rather poor lines the end of Elmira. After the 
exit of Mr. Shelton she was to come on the stage again with Isra- 
fel to take part in the last brief, hopeful, sunset glow of his final 
act. But in December, 1826, the end seemed inevitable a merry 
Christmas, indeed! The scene now shifts to a little later on in 
the afternoon. 

We are indebted to the testimony of Thomas Boiling, 254 a 
former schoolmate of Edgar's, to whom Mr. Allan had extended 
a cordial invitation to call, sometime before when he was on a 
visit to the country, for a description of the events at the Allan 
house on Christmas Eve, 1826. The young man, who was about 
Edgar's age, had taken the opportunity of paying his respects to 
Mr. and Mrs. Allan during the afternoon of the 24th, and was 
somewhat embarrassed to see that preparations for an entertain- 
ment were under way. He at once rose to leave, but was stopped 
by Mr. Allan, who cordially insisted upon his staying, explaining 
that Edgar had just returned from the University, and that some 
of his young friends and acquaintances had been asked in to meet 
him. Young Boiling replied that he was not suitably dressed, 
whereupon Mr. Allan bade him, " Go up to Edgar's room. He 
will supply you with one of his own suits." The remarkable ex- 
tent of Poe's wardrobe was now probably thoroughly impressed 
on Mr. Allan's mind. 

Upon going upstairs, Tom Boiling found Edgar lying on a 
lounge in his own room reading. " A handsomely furnished room, 
with books and pictures arranged in bookcases around the wall." 
One cannot help wondering if the little picture of Boston with 
the pathetic lines on the back was among the rest. Edgar wel- 
comed his friend cordially, and threw open the doors of his well- 
stocked wardrobe, giving Tom his choice. Both of them then 
went down stairs to the drawing room where Edgar did his part, 
in welcoming his guests. As the evening wore on, Poe seems to 
have become as impatient as usual with the formal social scene, 
and pulling young Boiling aside, he quietly proposed that they 
slip off down street and have a private spree of their own, Boi- 
ling replied at first " That it would never do," but his friend was 
so urgent that he finally yielded, and the company was left to 



ALIAS HENRI LE RENNET 187 

enjoy themselves as well as they could without the presence of 
the " honor guest." 

Just what led Poe to do this, it is not hard to guess. The re- 
ception of friends who knew the story of his fiasco at the Uni- 
versity was probably no easy matter, Elmira must have been 
keenly on his mind, and the festivities of a Southern Christmas 
Eve thoroughly out of keeping with his mood. In company with 
Boiling, we can imagine him retiring to Mrs. E. C. Richardson's 
tavern, a favorite haunt, where he may have found Ebenezer 
Burling, and over a few comforting cups confided the perplexities 
of his situation, while the festivities went on at home minus the 
presence of the young host. 

Poe's accounts to his friends of his University career were, as 
might have been expected, not the whole truth. In self defense he 
seems to have assumed a rather lofty indifference, and to have 
tried with a college boy's braggadocio to impress his acquain- 
tances with the " sporty " side of his life. His debts he explained 
by saying that he wanted to see how much of the old man's money 
he could spend, 260 and the seventeen broadcloth coats were an 
item in his remarks. This, if it came to Mr. Allan's ears, could 
not have helped to heal matters. Of the real reasons, neither he 
nor Poe would have been anxious to talk. The deserted party must 
also have been oil on the flames rather than a domestic lubricant. 
One is warranted in picturing Mr. Allan as very angry, and 
" Ma " perhaps in tears, when the boys returned that night, if 
either of the couple were inclined to sit up that long. The holly 
at the Christmas breakfast table could scarcely have expressed 
the spirit of the occasion for Frances Allan any more than the 
mistletoe did for Edgar. 261 It was all very tragic, and it was all 
very human. There was right and wrong on both sides, a deter- 
mined, exasperated, and incensed older man, and a despairing, 
sensitive and love-sick boy. Out of such stuff the world's tragedies 
are conveniently made. 

The Christmas Holidays of 1826 marked the last passing phase 



260 R. H. Stoddard Memoir. See note 146, ante. 

281 Christmas breakfast in the South often assumes the importance of the 
Christmas dinner in the North. 



xgg ISRAFEL 

of Poe's boyhood. New Year's, 1827, dawned and Poe was in 
reality, if not wholly in years, a man. Like everyone who is not 
born with at least a plated spoon in his mouth, he was now con- 
fronted with the prime question of every man's life " Where- 
with should he eat and wherewithall should he be clothed? " The 
store of Ellis & Allan seems to have been the most obvious an- 
swer, but this distasteful solution was not offered him. Condi- 
tions at home must have been unusually uncomfortable and, for 
a time, probably during the last of the holidays, Poe went down 
to his " father's " plantation, " The Lower Byrd " in Goochland 
County, to avoid the painful scenes in the big city house, and 
the trials of seeing his friends depart for the University leaving 
him behind. In the country, too, he could escape those who were 
hounding him for his debts, for he was now pursued by warrants. 
He seems to have returned to Richmond sometime in January 
and to have talked about, and even begun the reading of law. 202 
But this was not definite enough for Mr. Allan who seems to have 
considered that young Poe had forfeited his chance to become a 
professional man by his conduct. The older man on his part, 
however, offered no help in Poe's attempts to obtain employment, 
although he reproached the boy for "eating the bread of idle- 
ness." The stories, related by former biographers, that he was 
given work in the store of ElUs & Allan, are now shown by the 
dates of letters which have come to light, and the nature of their 
contents, not to be true. Poe's situation was, indeed, desperate. 
John Allan would not pay off his debts, or make any compromise 
which would allow him to return to the University. Neither would 
he aid him in getting employment, while at the same time he 
excoriated him for being idle. In the household, Edgar's position 
had become anomalous; he was, it appears, subject even to the 
whims, not only of the whites, but of the slaves, too. Indeed, he 
specifically complains of this. For a young Virginian this was the 
lowest rung of domestic tyranny. He was in fact trapped, and 
there is every indication that his foster-father took the occasion 



262 Poe's visit to the country and his attempt to read law are given on the 
double evidence of James Gait, and Poe himself in one autobiographical story 
published in Richmond, 1835, see note 150, ante. 



ALIAS HENRI LE RENNET 189 

to rub it in. Probably he deliberately improved the opportunity 
to make clear to Poe the lesson that the way of the evil doer is 
hard, and to impress upon him the value of money by allowing 
him to remain without any at all, and no means of making any. 
Fiery interviews must have occurred upon the receipt of such 
letters as this from Charlottesville: 

JOHN ALLAN, Esq., Richmond 

DEAR SIR, 

I presume when you sent Mr. Poe to the University of Virginia you 
felt yourself bound to pay all his necessary expenses one is that 
each young man is expected to have a servant to attend his room. Mr. 
Poe did not board with me, but as I had hired a first rate servant who 
cost me a high price, I consider him under greater obligations to pay 
me for the price of my servant. I have written you two letters and 
have never received an answer to either. I beg again, sir, that you will 
send me the small amount due ($6.25). I am distressed for money and 
I am informed that you are Rich both in purse and Honor. 

Very respectfully, 
GEO. W. SPOTSWOOD 229 268 ' 

From later indications it appears that this bill, along with the 
others, was never paid. John Allan at one time seems to have 
planned a public career for Poe, but in his indignation he allowed 
his foster-son to hang about the house, subject to the petty 
tyranny of his servants and his own reproaches, and pursued by 
warrants, which, about the middle of January, it appears began 
to make Poe's future residence in Richmond, without the aid of 
his guardian, an impossibility. 

Poe was not merely passive under this. He is known to have 
written a letter to the Mitts Nursery Company of Philadelphia, 
a firm with which Ellis & Allan had dealings, asking them for 
employment in that city. 264 His letter was, it appears, referred 
back to his guardian, who with the written evidence in his hands 



263 The date of this letter Is ist of May, 1827. The other letters, before, were 
written a month apart. The photostat of one written April 2nd, 1837, is also in 
the possession of the author. Poe may have received the first himself. It has not 
been found. 

264 J. H. Whitty Memoir, large edition, page xxix. 



I90 ISRAFEL 



of Poe's intentions to leave the house, seems to have precipitated 
a scene more violent than any which had preceded it. Even with 
a full knowledge of John Allan's character, it would seem impos- 
sible that he should be keeping Poe at home merely to make him 
suffer. He may have had some plan in mind for the boy later, and 
have simply used the opportunity to impress Poe with the re- 
sults of extravagance. A little pursuit by bailiffs might perhaps, 
he may have thought, be a salutary lesson to be more careful in 
the future, but the evidence all points to the fact that this was 
not the case. He must have known that his own parsimony was, 
in the final analysis, the cause of Poe's having run into debt, and, 
as he made no move to secure his " son " any employment, nor 
to save him from impending imprisonment, while he continued 
to reproach him for not paying for his keep, the inference is 
forced upon us that he desired to have him out of the house; to 
have done with his interference in the discords of the family; and 
be rid of the young upstart, " the black-heart," as he called him 
later, who could if he desired make the family skeletons dance. 
The scene now shifts again to the library of the Allan house 
sometime after supper in the evening of March 18, 1827. 

The great quarrel, resulting in his leaving the house of John 
Allan, was the crisis of Poe's life. In point of time it falls about 
midway in his span of days. In a certain sense, all the events of 
his youth led up to it, and its results never ceased to affect his 
manhood. Things were said by both men, which could never be 
forgiven; it was the decisive turning point in Poe's career. From 
the mass of evidence now at hand, and the knowledge of the per- 
sonality and character of those involved, it is amply possible to 
reproduce what took place. 205 

265 xhe publication of the Valentine Museum Poe Letters on September, 
1925, including correspondence between Poe and John Allan the two days im- 
mediately after the quarrel show exactly what took place. The story of this 
momentous event in Poe's life has hitherto, of necessity, rested on guesswork. The 
exact date of the quarrel is arrived at by a series of deductions from the dates of 
correspondence during this period of the end of March, 1827, viz: a letter written 
by John Allan to a sister hi Scotland, March 27, 1827. A letter from Poe's creditor 
Crump, dated March 25, 1827, Poe's two letters to John Allan after the quarrel, 
and the tatter's reply. For the deductions from these I am frankly indebted to 
Prof. Eillis Campbell, and Mrs. Mary Newton Stanard's excellent comments in 
the Valentine Museum Poe Letters. 



ALIAS HENRI LE RENNET 191 

John Allan must have confronted Poe with the Mills Nursery 
letter, and have demanded of him whether it was his intention to 
leave Richmond as he indicated, or stay and work off his debts. 
Stared in the face by his own handwriting, Poe took the bit in 
his teeth and spoke his mind, reproaching his guardian for his 
parsimony to him at the University. John Allan could counter 
this by denouncing Edgar's extravagance and dissipation there, 
which must have brought up the subject of the gambling debts, 
a sore point with them both. This seems to have been the main 
bone of controversy. Poe urged that he be allowed to continue 
his course at the University by having his just debts paid there; 
the rest he felt he could shoulder later himself. His conduct dur- 
ing the last three months at the University, probably since John 
Allan's visit, had, he represented, been exemplary, and he had 
stood high in his classes. John Allan absolutely refused to send 
him back to Charlottesville. He seems to have had an idea that 
Poe should have continued at home to complete his studies. 
"French, mathematics, and the classics," he afterward speci- 
fically mentions. Evidently he had some vague idea of a profes- 
sional career for Poe still in mind. It was this rock upon which 
their further possibility of voyaging together split. From Poe's 
and John Allan's letters of the two days immediately following 
the quarrel it is quite evident that Poe desired to continue his 
course at the University with the idea of a literary future in 
mind. Even while so harassed in Richmond between January and 
March, 1827, it is probable that he continued to work upon his 
poems. John Allan regarded his time spent on these as idling, and 
he seems to have made it a condition that if Poe remained in the 
house it must be on his guardian's terms. Poe could either remain 
and pursue the studies which would " promote the end," the 
" eminence " in public life to which John Allan says he had taught 
him to aspire, or he could get out! For a literary career the older 
man had no sympathy and he would not permit his " son to idle 
around the house while engaged in any scribbling, nor would he 
make it possible for him to return to the University with such an 
end in view, indeed, he would not permit that at all. The reading of 
law is rather clearly implied, and Poe, it seems, was given the night 



I92 ISRAFEL 



to think it over. He was left for a few hours definitely at the 
parting of the ways. 

During the night of March 18, 1827, Edgar Allan Poe lying 
in his bed in his room in the Allan house after the momentous 
interview with his guardian, made the great decision of his life. 
He decided not to submit to John Allan's dictation of his future, 
nor to accept the conditions laid down, even if forced out upon 
the world. Let us be fair, there were some ugly connotations to 
this determination; it was "ungrateful," and it would bring 
pain to several yearning hearts, among them Poe's, but it was 
nevertheless a great decision and a brave one. Comfort had been 
weighed in the balance with pride and the potentialities of genius, 
and comfort had been found wanting. The possibility of fame and 
honor had deliberately been preferred to wealth. More, although, 
perhaps he could not know it, starvation and poverty had been 
chosen. That they were risked, Poe must have known. 

From his letter to John Allan later, on the afternoon of the 
same day, it is plain that the final break occurred on the morning 
of the nineteenth of March. The discussion was probably resumed 
at the breakfast table. No doubt John Allan asked for Poe's de- 
cision and Poe told him what it was. In addition he said that it 
was his opinion that John Allan's real reason for not sending him 
back to the University was that he was too parsimonious to do so. 
This declaration seems 'to have been followed by an outburst of 
extreme anger on the part of the older man, who had a violent 
temper and a sharp tongue. By this time the whole house must 
have been in an uproar, the harsh voice of the furious Scotchman 
and the pounding of his cane on the floor advertised to the house- 
hold the extremity of his anger, nor could the shrill strained 
tones of Edgar's replies have reassured the frightened ladies and 
scared servants. That the young upstart whom he regarded as the 
object of his charity was about to shake off his dominance, must 
have come as a terrible shock to the older man. The scene seems 
to have ended in a furious round of mutual insults; both had a 
gift of irony and were in possession of facts that hurt. Poe's self- 
confidence in his future seemed insufferable " let him find out 
what it means to starve," thought John Allan predicted that 



ALIAS HENRI LE RENNET 193 

Poe would soon be starving in the streets and ordered him to 
quit the house. His command was carried out immediately and 
literally, for Poe dashed out of the door with nothing but what 
he had on. 

From the letters between the two which immediately followed, 
it is now possible for the first time to follow Poe's movements ac- 
curately. 265 Poe left John Allan's house on the morning of Mon- 
day, March 19, 1827. Having no place to go, characteristically 
enough, his first place of refuge was a tavern. On the afternoon of 
the same day he writes John Allan from the Court House Tavern, 
Richmond, a three page letter. The letter is headed " Richmond, 
Monday," and is undated. 265 He addresses his " father " as " Sir." 

Poe says that after his treatment of the day before and the 
quarrel which had taken place that morning, that he hardly ex- 
pects John Allan to be surprised at the contents of the letter. 
His determination is at last taken unalterably, however, to find 
some place in the wide world where he will not be treated as his 
guardian has treated him, and that, as he has been long consider- 
ing such a move, Mr. Allan need not think that his departure is 
the result of passion, and that he is already hoping to return. 
Poe then proceeds to rehearse his reasons for Ms decision. 

From the time he has been able to think on any subject he says, 
he had been ambitious, and had been taught by John Allan him- 
self to hope for a high position in public life. Therefore, a col- 
lege education was what he most ardently desired. He continues 
by asserting that this had been denied him in a moment of caprice 
because he disagreed with his guardian in an opinion. This meant 
that he told John Allan the real reason for his keeping him from 
college was that he was too parsimonious to send him there. 
Naturally enough the older man would not have agreed to that, in 
spite of the fact. Poe also tells his " father " that he has over- 
heard him telling others that he had no affection for his ward, 
and as John Allan could not have known that Poe was listening, 
his assertion could only be taken to be true. Furthermore, John 
Allan had ordered him to quit the house (" often " seems to be 
understood here) and had continually upbraided him for eating 
the bread of charity while at the same time refusing to remedy 



I94 ISRAFEL 

the conditions by obtaining work for him. Lastly, and the 
charge is significant from as proud a spirit as Foe's, his guar- 
dian had taken a cruel delight in exposing the boy before those 
from whom he hoped to obtain advancement, and had subjected 
him, he says, completely, not only to the members of the white 
family, but to the slaves. 

He ends by entreating his " father " to at least send him his 
trunk containing his clothes and books, and a sum of money suffi- 
cient to pay his way to some Northern city and support him there 
for a month until he can obtain a position and earn enough to 
keep himself at the University. He asks that his trunk and effects 
be sent to him at the Court House Tavern with some money, as 
he is in dire need, and he adds, that if the request is not com- 
plied with, he trembles at the consequences. A postcript informs 
his guardian that it depends upon him whether he sees or hears 
from the writer again. 

The letter bears every impress of being written by one who 
found himself insulted and wronged beyond all bearing. The 
hint of suicide is significant; evidently Poe would rather kill 
himself than return. He was already undergoing the pains of 
hunger. 

Having received no answer to this, the next day, Tuesday, Poe 
writes John Allan again. He begs him to send him his trunk and 
his clothes, doing his guardian the grace to say that, as he had not 
received his clothes, he must suppose John Allan had not gotten 
his first letter. His necessity, he says, is extreme. He has not 
tasted any food since the morning before, has no place to sleep 
and is roaming about the streets almost exhausted. His guardian's 
prediction will be fulfilled unless he obtains his trunk and clothes 
and enough money to go to Boston, $12.00. If John Allan will 
not give the money to him, Poe asks him to lend it till he can 
obtain a position. He says he sails Saturday, the day he refers 
to in 1826 fell on March 26th, and he closes by a pathetic mes- 
sage of affection and love to all at home, and a postscript saying 
he has not a cent in the world with which to buy food. 

John Allan sent neither the trunk nor the money. Before re- 
ceiving the second of Poe's letters, he had replied to the; first. 



ALIAS HENRI LE RENNET 195 

In justice to the older man it must be said that his letter shows no 
trace of passion, it is, indeed, so calm and judicial as to be utterly 
cold. Its studied periods, to one who had been without food for a 
day when he received it, must have been far from satisfying. 

Mr. Allan says that he is not surprised at anything that Poe 
may do or say, he reminds him of his debt for his rearing and 
education already received and admits that he had taught him to 
be ambitious for a high place in public life, but he adds, Don 
Quixote, Gil Bias, Joe Miller and such books could not be expected 
to promote such a career. Evidently these had been a bone of 
contention, and John Allan did not approve of reading " novels." 
We also learn elsewhere that he abhorred Byron. He defends him- 
self from Poe's charges (and he is distinctly on the defensive in 
this letter) by saying that his reproaches for Poe's idleness were 
only made to urge him to perfect himself in the mathematics and 
the languages. That Poe has not shown any intention to comply 
with his wishes, (evidently in the matter of the direction which 
his studies were to take) is the only subject upon which he says 
he cares to be understood. He also adds, and we are bound to 
credit him in this with being sincere, that unless Poe's heart is 
made of marble, he can judge for himself whether he has not 
given his foster-father good reason to fear for him in more ways 
than one. He insists that his only reason for reprimanding his son 
was to correct his faults, and that for the rest of the charges he 
has no answer, as the world will reply to them. But he ends with 
a taunt. Now, he says Since Poe has declared his independence 
the first result is that he must tremble for the consequences 
unless the man, whose support he has just shaken off, will send 
him some money. With that word his correspondence with his 
foster-son ceased for two years. 

If any doubt remains, this letter makes ultimately clear that 
the cause of Poe's final break with John Allan was the latter's 
determination to force Poe into a career he did not care to follow. 
As one reads the confident and admonitory periods of this self- 
contained letter, addressed by the man in the comfortable house 
in Richmond to the youth who was hungry on the city streets, 
it is only natural to recall the remark of Cromwell made upon 



196 



ISRAFEL 



another pregnant occasion to some self-righteous gentlemen, " Be- 
think you, bethink you, in the Bowels of Christ, ye may be 
wrong! " Such a possibility seems never to have troubled John 
Allan. Strangely enough, in the matter of his choice as to the 
future career and the treatment of his foster-son, he appeals in 
the same letter to the judgment of the world. All the world now 
knows the answer. But, perhaps, this is unfair, what could one 
expect of a youth who deliberately preferred Don Quixote to in- 
sults and mathematics? 

Poe says that he is sailing for Boston on the next Saturday, 
March 24th, after the writing of the letter, but he also says he 
is penniless. It would seem as if his sailing were largely contingent 
upon the receipt of the $12 which he says the passage will cost. 
From the copy of John Allan's letter, originally in the ElKs & 
Allan Files, it is evident he sent Poe no money. The immediate 
sailing for Boston must, therefore, have been deferred. Tradi- 
tion, circumstantial evidence and direct testimony all point to 
the fact that it was. 286 

Poe tells his " father " that he will receive letters at the Court 
House Tavern, evidently this was a temporary arrangement, as 
he had no money, he could not have stayed there. He seems to 
have gone to stay at Mrs. Richardson's tavern where he was 
known, and where his friend Ebenezer Burling was an habitue 
about the bar. That Richardson's Tavern was Poe's hiding place 
during the few days that he remained in Richmond after the 
quarrel with John Allan, rests on direct testimony, for Dabney 
Danbridge, one of th$ slaves of the Allan household, told persons 
still living in Richmond that he carried packages from the Allan 
household to Poe while he was there, but " Dab " did not dare 
to reveal the fact to the members of the family. " Mars Eddie " 
was a favorite with the servants, and it is probable, that finding 



sae i^ editor of the Valentine Museum Poe Letters, Mrs. Mary Newton 
Stanard, has very cleverly, and in a scholarly way, suggested that Poe sailed from 
Richmond on the ship " Carrier," Captain Gill. The deduction is made from the 
dates of letters and the files of the Boston Commercial Gazette between March 
26 and April 7, 1827. If so, Poe arrived in Boston on April 7, 1827. The author, 
here, is inclined to think that, for the reasons given in the text, the weight of 
evidence is against Poe's having sailed on the " Carrier " as early as March 24th. 



ALIAS HENRI LE RENNET 197 

John Allan would not send him his clothes, he prevailed on the 
house servants to bring them to him. In this way, too, he must 
have gotten the manuscripts of his poems published a month or 
so later. These he would hardly have had in his hand when ke 
ran out of the house. Dabney Danbridge also said that during this 
time he carried notes for Poe to a young lady of the neighbor- 
hood whom his young master admired. She was at that time 
boarding with a Mrs. Juliet J. Drew nearby. 

It is very likely that Frances Allan saw Poe's letters to her 
husband. At any rate she seems to have become aware of Poe's 
intentions to leave Richmond, and must have created a scene, for 
she prevailed on Mr. Allan to stop Poe's departure and the cap- 
tains of the ships about the port were warned not to take him. 
Not caring to offend the head of a great firm with whom many 
of them traded, the avenue of departure was closed to Poe by the 
ship captains. Frances Allan must have been hoping for a recon- 
ciliation, and her husband doubtless thought that his recalcitrant 
ward would soon be starved into submission. Both Mrs. Allan and 
Miss Valentine appear to have supplied Poe with some small sums 
of money, as he must have had some upon which to live during 
the interim. 267 John Allan did not send it, and in Poe's condition 
of debt he could scarcely have borrowed any. The amount at best 
was small, and only sufficed to last him for a few weeks, until 
May twenty-sixth to be exact. 

In order to save himself from being arrested on a debtor's war- 
rant, and to conceal his departure, Poe now assumed the name of 
Henri Le Rennet, and having persuaded Burling to join him, left 
Richmond, probably on some coastwise vessel for Norfolk. Burl- 
ing had a small boat on the James in which the two boys had 
formerly made many a " voyage," and they seem now to have 
joined company for a real adventure. 

Exactly what took place in Norfolk will probably never be 
known. Burling was drunk when he left Richmond, and he began 
to take a melancholy view of the future as he sobered up. Prob- 
ably there was some difficulty in obtaining a berth aboard a ship. 



267 xhe traditions to this effect seem to have come later from Miss Valentine 
herself. 



198 ISRAFEL 

Burling returned to Richmond, evidently before Poe sailed, say- 
ing he had gone abroad. Either there had really been some talk 
of this, or the tale had been agreed upon to throw the family off 
the scent, and to put a quietus on the warrants. The latter was 
probably the main factor in Poet's incognito, then and for some- 
time afterward. That Frances Allan thought Poe had gone abroad 
is shown by the fact that four or five persons afterward saw two 
letters which she wrote to him with a foreign address. Burling 
simply got " cold feet " and dropped out. He was a weak and 
dissipated youth who died some few years later of cholera, and 
disappears from the record. Poe, however, did not go abroad, but 
persisted in his decision to get to Boston, probably because of its 
being a literary center, where, if his contemplated book of poems 
was published, it would receive a better chance of being noticed 
than if it emanated from Richmond. He may also have been influ- 
enced in his decision by his mother's injunction " to cherish the 
city of his birth," and have intended to look up the old friends of 
his parents. At any rate he arrived in Boston certainly by the 
middle of April, 1827. There is some evidence that he worked 
his way north on a coal-ship. 288 

Frances Allan is said to have been heart-broken; to one in her 
condition, the bitter quarrel between the two men of her house- 
hold, followed by the loss of her " dear boy " must have been 
crushing. Poe never saw her again. 269 Her affection attempted to 
follow him across the sea where she and John Allan thought he 
had gone, 270 for Poe received from her, sometime during 1827, 
two letters which are said by those who saw them to have exoner- 
ated him from all blame in the dissensions of the Allan household. 
These may have reached him at Boston or Fort Moultrie, or he 



268 In many of the stories which Poe afterward told of these adventures, a 
"coal-ship" remains a constant factor among much romance. See specifically 
Woodberry, 1909, vol. I, page 67 Poe's story in Baltimore to Nathan C. 
Brooks. Not much stress can be laid on this evidence, however. 

sea p oe returned just too late to attend her funeral. See Chapter XII, page 232. 

270 In his letter to his sister in Scotland, dated March 27, 1827, John Allan 
specifically says " I'm thinking Edgar has gone to sea ... etc." This looks as if 
at that date Mr. Allan was not at all sure where Poe had gone, despite Poe's 
earlier statement. John Allan never trusted Poe's statements then or later, especially 
in letters. 



ALIAS HENRI LE RENNET 199 

may have received them after their return to the writer when he 
came back home. At any rate their existence is too well estab- 
lished to doubt. 271 Poe's arrival in Boston sometime in the early 
part of April of 1827 is now no longer a matter of conjecture and 
all stories about his going to Greece, getting in trouble over pass- 
ports at St. Petersburg, Russia, and being rescued by the inter- 
vention of the American Consul, Henry Middleton, the visit to 
France, and having his portrait painted by Inman while in Lon- 
don, are at once and forever dismissed as legends. Poe's movements 
from January, 1827, to February, 1829, are no longer "mysteri- 
ous " but a matter of record. 

In the meantime things at the Allan house in Richmond seem 
to have taken their usual way that of John Allan's. Mrs. Allan 
grew feebler, and the master of the establishment went grimly 
about his affairs, except for the anxiety of his wife, taking matters 
very coolly. In a letter written from Richmond, March 27, 1827, 
to one of his sisters in Scotland, he covers three pages defending 
his administration of his uncle's will and ends with a few signifi- 
cant sentences about domestic affairs: 

. . . though Mrs. Allan (is) occupying one of the airiest and pretty 
places about Richmond, it seems to make no improvement in her it 
is indeed a lovely spot. . . . Miss Valentine is as fat and hearty 
as ever, I'm thinking Edgar has gone to Sea to seek his own for- 
tunes. . . , 272 

How obstinate of Mrs. Allan not to improve in so " airy " a man- 
sion when her sister was heartier than ever! What could be the 
reason? Perhaps the air was not so salubrious after all; even 
Edgar seems to have sought a different atmosphere. " I'm think- 



2fi These letters were long cherished by Poe. His wife, Virginia, is known to 
have had them about the time of her death, when she read them to Mrs. Shew. 
See the letter from Mrs. Shew to Ingram, Poe's biographer, now in the Ingram 
collection, University of Virginia. In this, Mrs. Shew (then married a second time) 
says these letters were the second Mrs. Allan's. This is an obvious error, although 
she is quoting from her diary (sic). It can positively be stated that the second 
Mrs. Allan never wrote any letters to Poe. 

273 From the EUis & Allan Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C., 
photostat in possession of the author. Also referred to in connection with the 
William Gait will, Chapter VII, page 117, this volume. Also for further quotation, 
see note 165. 



200 ISRAFEL 

ing," says John Allan one wonders. By this time he knew most 
of the story of the runaway, even to the name which Poe assumed, 
for on the very desk upon which he wrote the " airy letter to 
Scotland, was some mail which the fortune-hunting Edgar never 
received. Among it was this letter: 278 

Dinwiddie County, March 25, 1827 
(Mr. EDGAR A. POE) 

DEAR SIR: 

When I saw you in Richmond a few days ago I should have men- 
tioned ffce difference between us if there had not been so many persons 
present. I must of course, as you did not mention it to me, enquire if 
you ever intend to pay it. If you have not the money, write me word 
that you have not, but do not be perfectly silent. I should be glad if 
you would write to me as a friend. There can certainly be no harm in 
your avowing candidly that you have no money, if you have none, but 
you can say when you can pay me if you cannot now. I heard when I 
was in Richmond that Mr. Allan would probably discharge all your 
debts. If mine was a gambling debt I should not think much of it. 
But under the present circumstances I think very strongly of it. Write 
to me upon the receipt of this letter and tell me candidly what is the 

matter. 

Your friend EDWARD G. CRUMP 

Under the endorsement " to E. A. Poe " John Allan has added 
in his own hand " alias Henri Le Renn&." Poe never got the 
letter, and it remains to this day in the file where his guardian 
quietly placed it. Meanwhile, what of Henri Le Rennet? 

Upon his arrival in Boston, Poe probably tried to look up some 
of the old friends of his mother and father. His knowledge of 
such, at best, must have been slight; his parents had been ob- 
scure, and they had been forgotten in Boston for sixteen years. 

In some way or other he became acquainted with a youth of 
about his own age of the name of Calvin Thomas. There was said 
to have been some connection between the families of the two boys 
which was not a pleasant one. A Miss Thomas had at one time 



278 Crump's letter was written in Dinwiddie County on March 2$th and must 
have taken a day or so for transmittal and delivery at Richmond. John Allan 
writes his sister from Richmond on March 27th. Both letters therefore must have 
been in his hands about the same day. 



X AM E R L A N E 



AND 



OTHER POEMS 



BY A BOSXONIAN 



Vcung heads are giddy and young hearts arc warm 
And make mistake* for manhood to reform- 

COWER 



BOSTOK 

CAZ.VXN F. S, THOMAS . . . PRINTER 



1827 



Title Page of Tamerlane and Other Poems 

Boston 1827 

Edgar Allan Poe's first published volume 



&MMMMMI 




ALIAS HENRI LE RENNET 201 

been in the same theatrical company with the Poes. 27 * Young 
Thomas and his people had at one time lived in Norfolk and came 
later to Boston, with their grandmother, who wished to educate 
them there. They were originally New Yorkers. Whether there 
had really been any family intimacy between the Poes and Thom- 
ases seems very doubtful. One thing is certain, however, the two 
youths became friends, the result of which was the publication of 
Poe's first volume. 275 

Calvin F. S. Thomas was the proprietor of a little job printing 
shop at "No. 70, Washington Street, Boston, Corner of State 
Street." The style of type fonts and printers ornaments which he 
used show that he had newly set up in a small business, which he 
had probably recently bought from someone else. He was about 
nineteen years old and could have had little more than an appren- 
tice's brief experience at his trade. To the hands of this tyro Poe 
confided the printing of a book which is now one of the most 
sought-after and most costly in the English language. It was 
Tamerlane and Other Poems. This was probably sometime about 
the beginning of May, 1827. The time of Poe's arrival in Boston 
precludes its being much earlier, and the date of his ensuing en- 
listment in the army fixes it as being sometime within the month 
of May. 

274 The Norfolk Herald, July 6, 1811 From this probable accidental re- 
semblance of names there has been an attempt in some quarters to connect the 
name of David Poe and the actress, Miss Thomas. There is no evidence that this 
Miss Thomas was a relation of Calvin Thomas, the printer. Poe may never, as 
Prof. Woodberry thinks (Atlantic Monthly, December, 1884) have told his real 
name to Thomas. The printer never seems to have known that he had known Poe 
despite the latter's great fame afterward. Thomas was a very obscure person. He 
later moved to New York, Buffalo, and Springfield, Missouri, where he died in 
1876. Communications from a Miss Martha Thomas, daughter of Calvin, elicited 
the information that the Thomases knew nothing about Poe and had no records of 
the Boston print shop nor any copies of Tamerlane and Other Poems. See letter 
of Miss Martha Thomas to Prof. Woodberry Woodberry, vol. I, 1909, Notes, 
page 360. Also Atlantic Monthly, December, 1884. The matter is very obscure and 
equally unimportant. The fact that both Poe and Thomas had lived in Virginia 
may have brought them together. The real point is that Calvin Thomas was a 
printer who printed Poe's first book. 

275 Poe's idea of earning money to go back to the University seems to have 
quickly disappeared at this time under the stress of poverty and no work. That 
he persevered in publishing his poetry shows how vital a place his desire for 
literary recognition held in his mind. The pitiable result of this sacrifice was the 
practical suppression of the volume. 



2O2 



ISRAFEL 



Where and how Poe was living at this time is unknown. Prob- 
ably on the remnants of his Richmond money. There is a story of 
his having obtained work on a Boston newspaper. The preparation 
of even this little volume for the press, together with the inevitable 
revision of the text, must have consumed considerable time and 
have precluded other work. By the time the book was printed he 
must have been penniless. Thomas, of course, was only a printer 
and had no means of publishing, so that the bulk of the edition, 
said to have been forty or fifty copies at most, remained on 
his hands. Poe probably bought a few copies himself with the 
last of his dwindling stock of coins; two books are known to have 
been sent out to reviewers. 276 Poe afterward said that the edition 
"was suppressed for private reasons." The "private reasons" 
are not hard to guess! There was no way to distribute the book 
when it was printed; no one who would buy it, if it had been put 
on sale; and the author was out of funds. Tamerlane and Other 
Poems was a pamphlet of about forty pages, 6| by 4% inches, 
bound in yellow, tea-colored covers. There have been at least 
three reprints but only four genuine copies of the first edition are 
known to exist. The author's name is not printed, the title page 
giving only " By a Bostonian," and a motto which happens to be 
the same as that chosen for Tennyson's first book, Poems by Two 
Brothers. 

Just why Poe published the book anonymously is an interesting 
speculation. Evidently from this, and the fact that he later en- 
listed under an assumed name, he was very anxious not to have 
his whereabouts known, probably mainly to prevent his being 
followed 'by duns and warrants. " By a Bostonian," certainly 
looks as if he did not desire to hail from Richmond. Poe knew 
that the book would have a better chance of being reviewed in the 
Northern magazines if it came from Boston, or it may have been 
merely a sentimental compliment to his mother and the lines 
she had written on the back of her picture of that city. It was, of 
course, the city of his birth, but the place where he was starving 
could have been little more. 



The United States Review and Literary Gazette, August, 1827. The North 
American Review for October, 1827. For a full description of Tamerlane see Kiffis 
Campbell, Poems of Poe, New York, 1917. 



ALIAS HENRI LE RENNET 203 

We would like very much to know just what Edgar Poe carried 
with him from the house of John Allan in Richmond. He must 
have rescued from his room the manuscripts of the poems which 
appeared in Boston a few months later. Among them were prob- 
ably some of those which Mr. Allan had shown a few years before 
to the schoolmaster, Mr. Clarke. There were enough of them, 
and some of them were of such length, as to show conclusively 
that their composition must have covered a period of several years 
prior to their printing. They prove Poe to have been hard at 
work at his craft, consciously and determinedly a poet. In his 
preface he says in part: 

The greater part of the poems which compose this little volume were 
written in the year 1821-2, when the author had not completed his 
fourteenth year. They were of course not intended for publication; 
why they are now published concerns no one but himself. Of the 
smaller pieces very little need be said, they perhaps savour too much 
of egotism; but they were written by one too young to have any 
knowledge of the world but from his own breast. . . 

It is chiefly for the knowledge of that young breast, which they 
reveal, that the poems are of value now. Tamerlane is an ambi- 
tious piece, which seems to have been written later than the 
others, at the University, 277 as it bears the ear-marks of the type 
of verse and the kind of semi-classical theme which the influences 
of the formal education of the day would supply to scribbling 
youth. It is chiefly of interest, though, in the light of what fol- 
lowed later, and as an indication of the kind of material which 
attracted Poe. For the rest, they show us a sensitive boy with an 
innate sense of melody, a surprising order of technique for one 
so young, and a spirit, which, while it found great charm in na- 
ture and the people with whom it came in contact, valued land- 
scapes and persons less for themselves, than for the dreams and 
moods which they invoked. Thus Poe already possessed the two 
main artistic factors that make a poet. He had mQods which were 
of enough value to be worthy of being recorded; and he had the 
artistry to record them successfully. In Tamerlane and Other 

277 its connection with Elmira has already been noted. This also helps to place 
it as later work. 



204 



ISRAFEL 



Poems these qualities are best exhibited in The Dreamer, and 
The Lake 

In spring of youth it was my lot 
To haunt of the wide world a spot 
The which I could not love the less 
So lovely was the loneliness 
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound, 
And the tall pines that towered around. 

But when the Night had thrown her pall 
Upon the spot, as upon all, 
And the mystic wind went by 
Murmuring in melody 
Then ah then I would awake 
To the terror of the lone lake. 

Yet that terror was not fright, 

But a tremulous delight 

A feeling not the jewelled mine 

Could teach or bribe me to define 

Nor love although the lover were thine. 

Death was in that poisonous wave 

And in its gulf a fitting grave 

For him who thence could solace bring 

To his lone imaging 

Whose solitary soul could make 

An Eden of that dim lake. 

This poern^ is doubly interesting because it is the first which 
diOTOldiefinitely how early the strange spell of melancholy and 
the preoccupation with death entered into^hisjwork. The young 
boy who wrote it must clearly have hM^eriods of extreme sensi- 
tivity when physical existence became actually painful, together 
with a weird sense of the mystery of inanimate things that was 
to haunt him through life. So far as we know, his real mother and 
Mrs. Stanard were the only two instances in which he had actu- 
ally, thus far, experienced the trial of death. That a sense of grief 
and a feeling of brooding sorrow was thus early engraved on him, 
the lines bear witness. It is true that early youth is more often 
preoccupied by the themes of death and mutability than middle 



ALIAS HENRI LE RENNET 205 

age, but there seems to be an unusual sense of them expressed 
here. 

The realization that his poems were to become irrevocable in 
print, would spur Poe to further revisions, so that while he tells 
us that, " the greater part of the poems which compose this little 
volume were written . . . when the author had not completed 
his fourteenth year," we can take this with a grain of salt, as they 
undoubtedly had been much revised at home, at the University, 
and in Boston where they went to the press. The format, printing, 
and punctuation 27S of the book show that Poe appreciated the im- 
portance of the mechanical side of his art, and possessed both 
the education and the inclination to turn out a literate, although 
a typographically bungled piece of work. Thomas, the printer, who 
was only a year older than Poe, could not have been a past master 
in his art 2<79 and the passable result, despite some mistakes, must 
largely be attributed to the active collaboration and supervision of 
Poe himself. 

With the publication of Tamerlane and Other Poems, Poe's 
funds (or the patience of his landlady) seem to have been com- 
pletely exhausted. His situation was desperate; he was not cap- 
able of sustained physical labor, even if he could have secured 
employment, and an appeal to Richmond was unthinkable. In 
this extremity of pride and hunger he remembered his former 
military episodes in the " Junior Richmond Volunteers," or on the 
drill ground at the University, and joined the army. 

The War Department records show that Poe enlisted in the 
United States Army on May 26, 1827, under the assumed name 
of Edgar A. Perry. 280 He gave his age as twenty-two years, al- 
though he was only eighteen, and stated that he was born in 
Boston and was by occupation a clerk. The enlistment records 
describe him as having grey eyes, brown hair, a fair complexion 

278 The punctuation already shows many of Poe's peculiarly individual ideas 
about this "art," later developed to a "science" after his connection with the 
Southern Literary Messenger. 

279 Thomas was not even a member of the local printers' union. 

280 All of the War Department records relative to Poe's connection with the 
United States Army, are taken from the text of the documents as given by Prof. 
Woodberry in his article in the Atlantic Monthly for December, 1884. The search 
for this material was made by direction of the President of the United States. 



206 ISRAFEL 

and a height of five feet, eight inches. Without further delay the 
new recruit was assigned to Battery " H," of the First Artillery 
then stationed in Boston Harbor at Fort Independence. 281 In the 
barracks there, Poe spent the time from the end of May to the 
end of October, 1827. During this period he must have undergone 
his training as a recruit, but he seems early to have gravitated 
into the quartermaster's department where his clerical training 
and mercantile experience with Ellis & Allan would recommend 
him. The assertion that Poe enlisted in the army as a result of a 
spree had no foundation in fact and little probability behind it. 
From the time of his enlistment to his discharge we know that his 
conduct was so exemplary as to lead to his rapid promotion, and 
he was officially recommended upon discharge as being " sober," 
an unusual military virtue at that time. 

Nevertheless, Poe's enlistment is significant of the fact that he 
already found himself unable to cope with the world in civilian 
life. His tender rearing, his education, his desire for leisure and 
solitude and, above all, his nervous, impulsive and erratic char- 
acteristics, which the events of the last few years had tended 
to accentuate, now undoubtedly began to be tremendous handi- 
caps in a world which despises a dreamer, and puts a premium 
on physical endurance and insensibility. Poe was stretched from 
now on between two drums of a rack that kept turning slowly, 
torturing him until they pulled him apart. Every turn of the 
screw of the one to which his feet were bound, was bent on drag- 
ging him down to the callous level of the mediocrity about him, 
while the cords about his head dragged him ever upward, insist- 
ing that to be a poet and a dreamer, he must become hyper-sensi- 
tive, see colors beyond the visible spectrum, and hear whispers 
of voices inaudible to the average ear. It was to the latter world 
that he belonged. Stretched between the two he was torn apart; 
occasionally relieving the tension of the unremitted torture by the 
anaesthetics of feminine sympathy, alcohol and, towards the last, 
opium. The result of each attempt at relief being, of course, 
a lowering of his power to withstand. Combined with this was, 
perhaps, an unfortunate heredity. 

28i poe seems to have joined his command about June i, 18*7. 



ALIAS HENRI LE RENNET 207 

Of the life of the young artilleryman at Fort Independence, 
Boston Harbor, in the Summer of 1827, there is very little trace. 
It was afterward said that at some time during the army episode 
he wrote letters to his foster-mother dated from St. Petersburg, 
Russia (sic). Some record of his doings at this time have recently 
come to light due to the discovery of an old Baltimore publica- 
tion of 1827 called The North American. 

To this obscure periodical the elder Poe brother, William 
Henry Poe, contributed steadily from the Summer of 1827 to the 
end of the year and the demise of the magazine. His contributions 
were in both prose and poetry, usually signed " W. H. P." From 
the nature of these it now seems certain that he was in touch with 
his brother Edgar in Boston and, perhaps, later from Charleston, 
for more particularly in a story called The Pirate, W. H. Poe 
treats romantically the episode of the love affair of Edgar with 
Elmira Royster, and republishes in two instances poems from 
Tamerlane over his own initials and as extracts. Dreams in a new 
version appears signed " W. H. P." 

From this evidence, it seems undeniable that Edgar, while in 
the army, corresponded with Henry and sent him a copy of 
Tamerlane from Boston. 282 

It is possible that if, at this period of his life, Poe could have 
found the shelter of some sympathetic and understanding influ- 
ence capable of imparting a feeling of calm and security to his 
intellect, and physical comfort conducive to the free working and 
growth of his mind, this continent might have seen the flowering 
of a genius which would have demanded a respectful and un- 
qualified admiration for its unblighted blossoming, rather than a 
belated recognition in which scorn and pity have slowly given 
way to acceptance. Instead of that, the most sensitive nervous 
system, and one of the keenest intellects then extant in North 
America, was treated to a round of spiritual and mental outrage 

282 The Happiest Day, the Happiest Hour, from Tamerlane and Other Poems, 
1827. Republished by Henry Poe, 1827. The credit for the discovery of The North 
American containing the work of Henry Poe belongs to Dr. Thomas Ollive 
Mabbott and Captain F. L. Pleadwell. It is possible that portions of. The Pirate are 
Edgar Poe's. Dr. Thomas Ollive Mabbott and I have collected all this material in 
Poe's Brother, Doran, 1926, a book to which the reader is referred. 



208 



ISRAFEL 



inherent for any higher nature in the ranks of a regular artillery 
regiment lying idle in barracks during a time of profound peace. 
The army of one of the most warlike republics which has ever 
troubled the world, is not to be blamed if it is not so organized 
as to provide an ideal home for neurasthenic young poets; its 
domestic economy is bound to be of a different order. That Poe 
did not die at about the same age, and of similar complaint to 
Chatterton's, in a garret in Boston, Massachusetts, is due to the 
food, clothes, shelter and refuge from the civil society of the time 
provided by Battery "H" of the First Regiment of United 
States Artillery. Of his not unimportant adventures under the 
eagle, under various circumstances and upon distant shores, we 
shall shortly learn. In the meantime his physical continuity was 
assured, but 

The happiest day the happiest hour 282 
My sear'd and blighted heart hath known 
The highest hope of pride and power, 
I feel hath flown. 

Of power! said I? yes! such I ween; 
But they have vanished long, alas! 
The visions of my youth have been 
But let then pass. 

And pride, what have I now with thee? 
Another brow may even inherit 28a 
The venom thou hast poured on me 
Be still, my spirit! 

It is a pitiful farewell to youth, an acknowledgment of the futility 
of the Byronic formula, and a foreboding of the future. The 
shades of the prison house had begun to descend upon Israfel, 
but in them his spirit was never to be " still." 

On October the 3ist, 1827, his Battery was ordered to Fort 
Moultrie on Sullivan's Island at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, 
in South Carolina. 



283 This line and the one following can refer only to the fact that Poe felt 
that a possible heir of his guardian might " inherit " the " venom " which had been 
heaped on him. It seems to be a patent reference to conditions " at home." 



CHAPTER XI 
Israfel in Carolina 



TROOP movements, in the leisurely days before the com- 
ing of railroads, were by water. Outward bound from 
Fort Independence, Boston Harbor, the army trans- 
ports moved through the flashing November weather of 1827, 
sinking the sand dunes of Cape Cod and the blue haze of Nan- 
tucket behind them, as they stood far out into the Atlantic to be 
rid of the perils of the coast. There was, at least for Poe, the 
pagentry of adventure about it; the sparkle of brass buttons and 
uniforms; the call of bugles from ship to ship; the bright sails and 
the banners. 284 

A voyage from Boston, Massachusetts, to Charleston, South 
Carolina, in a sailing ship was, even with favorable winds, often 
a matter of several weeks. In the old clipper days a sailing ship 
stood well out from the coast to avoid the nightmare of all 
windborne mariners, a lee shore. Hatteras, especially in the Fall, 
was given a wide berth, and it was the custom of coastwise pilots 
to make a " long leg " out into the Atlantic. 285 

The whole interlude of Poe's life in the Army, taken in connec- 
tion with the places he visited, affords a remarkable example of 
the method the man sometimes followed in working directly from 
his environment. The story of it might almost be called How Poe 
Gathered his Material for a Short Story. Contrary to the fond and 
oft repeated opinion of many critics, Poe often found his material 
in the life and the place about him, and then worked only in a sec- 
ondary and indirect way from literary sources. He visualized even 
imaginary localities strongly, and his scenery, although often a 

284 It may be suggested that Henry Poe's having joined the navy may have 
influenced Edgar's joining the army in hopes of adventure. Edgar, we now know, 
became the Byronic hero of Henry's group in Baltimore and the subject of their 
poetic effusions in The North American. See L. A. Wilmer's Merlin afterward 
referred to by Edgar Poe in a complimentary manner. 

285 Poe's touching at the Bermudas is suggested. 



2IO ISRAFEL 



synthesis of the hills of one place and the lowlands of another, 
nevertheless, sprang directly from the vistas which he had seen. 
Out of the strange and impressive environment into which he 
was about to be plunged for a year, free from the problem of sus- 
tenance and with the opportunity for considerable leisure, came 
directly much of his material for The Gold Bug, The Oblong Box, 
The Man that was Used Up, the Balloon Hoax, and bits of the 
melancholy scenery, and sea and light effects which, from the 
time of his sojourn in Carolina, haunt so much of his poetry. A 
comparison of his 1827 and 1829-31 volumes will at once make 
this apparent. A familiarity with the peculiar nature of the land- 
scape and the section where Poe was about to tarry during 1827- 
28 will explain the " exotic " sources from which many of his 
descriptions in prose and poetry are derived. 

From November, 1827, to December, 1828, he did garrison 
duty at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island. Sometime in Novem- 
ber of the former year, the army transports from Boston found 
themselves "... in full view of the low coasts of South Caro- 
lina," 286 and anchored just under the lee of the walls of the old 
fortress, near the back channel, where they discharged Battery 
" H " of the First United States Artillery, bag and baggage, offi- 
cers and men, among whom was Private Edgar A. Perry, alias 
Henri Le Rennet, alias Edgar Allan Poe, doing duty even then as 
a company clerk. 287 He must have been given quarters somewhere 
within the bastions of the old fort. 

Style is very often the result of the impact of a new environ- 
ment upon the unsuspected potentialities of artistic personality. 
" For the first and only time in his life, Poe now found himself 
in a sub-tropical environment," a district with a highly differenti- 
ated fauna and flora, utterly different from anything he had seen 
so far, either in Virginia or abroad. 288 In addition to this, the place 
was full of piratical and Revolutionary lore, the very island and 

286 From the Balloon Hoax. 

287 See the letter of Lieut. J. Howard given to Poe on his discharge Chap- 
ter XII, page 240. 

288 Prof. C. Alphonso Smith to the author, July 23, 1921, " The point you 
make seems to me a good one and so far as I know the matter has never been 
presented as you propose. So far as I know, this was the only really "tropical" 
badcground that Poe had ever seen. 



ISRAFEL IN CAROLINA 211 

the bay upon which he looked had been famous as the haunt of 
pirates. To the south and west, Fort Sumter, only then beginning 
to assume the formidable shape of brick and stone so familiar to 
the reading public of the '6o's, looked across a narrow channel 
at its sister, Fort Moultrie, while a few miles up the harbor could 
be seen the pillared porches and spires of Charleston, a port which 
was alive then with ships from all over the world. 289 

Northward and eastward, stretched away from the barrack 
windows, the long, low, beaches of Sullivan's Island some miles 
away to an inlet which separated it from the Isle of Palms 
where the prospect was repeated. The inlet could be breasted by 
a powerful swimmer like Poe with a few vigorous strokes. The 
young soldier had only to pass through the portcullis to find 
himself upon a magnificent beach washed by a summer sea, a 
firm strand that stretched for miles, with the Gulf Stream on one 
side, and a low range of sand hills inland, covered with scrub 
palmetto and myrtles, the home of strange birds, sand butterflies, 
amusing beetles, and the haunt of great sea-turtles that crawled 
out by moonlight to lay their eggs. Here and there, at long inter- 
vals, was the hut of a lonely hunter or fisherman, far from the 
little summer settlement then confined to the immediate vicinity 
of the fort. The one overpowering impression of the place is the 
continual bell-like breaking of the "sounding sea," the eye- 
puckering glare of the lime-what sun, and the dirge of the wind 
through the myrtles, accompanied by a faint, clacking sound like 
an overtone of eery applause caused by the clapping together of 
the palms of the palmettoes. 

This island of sea-weathered monotonies, driven into Poe's con- 
sciousness by the long hours of an idle year, is the home of the 
Gold Bug. At the beginning of the story he has described it 
himself. 290 

This island is a very singular one. It consists of little else than the 
sea-sand, and is about three miles long. Its breadth at no point ex- 

289 At the time of Foe's service at Fort Moultrie, Charleston, South Carolina, 
was one of the great American ports, hundreds of ships clearing weekly. 

290 it must be borne in mind that Poe did not write The Gold Bug until many 
years later, 1842. The beach at Sullivan's Island seems to have been "photo- 
graphed " on his retina. 



2I2 ISRAFEL 

ceeds a quarter of a mile. It is separated from the mainland by a 
scarcely perceptible creek, oozing its way through a wilderness of reeds 
and slime, a favorite resort of the marsh-hen. The vegetation as might 
be supposed, is scant, or at least dwarfish. No trees of any magnitude 
are to be seen* Near the western extremity, where Fort Moultrie 
stands, and where are some miserable frame buildings, tenanted, dur- 
ing summer, by the fugituves from Charleston dust and fever, may be 
found, indeed, the bristly palmetto; but the whole island with the ex- 
ception of this western point, and a line of hard beach on the sea-coast, 
is covered with a dense undergrowth of the sweet myrtle so much 
prized by the horticulturists of England. 291 The shrub here often at- 
tains the height of fifteen or twenty feet, and forms an almost impene- 
trable coppice, burdening with its fragrance. 

SucH remote places, haunted by blue herons and other rare and 
shy bird-life, are, even to~day, the retreats of eccentric characters 
who find their compensation for loss of contact with their fellows 
in the observation of nature. Amid the lonely scrub forests of 
Sullivan's Island during the long hours of his rambles about the 
place, Poe seems to have encountered such a person, for he says, 
" In the inmost recesses of this coppice, not far from the eastern 
or more remote end of the island, Legrand had built himself a 
small hut which he occupied when I first, by mere accident, made 
his acquaintance." 

That Poe had a generous amount of idle time on his hands 
while at Fort Moultrie there can be no doubt. He was a member 
of a coast-guard regiment at a remote and little inspected post 
during a long era of profound peace. There were not even any 
lawns to be cut, and the situation of the fort, cut off from the 
world by what was then a row or sail of several miles from 
Charleston, curtailed even the social ambitions of the officers, and 
prevented the garrison from being kept busy about the multi- 
farious trivialities necessarily required of the soldier at a " smart 
post." The nearest hamlet was Mt. Pleasant, a community whose 
amusements were strictly confined to the raising of children and 
the delirious concerts of an orchestra of frogs. Leave in Charles- 
ton was the only relaxation of the garrison (" the facilities of 

281 Poe is probably thinking of the Rev. " Dr." Bransby's garden at Stoke 
Newington, where he cherished exotic shrubs. See Chapter V, page 83. 



ISRAFEL IN CAROLINA 213 

passage and repassage," says Poe, " were far behind those of the 
present day! ") To these pastimes, Poe seems to have added 
some conversation with the more cultivated of the officers; swim- 
ming, the study of the strange shapes of nature about him, the 
polishing of verses, excursions in the pages of Moore and Byron, 
and long hours of wandering along the sounding beaches and the 
" coppice " of Sullivan's Island. 

The orders of the day governing the routine and discipline of 
the force at Fort Moultrie, show that the garrison rose about 
five-thirty AM., policed, breakfasted, and engaged in a short 
morning's infantry drill, varied from time to time by exercises 
at the great guns. The passage of time was punctuated by the 
sharp reports of the sunrise and sunset gun, the strains of the 
bugles at meal times and retreat, and by nothing more. Beyond 
this, there was little to do except to play Seven-up on a blanket, 
or roll dice. Even from these strenuous duties Poe seems to have 
absolved himself by assuming clerical work with the consequent 
familiarity and favor of his officers which it entailed. After a 
few hours of " paper work," we can imagine him " calling it a 
day/ 5 and going outdoors to roam the beaches. To this mode of 
life, the climate was conducive, and he says: 

The winters in the latitude of Sullivan's Island are seldom very severe, 
and in the fall of the year it is a rare event indeed when a fire is con- 
sidered necessary. About the middle of October 18 , there occurred, 
however, a day of remarkable chilliness. Just before sunset I scrambled 
my way through the evergreens to the hut of my friend, whom I had 
not visited for several weeks. ... A fine fire was blazing upon the 
hearth. It was a novelty, and by no means an ungrateful one. I threw 
off an overcoat, took an armchair by the crackling logs, and awaited 
patiently the arrival of my host. 

In such a scene as this The Gold Bug begins. 

There are several prime factors to the story: The first is the 
eccentric character of "Mr. William Legrand." He was of an 
ancient Huguenot family; the next is " Jupiter," the negro serv- 
ant, and the others are Poe himself, slightly disguised by the first 
person pronoun, a wonderful, golden, skull-marked beetle, the 
solution of a mysterious mathematical cipher, a buried pirate 



2i 4 ISRAFEL 



treasure, and the meticulous description of the locality. As an 
example of Poe's method of assembling material for his more 
objective kind of short story, it is the purpose here to suggest 
briefly the probable sources of The Gold Bug. 

The idea of buried treasure is one which would inevitably as- 
sociate itself in Poe's mind with Sullivan's Island, which was 
from early colonial times the haunt of pirates. Stede Bonnet him- 
self was captured by a Colonel Rhett of Charleston only a few 
miles north of Fort Moultrie, and the port itself was early 
blockaded and its citizens held for ransom by Black Beard. Poe 
gives his pirate the generic name of " Captain Kidd," who is sup- 
posed to have buried his fabled treasure on Long Island, New 
York. In Poe's day the Isle of Palms immediately north of 
Sullivan's Island was known as Long Island, and so appears on 
all old maps. That the suggestion of buried treasure was present, 
seems fairly clear. "Legrand," the principal figure in the story, 
although Poe himself is the real hero who so cleverly solves the 
cryptogram, 292 was probably suggested by the very prevalent 
Huguenot name of Legare (pronounced Le Gree) among the 
many descendants of French settlers upon the Carolina " sea-is- 
lands." There was a minor poet of this name, which is also com- 
mon in Louisiana. According to the story, " Legrand " hailed from 
New Orleans. Into the mouth of " Jupiter," the slave or valet, 
Poe puts the negro dialect of Virginia with which he was fa- 
miliar, rather than the flat, quacking Gullah patois of the Caro- 
lina Low Country. " Jupiter " talks like a Richmond darkey. So 
much for the human elements. When we come to the gold bug 
itself, " the queerest scarabaeus in the world," there is a synthesis 
of material which is perhaps even more interesting and original. 

POE'S GOLD BUG SYNTHESIS 

The genesis of Poe's " gold bug " seems to have been beyond 
peradventure some of the beetles which he noticed on his rambles 

2 2 Poe prided himself upon his ability to solve cryptograms sec Woodberry, 
vol. i, 1900, pages 303-304, and his own articles on the subject in Alexander's 
Messenger, Dec. 18, 1839, Graham's, July, 1841, etc. This was a later development 
and the cryptogram in the story belongs to the Philadelphia period of about 1842. 



ISRAFEL IN CAROLINA 215 

among the sand dunes of Sullivan's Island. A clever synthesis of 
several of these, together with the legends of pirates, the strange 
aspects of the lonely landscape, and his well-known flare for the 
solution of ciphers, give all the necessary factors for the plot. 
Our immediate concern is with the beetles. In the story, the de- 
scriptions are scattered; brought close together in connection with 
one another, their origin becomes startlingly plain. 

To make his "gold bug" Poe evidently super-imposed one 
upon another several of the beetles common to the Island, tak- 
ing the long antennae and the golden tint from one, and the skull 
markings and shape from another. These, when assembled became 
the Scarab&us Caput Hominis, a bug never seen before or since 
upon sea or land. We can imagine him, upon some idle sunny day, 
the young soldier in the scarlet and blue uniform of the artillery, 
lying upon his stomach amid the sand dunes amusing himself 
with a piece of manuscript and the gyrations of some unfortunate 
beetle. The one of which " Jupiter " says, " I nebber did see sich 
a deuced bug he kicks and he bite eberything what cum near 
him. 293 1 didn't like de look ob de long mouff, myself, nohow, so 
I wouldn't take hold ob him wid my finger, but I cotch him wid 
a piece ob paper and stuff a piece of it in his mouff dat was de 
WQ> y 294 aj^ that j s the wa y we can easily see several beetles 

going home to Fort Moultrie in the pockets of one Edgar Allan 
Poe, alias Perry, to be duly drawn upon paper that evening under 
the light of the glimmering barrack lantern by a semi-scientific 
young poet who combined imagination with observation and the 
use of the artistic pencil. Indeed, it is this very operation of draw- 
ing beetles in which we surprise " Legrand " at the opening of the 
story. 

. . . He seated himself at a small table on which were a pen and ink, 
but no paper. He looked for some in a drawer but found none. * Never 
mind/ he said at length, ' this will answer '; and he drew from his 
waistcoat pocket a scrap of what I took to be very dirty foolscap, and 
made upon it a rough drawing with the pen* . . . When the design 

298 In corrections in his own hand in the Century Association copy of The Col- 
kcted Works once owned by Poe and Griswold, Poe has changed deuced to 
d d." See note 299. 

294 xhe quotations are, of course, from The Gold Bug. 



216 ISRAFEL 

was complete, he handed it to me without rising. . . . * Well/ I said, 
after contemplating it for some moments, ' this is a strange scarabceus, 
I must confess; new to me, never saw anything like it before unless 
it was a skull, or a death's head, which it more nearly resembles than 
anything else that has come under my observation. ' A death's head! ' 
echoed Legrand. 'Oh yes well, it has something of that appear- 
ance upon paper, no doubt. The two upper black spots look like eyes, 
eh? and the longer one at the bottom like a mouth and then the 
shape of the whole is oval.' . . . 

Elsewhere " Legrand " says of the bug, " It is a brilliant gold 
co l or about the size of a large hickory nut, with two jet black 
spots near one extremity of the back, and another somewhat 
larger, at the other. . . " The antenna, we also learn, are long 
and accentuated, and the beetle had powerful jaws. With these 
descriptions in mind we can now proceed to see how Poe played 
with his beetles to the tune of a charming medley in fact and 
fancy, the theme of which was the gold bug. 

The reader is now asked to accompany an enthusiastic " bug- 
hunter " upon Sullivan's and Long Island, South Carolina, about 
one hundred years after Poe's historic visit, and to partake vicari- 
ously of the excitements of the chase. Some years ago, it appears, 
a noted entomologist, 295 armed with the classic butterfly net of 
science, crossed over from Sullivan's Island to Long Island to 
collect insects. While he was forcing his way through a dense 
thicket, a large beetle lit on the end of the dagger leaf of a 
bristling Spanish Bayonet. The insect was new to him and most 
beautiful, nothing like it, he thought, was to be found out of 
the tropics. It was gleaming with fiery gold, soft satiny green, and 
dull old-gold the antennae nearly three inches long extended in 
front of the insect as it stood at attention.* 9 * 

In his excitement, the scientific gentleman missed it with his 

2 Ellison A. Smyth, Jr. the author is frankly indebted to Prof. Smyth of 
the Virginia Polytechnic Institute for the description of the capture of the beetles, 
and for the idea which they suggested to him which are taken from his article in 
the Sewanee Review for January i, 1910, Foe's Gold Bug from the Standpoint 
of an Entomologist. The text of the article was supplied the author by the 
Charleston Museum, Charleston, South Carolina, together with specimens of the 
beetles described, captured on Sullivan's Island. 

296 "At attention" with antennae pointing. This is the position which sug- 
gested to Poe his idea for using the beetle as a " treasure pointer." 





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spade*. 1 was dreadfully weary, but, tcercely 
uadr*landing -what had occasioned the change 



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ffMttMly he fell opoa hi* knee* fa the pit, and, 
bury .ng his naked araaup tftthaftftowp ift gold 




letthittithrercm a m 1 *U'eioyJngtbelaxwyJ^M of antique dale wid of gwat 
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Wit 111 



Original illustrations for The Gold Bug 

Published with the text for Poe's 100 prize story in The Philadelphia Dollar 
Newspaper for Wednesday, June 28, 1843. The illustrations were by F. O. C. 
DAR.LEY, the Philadelphia artist retained by POE to illustrate The Stylus, 
which never appeared 

From a file of the Dollar Newspaper 
Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society 



ISRAFEL IN CAROLINA 217 

net, but some years later when visiting the same locality he 
managed to snare several by the pleasant and magic formula of 
anointing tree trunks in daytime with an alluring mixture of stale 
beer, rum, and brown sugar. Their fondness for sap it seems sug- 
gested his " sugaring for them " as moth collectors do. A speci- 
men of the beetle itself, it appears, must be closely examined if 
its beauty is to be fully appreciated. A large specimen is about an 
inch and a half long and about a half an inch wide; they have 
black antennae that sometimes measure over two inches in length, 
while the head and prominent prothorax are glittering with fiery 
gold sometimes shot with iridescent green. The fore-wings are 
satiny-green and, when opened, discover the full-gold of the 
abdomen beneath, so that old " Jupiter's " description of, " Solid 
goole inside and all sep hum wing," fixes it as Poe's very " gold 
bug," indeed. 

But how about the skull markings? These, it appears, we do 
not have to go far to seek, as they are also forthcoming from a 
beetle very common to the locality of Fort Moultrie. Mr. Smyth, 
for such was the scientific gentleman's name, upon this same 
" sugaring expedition " was so fortunate as to capture upon the 
same tree, side by side with the golden Cattichroma, one of the 
common big " Click Beetles " of the vicinity, which is known to 
bug men as Alaus Oculatus and to small boys as "The Jump- 
ing Jack." It is about the same size as the gold-beetle (Cd- 
lichroma), but flatter and more oval. It has a background of 
black, thickly spotted with white, and its very large prothorax is 
provided with two oval, eye-like black spots edged with white that 
give it a decidedly piratical and skull-like appearance. 297 

Mr. Smyth was then visited, he said, by a " scientific revela- 
tion," and a moment of literary insight, in which he saw that 
Poe's gold bug was a composite, and that by placing Alaus Ocu- 
latus, I, the " skull-bug," on CdtUchroma, II, the gold bug, he had 
what the printer has so obligingly done for us here, Edgar Allan 

207 The drawings of these insects have been made for the author (from speci- 
mens captured on Sullivan's Island within a few miles of Fort Moultrie) by 
Miss Elena von Feld of the American Museum of Natural History, New York 
City, specimens furnished by Miss Laura M. Bragg, Director of the Charleston 
Museum. 



2I 8 ISRAFEL 

Poe's clever little synthesis, or " Scarab&us Caput Hominis," 
Poe's gold bug. 208 

The description of the beetle which " Legrand " finally places 
in the hand of Poe is now complete: 

It was a beautiful scarabceus, and, at that time, . . . unknown to nat- 
uralists of course a great prize in a scientific point of view. There 
were two round black spots near one extremity of the back and a long 
one near the other. The scales were exceedingly hard and glossy, with 
all the appearance of burnished gold. The weight of the insect was very 
remarkable. . . . 

The weight was necessary if the insect was to be used as a plum- 
met and a divining rod, as it was used in the story. The black 
marks at the rear, making cross-bones can, of course, be left to 
Poe's imagination, but it is all very typical of the young Poe, of 
his imaginative fancy, his preoccupation with semi-scientific ob- 
servation, and his love of a good hoax. 

There are many elements in The Gold Bug, indeed, which indi- 
cate Poe's insatiable curiosity, his live interest in many things. 
The long antennae of the beetle, which when lowered through the 
eye of the skull, point to the treasure, imply a knowledge of the 
old legends of the divining rod. There is also an understood ele- 
ment of sympathetic magic, for the golden bug is attracted by the 
golden treasure, like attracts like and there is, last of all, 
the delightful poetic fancy that the very soil of the island, where 
pirates have buried their doubloons and jewels, bred an insect 
that partakes of the nature of the golden treasure and the fear- 
some markings of the " Jolly-Roger " itself. 

Indeed, confirmation of this association of the ideas in the 
story with the pirate flag is unexpectedly forthcoming from the 
pen of Poe himself. In an 1845 edition of The Raven and Tales 
which he corrected for himself, Poe has inserted these para- 
graphs in his own hand with the evident intention of including 
them in a reprint of the text. These changes appear to have been 
overlooked or disregarded by Griswold, Poe's editor, and they 

298 Arrangement for the synthesis of CaZUchroma and Alans Oculatus designed 
by Theodore Spicer-Simson, Esq. to conform with Poe's own description in The 
Gold Bug. 



ISRAFEL IN CAROLINA 219 

should now be added to all texts of The Gold Bug which is other- 
wise incomplete. The paragraphs show the hero of the story and 
"Legrand "talking 299 

(Hero) I presume the fancy of the skull and of letting fall a 
beetle through the skull's eye was suggested to Kidd by the pirati- 
cal flag. No doubt he felt a kind of poetical consistency in recovering 
his money through his ominus insignium. 

(Legrand) Perhaps, still I cannot help thinking that common-sense 
had quite as much to do with the matter as poetical consistency. To 
be visible from the Devil's seat, it was necessary that the object, if 
small, should be white; and there is nothing like your human skull for 
retaining and even increasing its whiteness under exposure to all vicissi- 
tudes of weather. 

In this bit of dialogue, the double attitude of " poetical con- 
sistency " and " common sense," which Poe constantly employed 
in his stories, is nicely stressed and the effect of pirate legends 
upon the plot definitely confirmed. 

For the rest, the remaining elements of the story are part and 
parcel of romance. In the " high rugged country behind Sullivan's 
Island," Poe introduces some of the scenery of the Ragged Moun- 
tains into South Carolina, for the country back of the sea-islands 
is in reality excessively low and flat. 800 The tree, however, is true 
to life. In the huge tulip trees and live-oaks of the district, 801 

299 These paragraphs added by Poe himself, are inserted in the present text 
of The Gold "Bug immediately before the paragraph beginning, " but your grand 
eloquence . . ." etc., and are taken from Foe's own copy of The Raven and 
Other Poems by Edgar A. Poe. New York, Wiley and Putnam, 161 Broadway, 1845. 
12 mo. and Tales, by Edgar A. Poe. New York, Wiley and Putnam, 1845. " mo. 
" The above two works are bound together, the first precedes. This was Poe's 
own copy, with many manuscripts, marginal corrections and additions, evidently 
intended as the basis for a new edition, afterward the property of R. W. Griswold, 
Poe's editor, with his autograph on a fly leaf. It was bequeathed by J. L. Graham 
to the Century Association of New York. Quotations here by the courtesy of the 
Librarian of the Century Association. 

300 Prof. Basil L. Gfldersleeve in writing Prof. Harrison says ..." I am old 
enough to remember what an excitement his Gold Bug created in Charleston 
when it first appeared, and how severely we boys criticised the inaccuracies in the 
description of Sullivan's Island." Harrison's Life and Letters of E. A. Poe, vol. I, 
page 315. Prof. Gildersleeve knew the failings of his home town. Even Poe could 
not improve on scenery that was " already perfect." 

soi On Fairfield Plantation on the Santee, some miles from Sullivan's Island, 
there is a live oak which requires thirteen persons to span it. Many other large 
trees abound. 



22O 



ISRAFEL 



covered with the funereal plumes of Spanish moss waving eerily 
like the canopy of a catafalque, who, but the young Poe, could 
help but seeing something charneHike, or resist providing a grin- 
ning skull among the gloomy labyrinth of branches? Nor is the 
size of the tree exaggerated. There are many near Fort Moultrie, 
a little way inland, even more gigantic and incredible than the 
one introduced in the story itself. The two guardian skeletons 
buried with the treasure are part of pirate lore. Stevenson uses 
the same device in Treasure Island, and such, in reality, seems to 
have been the gruesome custom of the buccaneers. But nothing 
can exceed the skill with which every item of fact and fancy is 
combined in the story to lead the reader on and up to the climax 
of the finding of the treasure when " Jupiter " is digging under the 
great tree by the glimmer of a lantern, and the dog 

leaping into the hole, tore up the mould frantically with his daws. In 
a few seconds he had uncovered a mass of human bones, forming two 
complete skeletons, intermingled with several buttons of metal, and 
what appeared to be the dust of decayed woolen. One or two strokes 
of a spade upturned the blade of a large Spanish knife, and, as we 
dug further, three or four pieces pieces of gold and silver coins came 
to light . . . , (then the iron bound box, with its heavy lid and two 
sliding bolts!) These we drew back trembling and panting with anx- 
iety. In an instant a treasure of incalcuable value lay gleaming before 
us. As the rays of the lanterns fell Sashing within the pit, there flashed 
upward a glow and a glare, from a confused heap of gold and of jewels, 
that absolutely dazzled one's eyes. 

In other stories and poems there are to be found distinct traces 
of his visits to Charleston and the hinterland. The house of Usher, 
itself, may well be some old, crumbling, and cracked-walled colo- 
nial mansion found moldering in the Carolina woods, as it was left 
desolate by the hands of the marauding British, surrounded by 
its swamps and gloomy woods, its cypress-stained tarns, and its 
snake-haunted Indian moats. To see these, is instantly to be re- 
minded of descriptions by Poe. The whole country about, in fact, 
was one peculiarly in sympathy with his more lonely and melan- 
choly moods. The vault described at the end of The Sleeper, a 
poem written in its first form about 1831, recalls almost literally 
some of the great family tombs on the plantations about Charles- 



ISRAFEL IN CAROLINA 221 

ton, with the semi-feudal pomp that surrounds them. 302 And Poe 
saw this country, it must be remembered, before the devastations 
of war had laid low the glories of its old royal grants and baronies. 
As a disinherited son he must have envied, and as a Virginian 
sympathized with, its prodigally-generous plantation life. 

The young soldier seems to have risen rapidly in the estimate 
of his officers. Doubtless his gentlemanly manners and appear- 
ance soon recommended him. With this and his education, he 
would, indeed, have stood out in sharp contrast to the average 
regular army recruit of the period. His attention to duty was 
strict and evidently satisfactory, for on May i, 1828, we find him 
being appointed " artificer," 80S a title which does not necessarily 
carry any mechanical duties with it, but is merely the first rung 
in promotions carrying higher pay and leading to the higher non- 
commissioned grades. He had already served as company clerk 
and assistant in the commissariat department, and was evidently 
about headquarters where he attracted attention and gave satis- 
faction. The Colonel himself must have had his eye on him, for 
his rise through all the non-commissioned grades seems to have 
taken place between May and December, 1828, and on January 
i, 1829, he was appointed regimental sergeant major at Fortress 
Monroe, Virginia. 

Naturally enough, with added responsibility went the com- 
pensation of greater personal freedom. Poe would have had little 
difficulty in obtaining considerable leave, and there is evidence 
that he spent part of it in visits to the nearby city of Charleston. 
Here was a city with whose quaint streets and high-walled gar- 
dens he must have had considerable contact. The wanderings of 
a young soldier upon leave are not always without romance, and 
the unique and foreign aspect of the place could not have been 
lost upon him. Perhaps he knew that he had been there before, 
as a child-in-arms, with his even-then dying mother, in i8n, 80 * 



302 Typical of these is the family tomb at Middleton Gardens near Charleston. 

BOS one biographer is somewhat confused by Poe's being appointed an 
" artificer." 

so* xhis is doubtful, however, as Poe knew almost nothing about his family 
until he lived among his relatives in Baltimore in 1829. See his mistake in regard 
to being Benedict Arnold's grandson, Chapter XII, page 248. 



222 



ISRAFEL 



and so sat through some play given upon the stage of the theater 
where she had trod the boards in The Wonder seventeen years 
before. Mr. Placide, the manager of Mrs. Poe's company, had 
been succeeded in Charleston by his son, and it is by no means 
impossible that Poe, who was on the hunt for information about 
his parents, may have looked him up. 

At any rate, certain passages in the Oblong Box show that he 
was familiar with the departure of the Charleston sailing packets 
and the life along the docks, and he may have visited the " Old 
State House " (the rooms of the Charleston Library Society were 
located in the same building) and turned over some of the colo- 
nial records in the Probate Court relating to pirates and ship- 
wreck, material which seems to have affected The Gold Bug.* 

.For the rest, oblivion has it in its quiet keeping. The officers 
of Poe's regiment died before they could be questioned as to the 
details of his life at Charleston, and almost nothing but the offi- 
cial records are left. Here is a whole year whose social and whose 
human contacts are nearly blank. Of its dreams we know more, 
for Al Aaraaf is the monument. 

This is the longest poem that Poe wrote. Its story-plot and 
general architecture are negligible, although the conception is 
poetic. Into it the young poet poured, during the lonely hours 
at Fort Moultrie, a wealth of imagination, lovely sound, and airy 
fancy that entitle the work, for such it is, to a higher considera- 
tion than it has ever received. It has inspired other young poets 
to first take flight, and it remained for years a poetical bank upon 
which he continued to draw. Despite its frequent echoes, no 
one in America up to that time had ever written so many magic 
lines. Poe's dreams of the region between earth and paradise, 
however, were rudely interrupted by the place from which inter- 
ruptions so often come home. 806 

His hardship after leaving the house of John Allan, and the 
opportunity for considerable contemplation which the stay at 

805 In 1745, the ship " Cid Compeador," commanded by one Julian de Vega, 
was wrecked off the coast of South Carolina. Some of the affidavits preserved in 
the Probate Court Records at Charleston when compared with The Gold Bug 
suggest that Poe may have seen them (sic). 

SOB 5^ note 35o> Chapter XII, referring to Al Aaraaf. 



ISRAFEL IN CAROLINA 223 

Fort Moultrie afforded, seems to have confirmed Poe in his ambi- 
tions for a literary career. He felt, he says, that the prime of his 
life was passing, yet three years of his five year term of enlistment 
remained to be served, with no prospects but barrack life beyond 
that. Sometime during the close of the year 1828 307 he seems to 
have gotten into communication with his foster-father, either by 
letter or through the good offices of friends, and expressed a de- 
sire to obtain his guardian's help in leaving the army. Mr. Allan's 
permission it seems was required, for Poe's company commander, 
Lieutenant J. Howard, had become much interested in the bril- 
liant young soldier and had promised to discharge him, if a recon- 
ciliation between John Allan and Poe could be confirmed. The 
communications between Richmond and Fort Moultrie were made 
through the medium of a Mr. John O. Lay who seems to have 
been a friend of the Allan family. 808 

Although aware now of the whereabouts of his foster-son, John 
Allan did not write him directly, but wrote Mr. Lay that he 
thought a military life was a good one for Poe, and evidently indi- 
cated that he was quite content to allow him to remain where he 
was. Nothing is more indicative of John Allan's utter coldness 
of heart than this. The letter was inclosed by Mr. Lay to Lieu- 
tenant Howard, and must have brought a sinking sense of dis- 
appointment to the home-sick and ambitious young soldier. For 
the time being, his hopes were dashed to the ground and doubt 
cast upon all his statements to Lieutenant Howard. 

With the resumption of intercourse between father and son, a 
new factor begins to creep into John Allan's attitude to " the son 
of actors " snobbishness. After inheriting his uncle's ample for- 
tune, the older man developed social aspirations in conformity 
with the large mansion in Richmond, and these, it would appear, 
he felt were somewhat threatened by the fact that his " son " had 
enlisted as a private soldier. The descendant of Scotch smugglers, 
to judge from expressions in the correspondence which took place, 
felt that to have Poe return in the uniform of anything less than 

7 The facts related here which conflict with certain " standard " biographies 
come from the new published letters of the Valentine Museum, Richmond. See 
particularly letter 6, page 7$. 

808 Some authorities say, " a relative of Mrs. Allan." 



224 ISRAFEL 

an officer would be to have entailed upon him a portion of Poe's 
"infamy"; nevertheless, he feels a military career is the thing 
for Poe. " He had better remain where he is until the end of his 
enlistment." 

In a letter written by Poe to John Allan from Fort Moultrie on 
December i, 1828, Poe protests against this, tells of his concern 
at learning that John Allan had been ill, and speaks with par- 
donable pride of his own satisfaction at his rapid promotion. 
He stresses his determination to leave the army unless absolutely 
forbidden to do so by his " father," and states that army regu- 
lations do not permit of promotion from the ranks, and that his 
age precludes West Point. It is now that the first mention of 
West Point occurs. 

This letter shows Poe's character to have considerably har- 
dened during his army career. His promotions seem to have given 
him self-confidence and poise, and he says that he is no longer 
a wayward boy but a man with a work to do in the world. His 
future greatness he successfully predicts, for " he feels that within 
him" which will make him fulfil John Allan's wishes, and he 
excuses his self-confidence by saying that conviction of success 
is the only thing that can make ambitions and talent prosper. 
" I have thrown myself on the world like the Norman conqueror 
on the shores of Britain and, by my avowed assurance of victory, 
have destroyed the fleet which could alone cover my retreat I 
must either conquer or die succeed or be disgraced." Poe makes 
plain that he is not asking for money a letter to Lieutenant 
Howard assuring that officer of the reconciliation that would 
procure his release is all he asks and "my dearest love to 
Ma it is only when absent that we can tell the value of such 
a friend " yours respectfully and affectionately. 

This cry from the high heart of ambitious and fiery youth in 
the agony of frustration, and the prison-house of military bar- 
racks received as a reply a complete silence. In the arctic laby- 
rinth of John Allan's brain it was locked away as utterly and se- 
curely as some pathetic secret in a vault of cold marble. 

One ponders wearily such facts, startled by the amazing pos- 
sibilities of human nature, wondering a little about the wet eyes 



ISRAFEL IN CAROLINA 225 

of the fragile, failing wife in the great house at Richmond, of what 
her husband thought when he found his prediction about the 
boy's starving in the streets had not been fulfilled not com- 
pletely that is whether he was glad or sorry, annoyed, or 
simply surprised. Was there not some sorrow and yearning left 
in the man or was he, after all, this strong prophet of lean 
years, who saw to it that his predictions were fulfilled disap- 
pointed? Who knows even Fate must have been astonished 
John Allan had raised a poet! 

In the meantime, Edgar Poe had sailed northward. 309 On 
December the first, he writes that his regiment was under 
orders to sail for Old Point Comfort. The low coasts of Carolina 
faded away forever under the eyes of " Edgar A. Perry," First 
United States Artillery; the army transport lumbered heavily up 
the coast with the warm current of the Gulf Stream; the hours 
passed slowly while the men played cards in their bunks under the 
light of whale-oil lanterns. Fortress Monroe drew slowly nearer. 
Certainly a letter would be there to release him from all this! 
Only a few lines would do the trick would save three years of 
youth from being wasted. Even " Pa " would not fail him there. 
What had he done anyway to be thought so " degraded " ? Played 
cards for money and read novels, drunk a little heady peach-and- 
honey, insisted upon being a poet. For that he had done penance 
in uniform and barracks for two long, lost years. Surely that was 
enough! It was getting near Christmas time. Perhaps, they would 
let him come home? Home! he could anticipate old black 
" Dab " crying out over him as he opened the big door; " Ma" 
coming weakly down the steps half blind with joy, "Aunty 
Nancy's " hearty rapture, even John Allan's amused ironical smile 



so9 p oe s regiment almost certainly left Fort Moultrie the first week in De- 
cember, 1828, for on the first of December he writes John Allan that they are 
then under orders to sail and that mail must be sent to him at Fortress Monroe. 
See letter 6, The Valentine Museum Letters. Poe, therefore, spent the time be- 
tween the middle of November, 1827, and the first week in December, 1828, on 
Sullivan's Island, South Carolina. A considerable slice out of his short life. The 
statement that Poe left Fort Moultrie in October, 1828, (Woodberry, etc.) is thus 
corrected and the remaining months accounted for. The voyage to Hampton 
Roads could not have been under four days in length. This was Poe's last " long" 
voyage by sea. 



226 ISRAFEL 

and, " Weel, weel, my ain proud cockerel, fluttered back, eh! " 
Then the glow of the agate lamp in his own quiet room and the 
books. . . . The ship, whose name has been forgotten, lurched 
another wave-length northward. To Israfel it seemed to be making 
no perceptible progress. He was already a little, just a little weary 
of another voyage which was now half over. Within a few weeks of 
reaching Fortress Monroe he was twenty years old. Tamerlane 
had probably been destroyed in Boston, almost the whole edition. 
There had not been even a flash in the pan. 



CHAPTER XII 
Cold Marble 



POE'S regiment would have been completely disembarked 
and in quarters at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, before the 
middle of December, 1828. By the transfer from Fort 
Moultrie, only the scene of his monotony had been shifted. Old 
Point Comfort at that time was scarcely a village. What little 
gaiety it offered centered largely about a hotel where the officers 
occasionally held dances, sometimes attended by ladies from 
Washington, Baltimore, or Richmond. For the enlisted men, the 
fort, cut off by water as it was, could have offered almost nothing, 
beyond the squabbles of the married quarters, to relieve the 
tedium of artillery practice and guard duty. Poe seems to have 
made friends with the non-commissioned officers of his old com- 
pany; he specifically mentions Sergeants Benton, Griffith, and 
Hooper in a letter written later to Sergeant Graves, more fa- 
miliarly known as "Bully," whose wife, and one "Duke" are 
also included in his salutations. 810 Occasional leave to Norfolk, 
nearby, was probably the most abandoned form of entertainment 
known to the post. 

It is no wonder, then, that the young soldier with Al Aaraaf in 
his pocket, and Tamerlane completely revised and ready for 
print, under the urge of literary ambition, became impatient 
and felt that the prime of his life was being wasted. Three more 
years of military office routine would be fatal. He had already 
written Mr. Allan from Fort Moultrie that it was now high time 
that he should leave the army. To find no letter awaiting him at 
Fortress Monroe, filled him with a growing despair as day after 
day slipped by and the silence in Richmond continued. A week 
or so after arriving at Fortress Monroe, Poe again wrote his 



810 Poe to Sergeant Samuel Graves from Richmond, May 3, 1830, Valentine 
Museum Letters, No. ax. 



228 ISRAFEL 



guardian expressing his sorrow at not hearing from him, and his 
fixed determination to leave the service. 811 

This letter is remarkable. It shows how thoroughly Poe's per- 
sonality had become integrated by his army experience, and 
throws a vivid emphasis upon his literary aspirations. Despite 
the fact, says Poe, that his ambition has not taken the direction 
which his guardian desired, he is determined to follow his own 
bent. Richmond and the United States are all too narrow a sphere 
for him, and the world will be his theater. As for the army, he 
wishes to be gone. The undoubted conviction of genius rests 
heavily upon him. The letter is one of the most prophetic. In it 
he emphatically, but with great dignity, denies the imputation 
that he is degraded. / have in my heart what has no connection 
with degradation and can walk amidst injection and be uncon- 
taminated, is a close paraphase of his words. How heavily the 
sights and sounds of barrack life, the crassness, the coarseness, 
the association with those who were personally repulsive, together 
with the utter lack of all touch with the subleties of another world 
in which he lived how heavily these weighed upon him, leaps 
forth at us from the fevered writing on the yellowed page. If 
John Allan is determined to abandon him, Poe warns him, 
although neglected, he will be doubly ambitious, and the world 
will undoubtedly hear of the son whom the older man thought 
beneath his notice. With this letter the relations of " father " and 
" son " begin to enter upon their final phase. 

Lieutenant Howard, Poe tells us, had already introduced him 
to Colonel James House who had known " General " David Poe, 
the poef s grandfather. The Colonel and the other officers all felt 
that Poe might be gotten into West Point, despite his age, if John 
Allan will only aid him . . . etc., etc., but to this there was no 
reply. John Allan was probably too much absorbed in the im- 
portant affairs of the world of reality to be moved by the prayers 
of a " son " whose avowed ambition was to be a poet. Whether he 
conveyed Poe's oft-repeated messages of affection to his " dear 



an Poe to John Allan from Fortress Monroe, December 22, 1828, Valentine 
Museum Letters, No. 27. Poe indicates in this letter that unless he receives help, he 
contemplates going abroad, probably to London (sic). 



COLD MARBLE 229 



Ma " is not known. At least he payed no attention to her constant 
appeals to be allowed to see her " dear boy/' now only a few miles 
away from Richmond. And this plea was refused with a more than 
Spartan fortitude on the part of her husband, for Frances Allan 
was dying. In the big house at Richmond, the long physical and 
spiritual agony of the childless woman was about to receive its 
final anodyne. Worry over her mortal illness might be accepted 
as a sufficient reason for John Allan's disregard of his trouble- 
some " son," if it was not definitely known that it was the constant 
prayer of his fast sinking wife that she might be allowed to see 
" Eddie " 812 before she died. 

Shortly after Poe's arrival at Fortress Monroe, his own asser- 
tions as to the good opinion in which he was held by his officers 
were confirmed by his promotion to the highest rank which an 
enlisted man can attain, short of a commission. We have already 
seen that Lieutenant Howard had introduced the young soldier 
to the Colonel of the Regiment. This, and the fact that he had 
long been employed upon military clerical work by his other 
officers, apparently to their complete satisfaction, probably pro- 
cured his final promotion. A few days after disembarking at Old 
Point Comfort, probably about December 20, 1828, Poe was de- 
tailed to Regimental Headquarters. 

" Private Perry's " performance of duty at regimental head- 
quarters was evidently eminently satisfactory, for ten days later, 
on January i, 1829, he was appointed regimental sergeant major 
and is so carried on the morning report of the day following. 

Poe's appointment to be regimental sergeant major is un- 
doubtedly a compliment to his trustworthiness and executive 
ability. The entire correspondence of a command passes through 
the hands of that non-commissioned officer. He is often in a posi- 
tion to cause serious trouble even for commissioned officers, and 
must perforce, possess the confidence and trust of the regimental 
staff. The regiment, of which Poe was the senior enlisted member 

si2 Testimony of James Gait which Mr. J. H. WMtty prints in Ms Memoir: 
This is to the effect that Mrs. Allan's dying desire was to hold Poe in her arms 
before she died. In case she passed away before Edgar arrived home, she asked not 
to be buried until her foster-son should see her. The Gaits, it will be remembered, 
were cousins of John Allan. 



230 



ISRAFEL 



at Fortress Monroe in January, 1829, was a composite one, being 
composed of companies detailed from various commands to make 
up an " artillery practice school; " a use to which the old fort has 
frequently been put. Among the officers present at that time, was 
one Lieutenant Joseph Locke with whom Poe came in touch, not 
altogether affably, later on at West Point. The fact that he had 
reached the top of the ladder as a private soldier, with peculiar 
opportunities to learn the mystery of artillery, undoubtedly 
helped him greatly in obtaining letters to the War Department. 

Sometime during January, 1829, Poe was ill in the military 
hospital at Fortress Monroe where he was attended by the Post 
Surgeon, a Dr. Robert Archer, with close relatives in Rich- 
mond. 818 The young soldier seems to have been prostrated by 
some sort of fever. No doubt his uneasiness and anxiety was a 
contributing cause. Dr. Archer was greatly attracted by the bril- 
liant young soldier whose manners were so evidently that of a 
gentleman. After some little time, Poe confessed to the surgeon, 
who seemed to be his friend, that he was the " son " of John 
Allan of Richmond and serving in the army under an alias. Dr. 
Archer, who must have known Poe's story through his Richmond 
connections, interested himself in the young man's behalf. It may 
have been in this way that Frances Allan first heard that her 
foster-son was at Fortress Monroe. 

By this time Poe was thoroughly aware of the fact that his 
guardian would not help him to a discharge, with a literary career 
in view. The West Point idea seems to have been the only form 
of compromise, so letters were again written to John Allan sug- 
gesting aid in procuring a substitute, and his influence for a 
cadet's appointment. Dr. Archer enlisted the aid and aroused the 
interest of the officers. What, if anything, was Mr. Allan's reply 



818 Dr. Archer was an uncle of Mrs. Susan Archer Weiss, one of Poe's minor 
biographers. Under the circumstances of this close relationship I have followed 
her account of Foe's contact with this army surgeon which is somewhat more 
complete and convincing, in this particular, than Prof. Woodberry's. It is now 
certain, from letters unknown to either Prof. Woodberry or Mrs. Weiss, that Dr. 
Archer did not suggest to Poe the West Point scheme which he (Poe) had 
already conceived at Fort Moultrie some months before. Dr. Archer was ap- 
pointed to the United States Medical Corps, August 5, 1826, and stationed at 
Fortress Monroe, National Calendar, vol. IV, page 158. 



COLD MARBLE 231 



is not known. The first direct message from Richmond which Poe 
received from his guardian was a summons to the death bed of 
" mother." 

Frances Allan's frantic requests had at last prevailed. Realizing 
that she was indeed in her last agony, even the cold marble seems 
to have been touched. But it was too late. On Saturday February 
28, 1829, Sergeant-Major " Edgar A. Perry " is carried as present 
on the muster roll of his regiment, and on the same day, a few 
miles away in Richmond, Mrs. Allan died. 314 Knowing full well 
the mettle of the man with whom she was having her last dealings, 
with her dying breath she extorted from him a solemn promise 
that he would not abandon Poe. 815 It was her last wish that she 
might not be buried until he saw her. It is impossible to contem- 
plate this gentle woman, waiting in vain for the beloved and 
eagerly expected footstep of her " dear boy," while the darkness 
closed in upon her; or the stern heart that sat beside her, only 
melting at the last, without a solemn wonder at the different 
capabilities of human nature. With her had departed the sweetest 
and truest friend that a certain poet ever knew. " If only she 
hadn't died," said Poe afterward. 

On the afternoon of Sunday March i, 1829, by far the most 
conspicious passenger on the Norfolk stage bound for Richmond 
must have been a young sergeant major in the uniform of the 
First Artillery, with a hospital pallor under his sunburn, and ob- 
viously nervous and excited by every delay. Frances Allan had 
died on the morning of the twenty-eighth of February, she must 
had been sinking for two days before, yet it was only at the last 
that she had prevailed on her husband to send for Poe. Some hours 
would have been consumed in getting a leave granted, if the mes- 



81 * Richmond Whig, Monday, March 2, 1829. " Died on Saturday morning 
last, after a lingering and painful illness, Mrs. Frances K. Allan, consort of Mr. 
John Allan, aged 47 years. The friends and acquaintances of the family are re* 
spectfully invited to attend the funeral from the late residence on this day at 
12 o'clock." Clipping by courtesy of Edward V. Valentine, Esq. 

316 Mrs. Allan had a small income of her own from certain parcels of real 
estate which, it appears from transactions of assignment in 1822, were held in 
her name. It may be that she suggested to her husband that some of the proceeds 
from this property might be devoted to Poe. There is no direct evidence that she 
did so, however. 



232 ISRAFEL 

sage was received the next day, and Poe could hardly have started 
till the afternoon of March i. 316 While he was engaged in making 
the journey between Fortress Monroe and Richmond, Mrs. Allan 
was being buried. Perhaps there were good reasons for this; in 
any event, her last request was not carried out. 

The return of a young soldier to his home town after an ab- 
sence of two years, cannot fail to awaken in him a flood of mem- 
ories. One can imagine Poe's impatience at the stages where the 
negro horse boys slowly unhitched and hitched the relays of 
horses, and the thousand recollections that thronged upon him as, 
towards the close of a gloomy March evening, 317 the conveyance 
rattled, all too slowly, into the dimly lit streets of Richmond. 
Once arrived, he must have dashed up Main Street to the corner 
of Fifth, through the gate leading into the circular drive before 
the familiar house, and run with all his might up the steps. The 
crepe was not there, perhaps he was not too late after all? 
A hundred things that he had been saving up to say to his 
" mother " for the past two years crowded to his lips. The door 
swung open, and in a few instants he knew that, it was all over. 

The scene of Poe's tragic home-coming was said to have been 
so harrowing as to be unbearable to those who witnessed it. 
Frances Allan had been greatly loved by her whole household, 
the demonstrative negro servants were in tears. Miss Valentine, 
inconsolable and worn out by her long vigil by the bedside, could 
not have met Poe with much fortitude. Even John Allan was pro- 
foundly moved; he stayed away from the office next day, and he 
was so agitated as to misdate a document. Be it set down to his 
credit that it was an order for some mourning clothes for Poe. 818 



816 In his letter to John Allan from Fortress Monroe of March 10, 1829, Poe 
showed that the journey from Richmond to Norfolk took a day and a night. 
As he arrived home " the evening after the funeral," March 2, he must have left 
Old Point Comfort sometime the day before, probably on the afternoon stage 
unless he went by water. The latter method was slower, and therefore probably 
not employed in this race with death. 

817 It must be remembered that in Poe's day the term " evening " meant any 
time after three o'clock P,M. until darkness. In some parts of the South the word 
is still used that way by the older generation. 

818 Ellis & Allan Papers " MX. Ellis, please to furnish Edgar A. Poe with a 
suit of clothes, 3 pairs of socks or thread hose. McCrery will make them. Also a 
pair of suspenders, and hat and knife, pair of gloves." This is in the handwriting 



COLD MARBLE 233 



The dying whispers of his wife not to forget "her dear boy 
Edgar " were too near a thing for him to utterly disregard, and a 
flood of old tender memories of the dead woman in front of the 
fire, with the boy upon her knee, many and many an evening, 
must have revived in him some of the old affection. 

Soon after his return, probably the next day, Poe visited 
Shockoe cemetery where Mrs. Allan had been buried. The empty 
room had been bad enough; close to the actual presence of death 
in the graveyard, now for the second time, Poe must have sounded 
the last fathom of despair. The future author of the Conqueror 
Worm and the philosophy of Eureka could not have been, even at 
that time, under any comforting illusions about the hereafter of 
death. On the way to the new grave they passed the tomb of Mrs. 
Stanard, just to the left of the road, a combination of sorrow 
that in Poe's state must have been well-nigh unbearable. It seems 
to have been so, for he is said to have cast himself down ex- 
hausted by the last resting place of Frances Allan. The servants 
remembered helping him into the carriage which bore him away. 

Perhaps it may have occurred to his " strong-minded guard- 
ian," while his wife was being buried and his " son's " heart had 
almost stopped beating at her grave, that there were a good many 
things in heaven and earth that had hitherto not been thought of 
in his philosophy. The wife, who had, at least, been allowed to 
share his bosom, later received a "fitting marble monument." 
Even in that, however, she was not alone. For the time being, 
though, John Allan was shaken. It was some weeks before another 
piece of marble that had originally been quarried in Scotland re- 
sumed its normal mean temperature. 

Of the details of this Richmond visit in the Winter of 1829, 
not very much is known. Poe probably saw most of his old friends 
who were not away at the University. The Gaits seem also to 
have been most kind, and the young sergeant major undoubtedly 
visited his sister Rosalie at the Mackenzies'. Probably the most 
important of his visits was at the Roysters'. Poe is said to have 



of John Allan, but dated March 3, 1828, probably due to Mr. Allan's troubled 
state of mind at his wife's death, as the slip belongs in the records of 1829. Poe 
was not in Richmond in 1828. 



234 



ISRAFEL 



called upon the parents of his sweetheart and to have created a 
scene when he learned that during his absence Elmira had been 
married to Mr. Shelton. This was contrary to the assurances he 
had received from them upon his return from the University in 
i827. 819 The young poet undoubtedly felt that both he and Elmira 
had been tricked, and every advantage taken of his absence to 
influence her. He is said to have reproached Mr. and Mrs. Roy- 
ster bitterly, and to have demanded an interview with Elmira. 
This, of course, was refused, and Mr. Shelton was warned. It 
appears that one of Poe's letters to Elmira from the University 
had fallen into her hands after her marriage, and that as a conse- 
quence she had made things unpleasant for her husband and 
parents. The marriage was a fact, however; Poe had lost his 
" Lenore," and this grief was added to his already overwhelming 
sorrow over the death of Mrs. Allan. From later developments, 
it is known that he was by no means satisfied as to the state of 
Elmira's feelings, and there can be no doubt that he cherished 
her memory, was haunted by dreams of her as long as he lived, 
and felt determined to have an interview at the first opportunity. 
This, however, did not occur while he was in Richmond in 1829. 
No doubt there were precautions taken to prevent it. 

Poe's leave of absence was the usual ten day furlough granted 
for such emergencies in the army. During the few days that he 
was in Richmond, the West Point scheme was talked over with 
John Allan, who was probably willing to listen to it because it 
seemed to offer a final solution as to his ward's future and defi- 
nitely removed him from the household. 820 A complete reconcilia- 
tion was impossible under the circumstances, but a more amicable 
feeling undoubtedly existed between them when Poe left for 
Fortress Monroe, than had been the case for a long time. 

The young soldier left Richmond early on the morning of the 

319 The Roysters had talked to Poe after his return from the University and it 
had been agreed to defer the marriage for a year. At any rate, Elmira then married 
Mr. Shelton while Poe was away and not just before his return from the University, 
as several biographers aver. 

820 Definite moves to obtain letters of influence to the War Department for 
a cadet's appointment all follow this time, and Poe's proceedings to get dear of 
the army from the time of this visit shows that the understanding with his 
guardian was reached at this time, and not before by previous correspondence. 



COLD MARBLE 235 



ninth of March, 1829. He went to his " father's " room to bid 
him good-bye, but finding him asleep, he did not awaken him to 
the consciousness of grief. Immediately on arriving at Old Point 
Comfort, on the morning of the tenth, he wrote back home. 821 
He says he is well, and there is a note of joy in the letter at the 
reconciliation with his guardian, for he tells us, that if it were 
not for Mrs. Allan's death, he would now be happier than he has 
been for a long time. The rest of the letter is given up to saying 
how anxious he is to retrieve his good name and reestablish him- 
self in the good opinion of his guardian, and to suggestions as to 
those who might aid in obtaining an appointment to West Point, 
now taken for granted. Evidently, during the visit home, the mat- 
ter had been talked over, and John Allan's consent obtained. 

From many indications, it is certain that, from the first, the 
whole West Point plan was on Poe's part, merely a concession to 
his guardian's idea of what his future career should be. The young 
soldier himself would have liked to free himself entirely from the 
army to give himself up to writing. On this point, however, as 
upon his " son's " returning to Charlottesville, John Allan was 
adamant. Poe was himself a little wiser now. He had learned how 
futile it was to woo the muse with no bread in his stomach, and 
no oil in the lamp; and he was prepared to compromise, rather 
than to walk out of the house again to starve. Frances Allan's 
promise, that she had extorted from her husband, had paved the 
way for a reconciliation. With temporary acquiescence to his 
guardian's wishes, and a repetition at West Point of his success 
in the ranks, Poe felt that there was a real hope of being reen- 
stated in Mr. Allan's good opinion if not in his affection. In the 
meantime, the Military Academy offered board, bed and educa- 
tion; a specious combination that has appealed to a great many 
poor but ambitious youths. To share, even partially, in John 
Allan's large fortune was also highly desirable. Even a modest 
legacy would bring Poe the possibility of the leisure for his writ- 
ing which he so much desired desired, indeed, above all things 
and relief from the haunting fear of poverty. This choice there- 

321 p oe to John Allan, March 10, 1829. Letter No. 9, Valentine Museum Col- 
lection. 



23 6 ISRAFEL 



fore, which circumstances had so largely thrust upon him, was the 
lesser horn of a dilemma rather than a thirst for the glory of 
arms. The result of it was to be the almost utter waste of two 
years out of a short life. 

From the standpoint of literature, it is unfortunate that John 
Allan could not change his mind. A little concession, on his part, 
to the darling wish of his " son's " heart would have allowed the 
world to have heard from Poe oftener and sooner. It might have 
saved him, even then, from the nerve-shattering effects of the 
poverty and deprivations to follow. But to the potentialities of his 
ward, John Allan was blind. West Point, to the good merchant, 
seemed an ideal solution. Edgar would there be under that dis- 
cipline of which the Scotchman felt he was in such need; it re- 
lieved Mr. Allan of personal expense by casting him on the public 
charge; and it removed Poe from the household and assured him 
a future. By such an arrangement the older man could at once 
assoil himself of his promise to his dead wife, and be honorably 
rid of the young genius who had become a spiritual, an intel- 
lectual, and a physical nuisance. There comes a time in every 
man's life when he feels that he is entitled to what he calfe 
"peace." Death had removed John Allan's wife. He was now 
looking forward to a new era of existence, and in the scheme of 
that life there was no place for a reminder, a painful reminder, 
of the old order of things. 

No one can blame Mr. Allan for this. A lack of psychic insight 
and artistic prevision, however desirable, must be forgiven a 
man cannot be reproached for the lack of qualities with which 
he has not been endowed but there was something more than 
this. When John Allan " adopted " the helpless child whom he 
took into his house, whether willingly or not, he assumed certain 
responsibilities. It is the ruthlessness of his shaking these off, from 
the time of Poe's sojourn at Charlottesville until after the West 
Point interlude, of which posterity has a right to complain. The 
dying prayers of his wife seemed to temporarily arouse in him a 
sense of the fact that fatherhood does not consist simply in 
cramming a child's stomach, and then throwing it out of the nest. 
As the days slipped by, however, the repugnance to having Poe 



COLD MARBLE 237 



in the house returned, and the memory of the promise waned. It 
is this process that the correspondence between the years 1829 
and 1833 shadows forth. The beginning, as might be expected, 
was more favorable than the end. 

Most of Poe's time when he got back to the Fort was taken up 
in making arrangements for his discharge, getting letters from his 
officers to the War Department, and finding a substitute willing 
to serve out the remainder of his enlistment, about three years. 
A few weeks after his arrival, arrangements were complete, and 
the Colonel of the Regiment wrote the following letter to the Gen- 
eral commanding the Department of the East. As usual in Poe's 
case, most of the biographical data is inexact. The story which 
Poe told his commanding officer can be read between the lines. 

Fortress Monroe, 

March 30, '29. 

GENERAL, I request your permission to discharge from the service 
Edgar A. Perry, 822 at present the Sergeant-Major of the ist Reg't of 
Artillery, on his procuring a substitute. 

The said Perry is one of a family of orphans whose unfortunate par- 
ents were the victims of the conflagration of the Richmond Theatre in 
iSoQ. 828 The subject of this letter was taken under the protection of 
a Mr. Allan, a gentleman of wealth and respectability, of that city, 
who, as I understand, adopted his protegS as his son and heir; with the 
intention of giving him a liberal education, he had placed him at the 
University of Virginia from which, after considerable progress in his 
studies, in a moment of youthful indiscretion he absconded, 824 and was 
not heard from by his Patron for several years; in the meantime he 
became reduced to the necessity of enlisting into the service, 825 and 
accordingly entered as a soldier in my Regiment, at Fort Independence, 

322 xhe request for discharge of course had to be in the same name as that 
under which the soldier was enlisted. 

28 The Colonel evidently had the story from Poe and from John Allan's 
letter to him, but he is somewhat mixed as to dates and precise facts. The theater 
burned in 1811. That Poe used it as a convenient method of explaining his adop- 
tion seems likely. It is also a more romantic reason, the kind that Poe liked to 
fill into his " autobiography." 

824 The use of the word " absconded," carrying with it the idea of financial 
defaulting, may indicate that, in his letter to the Colonel, John Allan made men- 
tion of Poe's running away on account of debts. 

325 "Reduced to the necessity," etc. this is an interesting comment on the 
Colonel's own opinion of the enlisted personnel of that day, and Poe's desperate 
straits in Boston in 1827. Evidently " enlisting " was one step short of suicide. 



238 ISRAFEL 

in 1827. Since the arrival of his company at this place he has made 
his situation known to his Patron, at whose request the young man 
has been permitted to visit him; the result, is an entire reconciliation 
on the part of Mr. Allan, who reinstates him into his family and favor, 
and who in a letter I have received from him requests that his son may 
be discharged on procuring a substitute, an experienced soldier and ap- 
proved sergeant is ready to take the place of Perry as soon as his dis- 
charge can be obtained. 826 The good of the service, therefore, cannot 
be materially injured by the discharge. 
I have the honor to be, 

With great respect, your obedient servant, 
JAS. HOUSE, 

Col. ist Art'y. 

To the General Commanding the 
E. Dept. U. S. A., New York. 

Permission was granted by General E. P. Gaines commanding 
the Eastern Department, from New York headquarters in an 
order dated April 4, and in compliance with this, " Edgar A. 
Perry " was discharged from the service of the United States on 
April 15, 1829, a sergeant as the Colonel notes then being 
ready to take his place as substitute. As this transaction was 
later used as the basis of a serious charge against Poe by the 
second Mrs. Allan, it is important to note that Poe was dis- 
charged from the army in a little over a month from the time that 
he returned from furlough to Richmond. Apparently, the whole 
matter was easily arranged. Allowing for the time which the mail 
then required between New York and Fortress Monroe, 827 and 
for the usual delays of official correspondence, it is hard to see 
how it could have been done more speedily. 

Poe's own description of the transactions involved in his dis- 



826 The wording here strongly suggests that the approved sergeant was ready 
to fill the post of sergeant-major to which he would at the same time have to 
be promoted by regimental order. The point should be noted. 

82 * Then at least three or four days each way. The orders would also be a 
day or so in being approved, written, and transmitted. It evidently took the 
Colonel's letter three days to get to New York and the confirming order at head- 
quarters was issued on the fourth. The order for discharge is dated ahead to the 
fifteenth of April because it allows a month's half pay and is convenient to com- 
pute. This completely does away with the second Mrs. Allan's story of delay 
during which the aggrieved substitute " grew tired waiting and wrote to Mr. 
Allan." 



COLD MARBLE 239 



charge is now available. 828 On the date of his discharge it appears 
that both Colonel House and Lieutenant Howard, his regimental, 
and company commanders were absent. Had they been present, 
either one, it would have been possible to have mustered in the 
first recruit who offered as a substitute, which would have cost 
Poe only the usual bounty of $12. Poe had told John Allan that 
it would only cost that much, when he was in Richmond, it ap- 
pears. With the officers absent who were competent to. enlist a new 
recruit in his place, Poe was forced to pay $75 to the sergeant who 
took his place. This he did by giving the substitute $25 cash 
and a note for $50, which he afterwards took up out of $100 sent 
him from home. As Poe's explanation agrees with the army regu- 
lations in force at the time, both John Allan's suspicions, and the 
charge of embezzlement made against Poe by the second Mrs. 
Allan in her only known printed statement about him, published 
long after his death, are both shown to be wrong. 

Years after the events just described, when every move of 
Poe had become a matter of public interest, the second Mrs. 
Allan, then a widow, wrote to Colonel Thomas H. Ellis at that 
time living in Baltimore, an " explanation " of the estrangement 
between Edgar Poe and John Allan. The letter is quoted in part: 

Mr. Poe had not lived under Mr. Allan's roof for two years before my 
marriage, and no one knew his whereabouts; his letters were very 
scarce and were dated from St. Petersburg, Russia, although he had 
enlisted in the army at Boston. After he became tired of army life, he 
wrote to his benefactor, expressing a desire to have a substitute if the 
money could be sent to him. Mr. Allan sent it, Poe spent it; and after 
the substitute was tired out, waiting and getting letters and excuses, 
he (the substitute) enclosed one of Poe's letters to Mr. Allan, which 
was too black to be credited if it had not contained the author's signa- 
ture. Mr. Allan sent the money to the man, and banished Poe from his 
affections; and he never lived here again. 829 

An examination of the statements in this letter, together with 



828 From various letters from Poe in the Valentine Museum Collection dated 
from Baltimore in the Summer of 1829, written to John Allan in Richmond. 

329 This letter was afterward published hy Colonel Thomas H. Ellis, the son 
of Charles Ellis, in the Richmond Standard for April 22, 1880. Louise Allan Mayo 
also gave further publicity to this unfortunate epistle in Historic Homes of Rich- 
mond. The Richmond News, Illustrated Saturday Magazine, July 28, 1900. 



24 o ISRAFEL 



the known facts and movements of Poe and John Allan, and other 
letters dealing with the young poet's period of army service and 
discharge, prove that Mrs. Allan's letter is incorrect, not only in 
its charge of the misuse of funds, but in nearly every other item. 
Poe did, it is now known, still owe money to some of the non- 
commissioned officers in his regiment when he left Fortress Mon- 
roe. A letter of Poe's written to one of these men later on fell 
into the second Mrs. Allan's hands. This, together with her hus- 
band's suspicions, and the nature of Poe's statements about his 
guardian in the epistle itself, perhaps led Mrs. Allan to make the 
statement that she did make. 

The absence of Lieutenant Howard, on the date of Poe's dis- 
charge, April 15, probably accounts for the fact that Poe did not, 
although anxious to secure his cadet appointment, leave Fortress 
Monroe until almost a week after his release. He was waiting to 
obtain letters from Lieutenant Howard and the other officers to 
aid him in his application. These letters were given gladly, and 
show clearly the high estimation in which Poe was held by his 
superiors. The blamelessness of his conduct during his two years 
in the army is clear. His company and battalion commanders 
write: 

Fortress Monroe, Va. 2oth April, 1829. 

Edgar Poe, late Sergt-Major in the ist Arty, served under my com- 
mand in "H," company ist Reg't of Artillery, from June 1827, to 
January 1829, during which time his conduct was unexceptionable. He 
at once performed the duties of clerk and assistant in the Subsistent 
Department, both of which duties were promptly and faithfully done. 
His habits are good and entirely free from drinking. 

J. HOWARD, 

Lieut, ist Artillery 

In addition to the above, I have to say that Edgar Poe (erased Perry) 
was appointed Sergeant-Major of the ist art'y; on the ist of January, 
1829, and up to this date, has been exemplary in his department, 
prompt and faithful in the discharge of his duties and is highly 
worthy of confidence. 

H. W. GRISWOLD, 

Bt. Capt. and Adjut. ist. Arfy 

To this is 3, tfunj endorsement by the Lieutenant Colonel of the 



COLD MARBLE 241 



regiment, W. J. Worth, 380 who joins most heartily adding some 
further praise of his own. The letter, in short, covers the entire 
period of Poe's service in the army under all three officers. 

With these letters in his pocket, young Poe left Old Point Com- 
fort and set out for Richmond where he seems to have been oc- 
cupied during the latter part of April, 1829, and the first week 
of May in obtaining political influence for his appointment. John 
Allan bestirred himself in the matter and obtained a letter from 
Andrew Stevenson, the Speaker of the House, and a Major John 
Campbell, who remembered having seen Edgar Poe as a boy at 
"The Springs" in i8i2. 331 While Poe was still in Richmond, 
Colonel Worth, the Representative in Congress from the district, 
was also prevailed upon to write the Secretary of War in the 
young man's behalf, and to these letters and the eulogies of Poe's 
former officers, John Allan added his own. Pen in hand, the nature 
of the older man's feelings toward his ward, could not be forced 
beyond the following arctic "recommendation": 

Richmond, May 6, 1829. 

DR. SIR, The youth who presents this, is the same alluded to by 
Lt. Howard, Capt. Griswold, Colo. Worth, our representative, and the 
speaker, HonT^le Andrew Stevenson, and my friend Major Jno. 
Campbell. 

He left me in consequence of some gambling at the University at 
Charlottesville, because (I presume) I refused to sanction a rule that 
the shop-keepers and others had adopted there, making Debts of 
Honour of all indiscretions. I have much pleasure in asserting that he 
stood his examination at the close of the year with great credit to him- 
self. His history is short. He is the grandson of Quartermaster-General 
Poe, of Maryland, whose widow as I understand still receives a pen- 
sion for the services or disabilities of her husband. Frankly, sir, do I 
declare that he is no relation to me whatever; that I have many whom 
I have taken an active interest to promote theirs, 882 with no other feel- 
ing than that, every man is my care, if he be in distress. For myself I 
ask nothing, but I do request your kindness to aid this youth in the 
promotion of his future prospects. And it will afford me great pleasure 

880 The endorsement of this letter by the Lieutenant Colonel of the Regiment 
shows that the Colonel was absent as Poe states. 

881 See Chapter HI, page 45. 

882 This may refer to the " children," probably not to anyone in Scotland as 
William Gait had cared for them in his will. 



242 ISRAFEL 

to reciprocate any kindness you can show him. Pardon my frankness; 
but I address a soldier. 888 

Your Ob'd't se Vt, 

JOHN ALLAN 
The Hon'ble John H. Eaton, Sec'y of War, Washington City. 

With this gloomy document from the frank altruist who felt 
that " every man is my care, if he be in distress " to fire the 
enthusiasm of the Secretary of War in his behalf, Poe left Rich- 
mond on or about May 7, 1829, and went to Washington to 
present the letters to the Secretary of War in person. 

John Allan's letter must have been meant for the eyes of Poe 
himself as much as for the Secretary of War. 834 It was plain notice 
to the young poet that his guardian considered him as merely an 
object of charity, and that beyond his efforts to get him off his 
hands and into West Point, he had no further interest. " Frankly, 
sir, do I declare that he is no relation to me whatever," did not 
mean that he was about to make Poe his heir, or at home any 
more in his house. In formally carrying out his promise to his 
dead wife, only John Allan's honor, and not his affection, was 
involved. The result of Poe's application was the usual one. The 
letters were put on file in the War Department and nothing hap- 
pened for months. 

Mr. Allan had given Poe $50 when he left Richmond. Poe ap- 
parently merely stopped off in Washington to present his letters 
at the War Department and then went on to Baltimore, where we 
find him before the middle of May, 1829. Poe, immediately pro- 
ceeded to look up his own relatives, and, on May 20, he writes 
John Allan that he has succeeded in finding his aged grandmother, 
Mrs. (General) David Poe and his other relations. In the mean- 
time he had drawn on Richmond for an additional $50, a draft 
which his guardian honored. On May 18, John Allan writes from 
Richmond telling Poe that Colonel Preston had written a warm 

883 Hon. John H. Eaton, then Secretary of War, also bore the title of " Major." 
In the South this would not he forgotten. See also James Preston's letter. 

88 * Hon. John H. Eaton of Tennessee, was Secretary of War in Jackson's 
cabinet 1829-1837. He was a politician of great influence in the Jackson " democ- 
racy" and did not escape without grave scandals being connected with his 
name. John Allan was evidently not anxious to be beholden to him "For my- 
self I ask nothing." 



COLD MARBLE 243 



letter of recommendation in his behalf, and at the same time en- 
closing a check for $100 with the admonition to be prudent and 
be careful. Colonel Preston's letter which John Allan is evidently 
somewhat astonished to find so " warm," was as follows: 

Richmond, Va., May 13, 1829. 

Sot, _ Some of the friends of young Mr. Edgar Poe have solicited me 
to address a letter to you in his favor, believing that it may be useful 
to him in his application to the Government for military service. I 
know Mr. Poe and am acquainted with the fact of his having been 
born under circumstances of great adversity. I also know from his own 
productions and other undoubted proofs that he is a young gentleman 
of genius and taleants. I believe he is destined to be distinguished, since 
he has already gained reputation for taleants and attainements at the 
University of Virginia. I think him possessed of feeling and character 
peculiarly intitling him to public patronage. 

Very respectfully your obt. serv't, 

JAMES P. PKESTON 
Major John Eaton, Sec*y of War, Washington. 

This letter is more than a formal recommendation obtained by 
political influence; it is the warm recognition of Poe's " taleants " 
by a friend and neighbor who had known him from childhood. 885 
Despite his unusual spelling, James Preston had sufficient liter- 
ary foresight to be distinguished as the first person who linked 
the word genius with the name of Poe. 

Poe had several good reasons for going to Baltimore from 
Washington. In the first place, he must have been thoroughly 
advertised of the fact that by this time he was no longer welcome 
" at home." With the waning of John Allan's " affection," he also 
felt the desirability of establishing more firmly the family ties 
with his blood relations in Baltimore, and the importance of ob- 
taining from them whatever influence the name of his grand- 
father, who had been Quartermaster in the Revolutionary War, 

ass The Hon. James P. Preston "Mr. Preston," was the father of young 
Preston who had been one of Poe's rather intimate playmates at Mr. Clarke's 
school; they sat on the same bench together there, and young Preston had at one 
time been in the habit of taking home some of Poe's schoolboy verses for his 
mother's criticism. In the letter which Mr. Preston gave Poe to the Secretary of 
War there is a patent reference to this. 



244 ISRAFEL 

might have with the War Department. 888 Poe's ignorance about 
his own family up until this time seems to have been almost com- 
plete. Grandfather Poe's exploits in the Revolution had taken on 
an importance by family recital and the lapse of time which had 
already breveted him " General." Edgar was delighted. He was, 
in short, only now beginning to find out who he really was. 
" Edgar Allan " was about to become completely metamorphosed 
into " Edgar Poe." There was also another reason why Poe de- 
sired to be in Baltimore, one which he had not so far dared to 
reveal to his guardian. His real interest in life was now centered 
upon getting out another volume of poems. With May, 1829, the 
long and indomitable struggle for literary recognition really be- 
gins. 

Once in Baltimore, Poe lost no time in pushing the publication 
of Al Aaraaf and the new and revised poems which he now had on 
hand. His experience with Tamerlane and Other Poems had 
taught him the futility of merely printing his own work with no 
means of publication or public notice, and he now set about pre- 
paring the way for his next book in the manner which he followed 
for the rest of his life. This was to send his work to some well- 
known writer or influential person, and, under the guise of solicit- 
ing their criticism, to obtain a hold on their interest and influence. 

A day or so after his arrival in Baltimore, May n, 1829, he 
called upon William Wirt, 887 the author of the then well-known 
Letters of a British Spy. Poe had met Mr. Wirt previously in 
Richmond, and he now left with him the manuscripts of Al 
Aaraaf, telling him that he was submitting it immediately to a 
Philadelphia publisher. He also asked for Mr. Wirt's comment, 
doubtless hoping for a letter that would have influence with pub- 
lishers. Wirt, who was a semi-literary person, was completely 

ass Preference of appointment was given to the descendants of Revolutionary 
officers. 

M William Wirt had just retired to Baltimore as ex U. S. Attorney General. 
In 1831 he represented the Cherokee Indians in their famous suit before the 
Supreme Court of the United States, to retain their lands (the Cherokee Nation 
vs. the State of Georgia). The court held that it had no jurisdiction in the case. 
An important constitutional principle was involved, and Wirt's arguments were 
most able (Niles XXXVI. 231, 258.9; Stat. Man., II, 709). See also (Wooster vs. 
the State of Georgia), 1832, for an interesting side light on this case. 



COLD MARBLE 245 



mystified by the imagery of Al Aaraaf 9 a poem that still continues 
to trouble the " well ordered " and academic mind. He, however, 
replied the same evening having evidently put in the day some- 
what badly with " Nesace " in the limbo of Al Aaraaf yet with 
kindly feelings withal for the young author to whom he writes: 

Baltimore, May n, 1829* 

... I am sensible of the compliment you pay me in submitting it to 
my judgment and only regret that you have not a better counsellor. 
But the truth is that having never written poetry myself, nor read 
much poetry for many years, I consider myself as by no means a com- 
petent judge. . . . This is no doubt an old-fashioned idea resulting 
from the causes I have mentioned, my ignorance of modern poetry and 
modern taste. You perceive therefore that I am not qualified to judge 
of the merits of your poem. It will, I know, please modern readers 
the notes contain a good deal of curious and useful information, but 
to deal candidly with you (as I am bound to do) I should doubt 
whether the poem will take with old-fashioned readers like myself. 
... I would advise you, therefore, as a friend to get an introduction 
to Mr. Walsh or Mr. Hopkinson or some other critic in Philadelphia, 
versed in modern. . . . 8SS 

Armed or disarmed with this letter from a legal critic who 
thought that, " the notes contain a good deal of curious and useful 
information," Poe set out at six o'clock the next morning on the 
steam boat for Philadelphia with his manuscript in his pocket. 

In Philadelphia, Poe submitted his poems to Messrs. Carey, 
Lea & Carey, and had a short interview with Mr. Lea at the 
firm's office on Chestnut Street, in which Mr. Lea suggested that 
the "author" might contribute some poems to the Atlantic 
Souvenir. Meanwhile, he took the manuscript of Al Aaraaf under 
advisement while Poe returned to Baltimore. 

Before the end of the month, Poe probably received from the 
Philadelphia firm the usual reply of publishers to a young poet, 
saying that if they could be guaranteed from all loss, they would 
undertake publication. Hence on May 29, 1829, we find Poe writ- 
ing to John Allan inclosing him William Wirt's letter, enlarging 
on the importance of a young poet's being brought before the eye 

sss From the mutilated manuscript in William Wirt's handwriting, with the 
conclusion of the letter and the signature missing, now hi the Boston Public 
Library. Dr. Thomas Ollive Mabbott is to be credited for making public this letter. 



24 6 ISRAFEL 

of the world early, and asking his guardian to write the publishers, 
guaranteeing the book to the extent of $100. In making this re- 
quest, Poe assures Mr. Allan that he has long ago given up Byron 
as a model. 839 The merchant's reply, which was unusually prompt, 
was to sternly refuse all aid, and " strongly censure " Poe for 
his "conduct." 

More correspondence about Al Aaraaf followed between 
" father and son," 8 * but although Poe grew humbler, Mr. Allan 
remained as always firm. The incident seems to have affected 
their relations seriously. John Allan was both disgusted and 
alarmed at this token that Poe's literary ambitions were un- 
changed, and he seems to have felt that his ward was not very 
much in earnest about West Point. Although it was obviously not 
Poe's fault that the appointment was not forthcoming, and 
equally patent that he would have to exist in the meantime, John 
Allan, while he retired to his plantation during the summer days, 
seems to have left his " son " to shift largely for himself. Poe 
would have liked to come home he tells his guardian, but 
the latter replied that he was not especially anxious to see him, 
and let it go at that. By the end of July, 1829, the young poet 
was in precarious circumstances. Finally, on July 26, John Allan 
sent him a little money with the suggestion that a man of genius 
ought not to have to apply for aid; to which taunt Poe replied, 
that a little more timely assistance would prevent the application. 

As John Allan's suspicions of Poe's honesty and ability in 
money matters have to a certain extent been handed down as 
part of the Poe tradition, a brief examination of Poe's financial 
transactions at this time may be of value in making plain his 
typical difficulties. 

By John Allan's own accounting on the back of one of Poe's 

889 This remark arouses interesting speculations. Byron, and the influence of 
the Byron cult on young Poe was doubtless something which John Allan abhorred 
and had held responsible for many of his ward's " immoral " flirtings with litera- 
ture. The reader will remember that Don Quixote and GU Bias were also on the 
Scotchman's index expurgatorius. 

8*0 p e seems to have replied at the same time to Carey, Lea & Carey asking 
them to hold his poems until they heard further. The manuscript of Al Aaraaf re- 
mained with them up until the end of July, 1829, by which time all hope of Mr. 
Allan's help was at an end and Poe wrote them withdrawing it. 



COLD MARBLE 247 



letters, it appears that from about the middle of May to the 
nineteenth of July, 1829, the merchant provided Poe in all with 
$200* On this amount the youth was expected to board and 
clothe himself for a period of ten weeks, pay his traveling ex- 
penses from Richmond to Washington, and from Washington to 
Baltimore then a matter of about a day each way and take 
care of all contingent expenses, in short, as John Allan recom- 
mended, " be prudent and be careful." The young man was just 
out of the army, and except for the suit of mourning which was 
given to him in Richmond, he was without civilian clothes. Allow- 
ing for the value of money at that time, $200 might have covered 
this, had there been no extra expenses. But Poe tells his guardian 
that he had to take up the note of $so which he had given to his 
substitute, and we know also that he had gone to Philadelphia 
and returned to Baltimore in May. Allowing for the money he 
sent the substitute, we now learn that Poe had spent $104 between 
early May and June 22, 1829, when he tells his guardian that he 
was robbed of $46, " all I had," while sharing a room with Mosher 
Poe in the Beltzhoover Hotel in Baltimore. By searching the 
pockets of his cousin, who thus immortalized himself, Poe was 
able the next night to recover $10. The man begged not to be ex- 
posed on account of his wife, although Poe gives his name in the 
letter to John Allan. 841 The next remittance which Poe received 
from Mr. Allan, was on July 26. 

It would therefore appear that during the Summer of 1829, for 
a period of one month at least, Edgar Allan Poe managed to exist 
on $10, probably with the connivance of his landlady and his 
relations. The exact form of dissipation in which the young poet 
indulged at 33 cents a day does not appear at this writing to be 
clear. Nor was this all, John Allan's censure of his extravagance 
was bitter and his expression of his suspicions extreme. For even 
suggesting the publication of the poems, Poe is now full of apol- 
ogies. Nevertheless the manuscript was still left with Carey, Lea 
& Carey, and Poe, meanwhile, had succeeded in getting an intro- 

34i This name has been deleted from the Valentine Museum Letters, letter 
No. 13. Mosher Foe was a second cousin of Edgar's. There is no doubt the story is 
true or Poe would not have dared to give his cousin's name to John Allan. In one 
facsimile reproduced in the Valentine Letters the name " Mosher " occurs. 



24 8 ISRAFEL 

duction to Mr. Walsh, the editor of the American Quarterly Re- 
view, and obtained the promise of his help. In the interim there 
was no w&rd from the War Department about the appointment. 
During the entire period of young Poe's stay in Baltimore from 
May, 1829, until the end of that year, the letters he received from 
John Allan were filled with sarcasms, suspicions, and reproaches. 
An occasional remittance generally came in time to save him 
from being thrown into the street, but the anxiety with which 
he accounts to his guardian for every penny gives indubitable evi- 
dence of the spirit in which the help was conferred. Aside from 
" blowing the boy up " for thinking of wasting money on poems, 
the chief bones of contention were the older man's suspicion 
about the amount of money given to the substitute which no 
end of obvious facts and explanation served to allay and the 
constant doubts expressed to Poe about his zeal in the matter of 
obtaining the appointment. A letter from Poe in which he told his 
guardian that he had just found out that he was a grandson of 
General Benedict Arnold, 8 * 2 must have caused Mr. Allan to ex- 
claim " I might have known it," for such were his sentiments. It 
seems probable that at the time Poe himself may have thought 
this to be true. The story, of course, came from the fact that his 
maternal grandmother's name had been Arnold. Aside from this, 
there was nothing in it. Perhaps, after all, it was only a sly little 
hoax on the part of Poe who enjoyed a well fabricated fib, and 
knew the exact expression that it would summon upon John 
Allan's countenance the grim mouth relaxing for a moment into 
a sardonic but withal annoyed smile. Whatever may have been 
his motive, however, in conveying to Richmond this devastating 
piece of information, which certainly would not have aided him 
with the War Department, 843 he lost no opportunity of proving to 
his guardian his earnestness about West Point. Poverty spurred 
him to it, an effect that may have been calculated by his guardian, 
and on July 23 he set out on foot for Washington, the payment of 



342 Poe to John Allan, June 25, 1829, Letter No. 13, Valentine Museum Col- 
lection. 

8* 8 Had Poe not succeeded in getting the appointment, this story would have 
been an excellent excuse. See note 304. 




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From two old illustrations 
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COLD MARBLE 249 



a board bill of $40 having exhausted the larger part of a 
long expected remittance from Richmond 'received the day 
before. 

After walking to Washington, Poe had a personal interview 
with the Secretary of War who told him there was a surplus of 
ten cadets then on the roll at West Point. But he advised him 
not to withdraw his letters of recommendation " for use else- 
where," as Poe says, because of the numerous resignations at 
West Point which usually took place during the summer encamp- 
ment. If these resignations should exceed ten, Poe would be sure 
of his appointment in September; if not, Mr. Eaton assured him 
he would be among the first appointed for the following year. Poe 
was afraid that his age might interfere, but he was assured by the 
Secretary of War that he might call himself twenty-one until he 
was twenty-two. The interview ended with a remark from Mr. 
Eaton that the trip to Washington had been unnecessary. After 
which the young man had the pleasure of walking back to Balti- 
more. From Baltimore he writes John Allan on July 26, that he 
has explained everything to him that needed explanation and left 
no stone unturned in the pursuit of his object. In great perplexity 
he adds that he wishes Mr. Allan would give him directions as 
to what course he is to pursue. He says that he would have re- 
turned home to Richmond but for the fact that his guardian had 
said he was not especially anxious to see him. 

Poe's position was in fact at this time most trying. His guardian 
had told him that he was " forgiven," yet the tone of his letters, 
and his continuing to keep him at arms' length, and on starvation 
allowance, were proofs of how he really felt. If this were not 
enough, there was the letter to the Secretary of War which Poe 
must have seen, as it was given to him as a personal introduction 
to Major Eaton. All this was puzzling and painful to the young 
man, again and again he begs his " father " to come out in the 
open, assuring him pathetically that since Charlottesville he has 
done nothing to offend him. 

... I thought that had been forgiven, at least you told me so I 
know that I have done nothing since to deserve your displeasure . As 
regards the poem, I have offended oaly in asking your approbation* 



2S o ISRAFEL 

I can publish it upon the terms you mentioned but will have no 
more to do with it without your entire approbation I will wait with 
great anxiety for your answer. You must be aware how important it is 
that I should hear from you soon as I do not know how to act. 

But his anxiety was not relieved for a fortnight. In the mean- 
time under date of August 4, Poe writes again saying how anxious 
he is to return home. With almost nothing to live on in Baltimore, 
and no assurance of more, the " anxiety " is not hard to under- 
stand. No reply having come from Richmond, on July 28, Poe 
had written Carey, Lea & Carey, asking for the return of his 
manuscript, for which he bravely says he has made a better dis- 
position than he could have hoped for. Whether he had really 
done so is doubtful. The expression was probably meant to cover 
his own disappointment while leaving the best of impressions 
upon the Philadelphia publishers. 

Baltimore 
July 28th 1829 

Messrs. CAREY, LEA & CAREY Rec'd July 30" 

Ans" Aug. 3" 

GENTLEMEN 

Having made a better disposition of my poems than I had any right 
to expect, (inducing me to decline publication on my own account) I 
would thank you to return me the MSS: by the gontloman who hands 
you thia mail. 

I should have been proud of having your firm for my publishers & 
would have preferred publishing, with your name, even at a disad- 
vantage had my circumstances admitted of so doing. 

Perhaps, at some future day, I may have the honor of your press, 
which I most sincerely desire 

Mr. Lea, during our short interview, at your store, mentioned The 
Atlantic Souvenir and spoke of my attempting something for that work. 
I know nothing which could give me greater pleasure than to see any 
of my productions, in so becoming a dress & in such good society as 
"The Souvenir" would ensure them notwithstanding the assertions 
of M r . J n Neal to the contrary, who now & then hitting, thro' sheer 
impudence, upon a correct judgment in matters of authorship, is most 
unenviably rediculous whenever he touches the fine arts 

As I am unacquainted with the method of proceeding in offering any 
piece for acceptance (having been sometime absent from this coun- 



COLD MARBLE 251 



try) 344 would you, Gentlemen, have the kindness to set me in the right 
way 

Nothing could give me greater pleasure than any communication 
from Mess rs Carey Lea & Carey 

With the greatest respect 

& best wishes 

I am Gentlemen 

Your most ob d Serv*. 

EDGAR A. POE 

On August 10, Mr. Allan again sent his ward a remittance, ap- 
parently accompanied by bitter complaints about the money 
spent on the substitute, despite the fact that the necessity for the 
expenditure had been amply explained several times before. Poe 
says that he can live on $8 or $10 a month, "anything with 
which you think it is possible to exist/' and ends with a request 
to have his trunk sent to Baltimore in care of H. W. Boal, Jr. 
This trunk contained some books and papers. On August 19, 
Mr. Allan sent Poe $50 on which he existed for three months. 
During that time Mr. Allan went to the Hot Springs, a visit that 
marks the second attack of a complaint that finally proved fatal 
some five years later. In the meantime Carey, Lea & Carey had 
returned AlAaraaf and Poe was trying to place it in Baltimore. 

August, 1829, marks the beginning of an association that was 
a vital one in Poe's life. He had gone to live with the Clemms. At 
that time Mrs. Maria Clemm, Poe's aunt, was living in a two 
story house with an attic in Mechanic's Row, Milk Street. She 
seems to have occupied the upper part of the house together with 
her little daughter Virginia, her son Henry, old Mrs. David Poe 
(the poet' s grandmother), and William Henry Leonard Poe. The 
addition of Edgar was undoubtedly a heavy burden on her 
already overcrowded household. Poe tells his guardian that old 
Mrs. Poe was a paralytic, that Mrs. Clemm was, if possible, in 
a still worse case, and that his brother Henry was so far gone 
in drink as to be unable to help himself. 



344 poe's seeming allusion here to a trip abroad is the first evidence of his 
intentions to cover up the period of his army service by claiming for himself the 
prestige of foreign travel: John Allan had impressed upon him the social disgrace 
of enlistment. 



ISRAFEL 



The poverty-stricken Clemm-Poe household seems to have ex- 
isted, and they could have done little more than that, on a small 
pension received by Mrs. Poe, the wife of the " General," on 
the wages of Henry Clemm, a stone cutter, the driblets of money 
received by Edgar from Richmond, and the sewing which Mrs. 
Clemm worked on, when she was able. Henry Poe was for a time 
after his return from sea employed as a clerk in the law offices 
of one Mr. Henry Didier, but he was dying of tuberculosis and 
given up as Poe says to drink. 

Edgar apparently shared a back attic room with his elder 
brother, and probably helped to nurse him even at this time. In 
this house the poet first met his cousin, Virginia Maria Clemm, 
then a little girl seven years old who later became his wife/ 

Virginia seems at that time to have been a merry little school 
girl, rather plump, with brown hair, violet eyes, and a disposition 
that was her chief charm. Doubtless she romped about the house 
with big Cousin Eddie, who called her " Siss " or " Sissie," and 
the childlike and helpless affection, one of complete trust on her 
part, and of protection and solicitude on Poe's, now began. De- 
spite the fond assertions of innumerable romantic biographers, it 
is extremely unlikely that it ever amounted to much more. Mrs. 
Clemm was a woman whose maternal instinct was tremendously 
accentuated. She appears to have taken her young nephew to her 
heart from the first. A paralytic mother, a troublesome son, a 
dying nephew, and an utterly dependent daughter were not 
sufficient to satisfy her all inclusive motherliness. To these she 
now added the sore pressed Edgar Allan Poe. For him it was the 
beginning of one of the most benign and, at the same time, de- 
vastating influences of his career. 

Warned by the complete demise of his first book owing to 
the lack of any adequate public notice from the rear garret 
of Mrs. Clemm's house in Baltimore, Poe now began to send out 
through the Autumn and early Winter of 1829 letters and poems 
to editors and critics in order to prepare the way for the volume 
containing Al Aaraaf, which he was determined to publish in 
spite of John Allan, West Point, poverty, and the interruptions of 
a closely packed household. 



COLD MARBLE 253 



To this career of literary ambition he was driven by the double 
necessity of expressing the intense desires of his nature, even by 
this time thwarted in many ways, and that vivid sense of the 
reality and all importance of the ego known as pride, a pride 
that Poe identified with the archangel Israf el, but which, in some 
of its aspects, belonged equally to Lucifer. It was no accident 
that the young poet had already years before taken Byron for 
his master, not only in attitude and verse, but in spirit. From 
Baltimore, Poe, as we have seen, had written Mr. Allan that he 
had given up Byron as a model, and in a certain sense he had, 
for he was now mature enough to realize that no mere follower 
can ever achieve. The necessity for originality, even in adaptation 
from others, was firmly fixed in his mind. But the pride was not 
gone. Above all obstacles it rose supreme, the inward sense of 
power, the necessity for justification, the sense of the importance 
of his utterance, was now more than ever fixed upon him. Hence 
his unequivocal prophecies of ensuing greatness which so dis- 
gusted John Allan, the force which insulated him to a great ex- 
tent from all outward circumstances always in the end unim- 
portant to those who live within themselves and such lines as 
these in Tamerlane: 

There is a power in the high spirit 

To know the fate it will inherit: 

The soul which knows such power, will still 

Find Pride the ruler of its will. . . . 345 

Thus, despite all untoward and often degrading circumstances, 
the great work went on in the back garret of Mrs. Clemm where 
Henry lay coughing himself to death, in the same room witH 
Edgar, or stumbled in late at night in his cups to boast drunkenly 
of his exploits in South America and other romantic lands beyond 
the seas he had traversed some years before, exploits to which 
Edgar listened eagerly, and made his own. 

In the room downstairs Mrs. Clemm sewed while Virginia ran 
back and forth carrying things to the helpless grandmother. She, 
poor lady, doubtless reminisced, as old people will, of the time 

845 The italics axe Foe's. 



254 



ISRAFEL 



when in her youth, as the wife of a Quartermaster of the Con- 
tinental Armies, her husband had provided money and forage for 
La Fayette and his soldiers, while she and the girls of Baltimore 
with their own hands cut out five hundred pairs of trousers for 
the breechless troops of Washington "and now, how small 
her pension wasl " Towards evening, Henry Clemm would come 
home covered with stone dust; Edgar from wandering about the 
docks or haunting the office of the Federal Gazette and Baltimore 
Daily Advertiser on the corner of St. Paul and Bank Streets, per- 
haps with the manuscript of Al Aaraaf in his pocket which he had 
shown to William Gwynn, the editor, and gotten small encourage- 
ment. David Poe had once worked for Gwynn when he kept a 
law office, and knowing the family traits, Mr. Gwynn had re- 
marked, when he saw the poetry of the runaway actor's son, that 
it " was indicative of a tendency to anything but the business of 
matter-of-fact life. 5 ' A remark which time has shown to be true, 
but, as so often happens, irrelevant. 

After nightfall, with the sewing laid aside, the family would 
gather about the table by the feeble light of a few tallow dips to 
sup on the single dish which Mrs. Clemm had cooked, and some- 
times by her importunity with friends or relatives, provided. 
Grandma Poe would be drawn up close to the small coal fire, and 
tihey would discuss the last depressing letter from " Pa " in Rich- 
mond, while Virginia chattered, or did her sums with " Cousin 
Eddie " to help. Then bed-time, for bed-time came early in those 
days to folk with a scant stock of candles, only one for Henry 
and Edgar as they climbed to their attic, Henry complaining, and 
coughing himself into a restless slumber, while Edgar, as long 
as the candle lasted, bent over his papers, driving the pen on and 
on toward that far-off shining goal. He was arrested at last by the 
midnight ghosts of " Helen " and Elmira, or his dear " Ma " with 
the agate lamp in her hand in the old house on Tobacco Alley. 
There the air from the docks used to blow in, waving the curtain 
fitfully as it did here reminding him exquisitely, but ex- 
quisitely painfully, of the vanished home in Richmond. The 
clothes that he took off were a little more ragged every night, de- 
spite the obstinate needle of Mrs. Clemm. Undressing under the 



COLD MARBLE 255 



eaves of the low-ceilinged room, Poe brushed them and folded 
them carefully, before he lay down by the side of the brother 
whose face was flushed, but whose hands and feet had already 
begun to take on an eternal cold. 

September, 1829, passed and there was no cadet's appointment 
from the War Department. The few letters from Richmond be- 
came more urgent and severe. Mr. Allan was greatly alarmed. 
Suppose, after all, that his convenient plan for providing for 
Edgar at the public cost had failed! He accused Poe of having 
deceived him in regard to Mr. Eaton's promise for September ap- 
pointments. In reply Poe refers him to his former letters giving 
the Secretary of War's exact words, pointing out that his guardian 
is " mistaken." He will, he says, go to Washington, however, and 
get the Secretary to give him his appointment in advance together 
with an order to repair to West Point for examination the follow- 
ing June. These letters he will ask the Secretary of War to 
forward to Mr. Allan "so that all doubts will be removed" 
and he adds with a touch of irony, " I will tell him (the Secretary 
of War) why I want it at present and I think he will give it." 

But Poe did not do this. He was without sufficient funds when 
he wrote this letter (October 30) even to walk to Washington 
again. The offer, however, seems to have quieted John Allan, who 
probably did not care to be put into the position of doubting the 
good faith of the Secretary of War. Nevertheless, he did not reply, 
and two weeks later Poe is forced to write him again telling his 
guardian that (November 12) he is almost without clothes and 
about to be ejected by his landlady, 846 as he has received nothing 
from home since the middle of August. John Allan at last replied 
and sent him $80. Nearly all of this was already due for board 
and in the next letter Poe was forced to beg his " father " to get 
half a strip of linen from Mr. Gait, which Aunt Maria Clemm 
would make up into sheets " without charge." 

846 This would seem to indicate that Poe did not live continuously with the 
Clemms. His places of abode were no doubt largely contingent upon the state of 
the supplies from Richmond, and both the Herring and Poe cousins doubtless 
gave him shelter from time to time. Mrs. Clemm, however, says that Poe lived 
with her while in Baltimore in 1820. The statement does not necessarily mean 
"all the time." Prof. Woodberry doubted Mrs. Clemm's statement, but the Valen- 
tine Letters now confirm it. 



2 S 6 ISRAFEL 

It must be remembered that in making these appeals, Poe was 
carrying out Mr. Allan's own desire of waiting for the cadet's 
appointment, and that while so waiting he could not obtain em- 
ployment when it was known that, at any moment, he might have 
to leave his job and be ordered off to West Point. Furthermore, 
the youth who was without clothes in Baltimore in November, 
1829, was the ward of a rich man whose prosperous warehouse 
was piled high with goods. Yet, says Poe, " if you could me a 
piece of linen, or a half piece at Mr. Gait's . . . I could get it 
made up gratis by Aunt Maria. . . . One wonders if " dear Pa " 
actually loosened up and did send the linen on by the boat, or 
whether Aunt Maria provided that gratis, too. The letter contain- 
ing this modest request is the last on record that Poe wrote to 
his " father" from Baltimore in 1829. Something had happened 
which mollified even John Allan, and the world now first began 
to take a faint notice of Edgar Allan Poe. 

Not very far from Mrs. Clemm, on Exeter near State Street, 
lived Mr. Henry Herring who had married Poe's Aunt Eliza, the 
same who had written the touching letter to Frances Allan many 
years before. 847 There were five children in the Herring house, 
cousins with whom young Poe was soon on intimate terms, writ- 
ing poetry in his Cousin Mary's album, and being much about 
the place. Aunt Eliza had died some years before, but Mr. 
Herring, who seems to have been acquainted with a number of 
literary men and editors about Baltimore, succeeded in interest- 
ing them and some other of the Poe cousins in Edgar's work. 
Both Mr. Herring and George Poe had known a Mr. John Neal 
when he had been in Baltimore as an editor a short while before. 
They had all belonged to the Delphian Club on Bank Lane, bet- 
ter known as " The Tusculum." Mr. Gwynn, to whom Poe had 
lately shown Al Aaraaf, was also a member. 

John Neal who wrote under .the pen name of " Jehu O'Cata- 
ract," had gone North to start a paper in Portland, Maine. This, 
he afterwards continued as the Yankee and Boston Literary 
Gazette, in whose columns his literary criticisms were received as 
oracles. George Poe, the father of Neilson Poe, seems to have 

347 5^ Chapter in, page 45. 



COLD MARBLE 257 



used his influence with his old friend John Neal, and to have 
suggested to his literary cousin Edgar that he send Neal some 
poetry for editorial comment. This Poe did and was rewarded 
soon after by the following notice in the columns of the Yankee 
for September, 1829: 

If E. A. P. of Baltimore whose lines about "Heaven" though he 
professes to regard them as altogether superior to anything in the whole 
range of American poetry, save two or three trifles referred to, are, 
though nonsense, rather exquisite nonsense would but do himself 
justice might (sic) make a beautiful and perhaps a magnificent poem. 
There is a good deal here to justify such a hope. 

These words, said Poe, were, "The very first words of En- 
couragement I ever remember to have heard! 9 848 But Neal ends 
the little critique with, " He should have signed it Bah! We have 
no room for others." 

Nevertheless, Poe took the criticism in good part and in the 
December issue of the Yankee he was allowed to print a letter 
covering four pages containing copious selections from the forth* 
coming volume. Among other things Poe says of himself: 

I would give the world to embody one half the ideas afloat in my 
imagination. ... I appeal to you as a man who loves the same beauty 
which I adore the beauty of the natural blue sky and the sunshiny 
earth. ... I am and have been from childhood, an idler. It cannot 
therefore be said that 

' I left a calling for this idle trade, 
A duty broke a father disobeyed.' 
for I have no father nor mother. 

John Allan's reproaches were evidently in his mind, and as he 
was often without resources in Baltimore, the censure of his 
relatives for writing poetry instead of " going to work " may pos- 
sibly be reflected here. 

The whole letter is typical of Poe's method of puffing his own 
work. It amounted, in short, to a long announcement of his forth- 
coming volume. John Neal prefaced it with these editorial re- 
marks: 



3*8 p oe m eans by an editor in the public prints. It must be remembered that 
Poe's " attack " on Neal in the letter to Carey, Lea & Carey was made two months 
before Neal's remarks in the Yankee. See " Poe and John Neal " in the Appendix. 



258 ISRAFEL 

The following passages are from the manuscript works of a young 
author, about to be published in Baltimore. He is entirely a stranger 
to us, but with all their faults, if the remainder of Al Aaraaf and Tamer* 
lane are as good as the body of the extracts here given, to say nothing 
of the more extraordinary parts, he will deserve to stand high very 
high, in the estimation of the shining brotherhood, etc. 

This editorial prelude concludes with some highly moral and 
patronizing advice to the poet's extreme youth, quite typical of 
the time. 

The notice in the September Yankee by the famous John Neal 
was probably of direct service to Poe in two ways. It must have 
been drawn to John Allan's attention by the admiring Nancy 
Valentine, or Poe's good friends the Gaits, and caused Mr. Allan 
to reflect a little. At any rate, about the middle of December, Poe 
received $80 from his guardian, and then or later, permission to 
return home. With NeaPs puff in hand Poe was also enabled to 
approach the publishers in Baltimore, the favorable notice of a 
Northern critic of note being then, as now, impressive in the 
South, which pays no serious attention to its own writers until 
they are praised elsewhere. The result, in Poe's case, seems to 
have been that his book was accepted. On November 1 8, in the 
" linen " letter, he writes John Allan that his poems have been 
accepted upon advantageous terms by Hatch & Dunning of 
Baltimore, "they to print, and give the author 250 copies of the 
book." Mr. Dunning, Poe adds, well knowing that his guardian 
might suspect that some expense was involved, would confirm the 
terms himself upon an immediate visit to Richmond. 

Heralded thus somewhat dubiously, but on the whole in a not 
unkindly way, Poe's second volume, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and 
Minor Poems, appeared in Baltimore in December, 1829, pub- 
lished by Hatch & Dunning, and printed by Matchett & Woods, 
the same firm which then printed the Baltimore Directory. It was 
a thin octavo volume bound in blue boards, containing seventy- 
one pages padded out with a considerable number of extra fly- 
leaves upon which appeared mottoes quoted from English and 
Spanish poets. The margins were more than ample. The dedica- 
tion, a line from Cleveland, reads, 



TAMERLAIVE, 



AND 



MI1TOE, POSHES. 



BJULTIMOB.B: 
HATCH 



1829. 



Title Page of ^4.1 ^4araaf y Tamerlane , and Minor 

Poems, Baltimore 1829 

Edgar Allan Poe's second published volume 

NOTE: A title page with the imprint "1820" is known to exist. This was 



COLD MARBLE 259 



Who drinks the deepest? here's to Mm. 

In this book, Al Aaraaf, and Tamerlane were the principal 
offerings. The latter was dedicated to John Neal, " respectfully," 
with the advertisement, 

This poem was printed for publication in Boston, in the year 1827, 
but suppressed through circumstances of a private nature. 849 

As a matter of fact, it was completely rewritten in conformity 
with the outcome of the adventure with Elmira, and, from a lit- 
erary standpoint, greatly improved. The two main long poems 
were followed by a brief preface, and nine miscellaneous short 
poems of which three are revised reprints from the Boston volume. 
The second of the nine, beginning " I saw thee on thy bridal day," 
obviously refers to Elmira Royster, by this time Mrs. Shelton. 
Al Aaraaf is an attempt on the part of the youthful poet to put 
in the form of an allegory his philosophy of beauty. 850 The al- 
legory is obscure, but the poem contains many exquisite lines. 

In general it may be said that Poe's second book with all of 
its juvenile faults was his first real approach to a contribution to 
American poetry. It marked a distinct advance over his first 
volume of two years before, and embodied in its lines some of his 
characteristic landscapes tinged with his mystical melancholy and 
the autobiographical records of his love affairs. The gain in his 
handling of rhythms is marked. Certainly the landscapes bear in- 
dubitable marks of his South Carolina sojourn. 851 

3 *9 See Chapter X, page 202. 

3o Al Aaraaf is the region placed by the Arabian poets between the upper and 
nether regions, neither hell nor heaven, where those spirits who deserve to enter 
neither, dwell. Poe has personified his ideal of beauty in a beautiful maiden by the 
name of "Nesace" who dwells in a distant star 

" for there 

Her world lay lolling on the golden air 

Near four bright suns " 

Poe has caught some of the tremendous sweep of space from Milton, and there 
are reminiscences of Queen Mob, with a strange admixture of Moore and Byron and 
perhaps a trace of Pinkney. Despite this, the fault of a young poet, it is peculiarly 
his own. The universe is ransacked for beautiful things to make up its lines, with 
notes, in which the young poet takes a pardonable pride. _ 

S5i This is the "foreign influence" pointed out by numerous critics in Foes 
second volume, due to his trip abroad in 1827, now known to be a pure myth. 



2 6o ISRAFEL 

Poe remained in Baltimore until the end of 1829 seeing his 
book off the press and dispatching copies to editors for review 
and notice. On December 29, 1829, he sent a copy to his friend 
John Neal, the editor of the Yankee in Boston, with this char- 
acteristic letter: 

I thank you, sir, for the kind interest you express for my worldly 
as well as poetical welfare a sermon of prosing would have met with 
much less attention. 

You will see that I have made the alterations you suggest ... and 
and some other corrections of the same kind there is much, however, 
(in metre) to be corrected for I did not observe it till too late. 

I wait consciously for your notice of the book I think the best 
lines for sound are those in Al A&raaf 

There Nature speaks and even ideal things, 
Flap shadowy sounds from visionary wings. 

I am certain that these lines have never been surpassed. 

Of late eternal condor years 
So shake the very air on high, 
With tumult as they thunder by 
I hardly have had time for cares 
Through gazing on the unquiet sky. 

' It is well to think well of one's self ' so says somebody. You will do 
me justice, however. 

Most truly yours, 

EDGAR A. POE 

After which Poe said good-bye to the Clemms, and the Herring 
and Poe cousins, packed up what little belongings he had, and 
taking advantage of John Allan's permission to return home in 
the luster of his new laurels, went to Richmond before the holi- 
days were over, taking along a generous supply of the copies of 
the new book for distribution among his friends. 

Upon his return to Richmond, Poe found his old room ready 
for him at the Allan house. It was then and long afterwards 
known as " Edgar's Room " to all the servants and the friends 
of the family. During the second Mrs. Allan's regime the name 
was probably suppressed. After Mrs. Clemm's crowded and 
humble quarters, the spaciousness, the luxury, and the gardens 



COLD MARBLE 261 



of the big house must have been delightful. The kindly black faces 
of Jim and Dabney were there to welcome him, and their hands 
to serve him, while " Aunt Nancy's " affection was as loyal as 
ever. But with what memories must he have wandered about the 
house! Frances Allan was gone, her room was empty, and there 
was no Elmira to come and sit in the swing or look through the 
telescope. That Poe was in Richmond by the first week in Janu- 
ary, 1830, is certain, as he was supplied with clothes at that time 
by orders upon Ellis & Allan, among other things, a fine " London 
hat." Probably, despite the darning needle of Mrs. Clemm, his 
wardrobe was in a sad condition after the period of poverty in 
Baltimore. 

The second night after his return, Poe met Thomas Boiling, his 
old University of Virginia acquaintance (altogether, as his letters 
show, a charming fellow), at Sanxey's Book Store then at 120 
Main Street, Richmond. Tom Boiling was home for the holidays 
from Charlottesville, and the two boys had many reminiscences 
to exchange, not having seen each other for two years. Poe gave 
Boiling a copy of Al Aaraaf and regaled him with an apocryphal 
account of his " trip abroad," since the real facts of his rather 
uneventful life in the army as an enlisted man did not supply the 
adventurous background which the author of two volumes of 
poetry required. Boiling was much impressed, and we may be 
sure carried back to the University the news of the brilliant and 
interesting career of " Gaffy," news which no doubt helped to 
clear the atmosphere there of the cloud which rested upon the 
erstwhife young gambler on account of unpaid debts. 

Thus the " Poe legend " was already beginning to take shape 
with Poe himself as the prime source. 84 * All of this was at that 
time due to his desire to appear a man set apart, an adventurous 
fellow, who had left the University to see the world, and had 
succeeded. 852 In these stories he seems always to have embodied 
some of the actual experiences of his brother Henry. 858 

852 A Richmond newspaper for January 19, 1830, Poe's twenty-first birthday, 
prints the acknowledgment of the receipt of Al Aaraaf, etc. 

858 The persistence of the story about Poe's " trip abroad " is incredible. Rus- 
sian encyclopaedias give detailed accounts of his "arrest in St. Petersburg/ 1 and, 
confusing the title of Henry Middleton, the American Consul, with that of 



262 ISRAFEL 

For the rest, Poe was much about town, seeing his old friends 
and distributing to them in person, or by orders on the Richmond 
book store, copies of Al Aaraaf. As few were capable of under- 
standing the poems, an attitude of amusement, always a con- 
venient mask for ignorance, was the general result. In this the 
wiseacres of the town were confirmed by a review J. H. Hewitt is 
supposed to have written for the Baltimore Minerva and Emerald, 
poking fun unmercifully at the new poet. The paper's editor was 
Rufus Dawes, and Poe may have been mindful of this when he 
skinned the man alive in Graham 9 s Magazine. 

Not a great deal is known of this, Poe's last sojourn, in the 
Allan house at Richmond, in the Spring of 1830. He was still 
waiting for his appointment to West Point and for that reason 
was tolerated as a temporary inmate of the establishment, rather 
than the " son " of the house. John Allan had not long before re- 
turned from " The Springs." He was not in very good health, was 
still troubled over his wife's death and revolving in his mind the 
fact that he had no heir nor wife to preside over his household, 
although Miss Valentine remained and took her sister's place 
most acceptably as later events show. Poe probably came and 
went as he pleased, being left to his own desires and his room 
with the beloved books, where the further revision of his poems 
with new ones was already under way. He probably saw a good 
deal of the Mackenzies at the Hermitage where Rosalie still lived 
in the atmosphere of affection which her brother so lacked. Mr. 
Allan may have tried at times to drown his memories after a not 
unusual method, although he was by no means given to drink. 
There is good reason to believe, however, that with the first 
signs of advancing age and ill health and the loss of his life part- 1 
tier of many years standing, at this particular time he sometimes 



"minister," have translated the word "priest." So we have Poe, drunken, of 
course, being rescued from prison and Siberia by the " Rev. Middleton," Bible in 
hand. Absurdity can go no farther! Henry Poe, Edgar's brother, may have been 
to St. Petersburg while in the Navy or merchant marine. There is no proof. 
Poe probably "annexed" some of his brother's adventures. Henry died soon 
after, so that the rest is silence. 

354 We now hesitate not to say, that no man in America has been more 
shamefully over-estimated," etc. Poe's article on Rufus Dawes. See Chapter XXI, 
page 547- 



COLD MARBLE 263 



indulged too freely. If so the results were not such as to make 
things happier for the members of his household. Shortly after 
the beginning of the year he began to find solace for his sorrows in 
the companionship of one who had already borne him a daughter. 
The natural result proved doubly disturbing to his peace of mind. 

On May 3, 1830, he had a violent quarrel with Poe. 855 Probably 
a recurrence of the old charges of idleness and living upon his 
bounty, in which he heaped reproaches upon his ward, and ended 
by roundly insulting the young poet about his family, at a time, 
says Poe, " When you knew my heart was almost breaking." The 
uncertainty of living in Richmond waiting for the appointment, 
while the carping and fault-finding tongue of his guardian let 
no old fault rest, when, too, Frances Allan and Elmira were 
haunting him like ghosts, all this made such scenes doubly hard 
to bear, sometimes almost insufferable. The alternative was starv- 
ing, nakedness, and the loss of opportunity, 

A few minutes after this scene Poe wrote to an old army ac- 
quaintance at Fortress Monroe, apparently a sergeant in his old 
company to whom he owed money. Poe addressed him as 
" Bully," and says that the reason he had not paid the debt 
was because he could not get the money out of his guardian, 
although he had tried dozens of times. Poe, it seems, owed sums 
to several other non-commissioned officers in the old regiment, 
amounts which he had probably borrowed in the Spring of 1829 
on the prospects of the " reconciliation " with Mr. Allan after 
Frances Allan's death. The small sums he had received from home 
had not permitted a settlement. From other statements in this 
letter, it appears that he could not be frank with his guardian 
about the matter. The trouble John Allan had raised over the 
extra amount necessary to procure a substitute was probably a 
sufficient warning that any further revelations about expenditures 
would be met with a burst of wrath. One Downey from Fortress 
Monroe had already called upon John Allan and received an 

355 Valentine Museum Letters, letter No. 24, page 257. If the young Poe had 
any knowledge of his guardian's mode of life at this time, and it is quite probable 
that he had, in view of his great reverence for the memory of his foster-mother, 
his indignation over his guardian's actions becomes only too dear. The situation 
does not need to be elaborated. 



264 ISRAFEL 

answer not satisfactory to Poe's " creditors," and this reply Poe 
is at haste to explain away by saying that Mr. Attan was not very 
often sober and his words could be discounted. 

This statement about John Allan is one of the most discredit- 
able and unfortunate that Poe ever made. Whatever the provoca- 
tion, it was unwise, defamatory to his " father," and eventually 
the final cause and plausible excuse for his being " disinherited." 
On this letter the second Mrs. Allan also based her charge that 
Poe had spent the money provided for the substitute. Sergeant 
Graves, or " Bully," to whom Poe wrote was not the substitute, 
however, but simply one of several soldiers about Fort Moul- 
trie to whom the ex-sergeant major -owed various small sums. Poe 
promises payment, and in a most familiar tone, ends by informing 
" Bully " that the writer is now a cadet. This looks very much 
as if the Secretary of War had already given Poe the letters to 
report to West Point for examination, as the latter had sug- 
gested that he would in an earlier letter to Mr. Allan while in 
Baltimore. Only the official confirming letters were now needed; 
perhaps the exact weight of political influence was still lacking, 
and events now shaped themselves in such a way as to cause Mr. 
Allan to secure this and get Poe finally off his hands. 

John Allan was now a widower, and a very eligible one in 
point of fortune, at least. His former wife's sister, Miss Valentine, 
was running his establishment, and it seems to have occurred to 
the thrifty merchant that the arrangement already in force might 
as well be made permanent. About a year before Frances Allan's 
death he remarked in a letter that Miss Valentine was " as fat 
and hearty as ever." Doubtless her figure had lost nothing in 
attractiveness during the interim; she was acquainted with how 
much sugar he liked in his coffee, she was near at hand, and they 
were intimately " at home." The result was that he began to pay 
her marked attentions. What the lady's sentiments were, we do 
not know. To remain in the same household where she had already 
lived for twenty-five years, and to become the presiding mistress 
of one of the finest establishments in Richmond, may not have 
been without its attractions. Poe, however, seems to have been 
outraged. Frances Allan was scarcely dead a year, and he was 



COLD MARBLE 265 



under no hallucinations as to the delicacy of his guardian's tender 
emotions. He seems to have protested and to have reminded his 
" Aunt Nancy " of her dead sister's wrongs* Perhaps he even 
intruded upon some sentimental scenes. At any rate Miss Valen- 
tine refused John Allan's offer, probably influenced by Poe's ad- 
vice, and the effect was devastating upon what remained of 
Frances Allan's household. John Allan's indignation must have 
been implacable. Was he never to be quit of this young upstart, 
or the household rid of his interference in his perfectly logical and 
natural plans? He seems to have forthwith determined to put an 
end to it once and for all. Poe has been accused of trying to pre- 
vent his foster-father from having a legitimate heir, but the " other 
reasons " seem to be sufficient and much more probable. What- 
ever the reasons may have been, the results are not in doubt. 
Poe was packed off forthwith to West Point. General Scott's in- 
fluence seems to have been obtained, 856 and through John Allan's 
partner, Mr. Charles Ellis, a letter was secured from the latter's 
younger brother, Powhatan Ellis, then United States Senator from 
Mississippi, recommending Poe to the Secretary of War. As usual, 
a senator's letter turned the trick with the War Department, and 
on March 31, 1830, we find Poe's guardian signing this document 
at Richmond, probably not without extreme satisfaction: 

SIR as the guardian of Edgar Allan Poe I hereby signify my assent 
to his signing articles by which he shall bind himself to serve the United 
States for Five years, unless sooner discharged, as stipulated in your 
official letter appointing him cadet. 

Respectfully, 
Your obt. servant. 

JOHN ALLAN 
The Hon. Sec'y of War 
Washington 

The state of affairs at home may be inferred from the fact, 
that once in the possession of his appointment the new cadet did 

386 This is not certain but probable. General Scott had known Poe as a boy; 
John Allan knew hfm ; a volume of Poe's early poems was afterward found in the 
General's library; several of Poe's West Point classmates assert that General 
Scott helped Poe. At a much later date General Scott gave money to a collection 
taken up to help Poe, etc., etc. Also see letter No. 23, Valentine Museum Letters 
(November 6, 1830). 



2 66 ISRAFEL 

not linger any longer than he had to. From Mr. Allan's letter it 
seems clear that Poe received his cadet's warrant at the end of 
March, 1830. Examinations at West Point were in June, yet by 
May 12 he was preparing to depart, for on that date John Allan 
is charged on the books of his firm with a pair of blankets for 
Poe's outfit, and it seems likely that, about the same time, the 
young man left Richmond for the United States Military 
Academy. Mr. Allan accompanied him to the steamboat leaving 
for Baltimore, and shook hands with him. Poe says that he knew 
it was meant for a final farewell. 857 

Poe must have arrived in Baltimore about the middle of May, 
1830, where he seems to have gone to live temporarily with his 
Aunt Maria Clemm, as letters from Richmond were afterward 
addressed to him in care of his brother Henry, who also resided 
with her. The affection of Mrs. Clemm, and the doubtless spon- 
taneous welcome of little Virginia, no doubt formed a warm con- 
trast to the atmosphere he had just left. The fact that he was 
about to enter the military profession, presumably for life, did 
not interfere with his literary aspirations. Poe doubtless had his 
reservations about the permanence of his career in the army, 
even then. He must already have been at work on some of the 
poems which appeared the year following, and he doubtless hoped 
that by pleasing his guardian and becoming an officer he would 
solve the problem of existing, and later on be in a position to 
rely on Mr. Allan's patronage in the work which lay nearest to 
his heart. 

Indeed it is safe to say that from the first, " Cadet Poe " had 
no enthusiasm for West Point. His two years of army service 
could leave him no illusions as to what was to come afterward. 
Arid the outward glitter, the uniforms, and the parades did 
not have the attraction for him by this time that they do for the 
average youngster who first encounters them. A long experience 
on the inside of a military tunic had already proved to him how 
tight and narrow was the fit. He was now twenty-one years old 
and capable of estimating his chances for the future. 358 With his 

8 " Valentine Museum Letters, letter No. 24, page 257. 

858 Some of Poe's biographers make capital of Poe's being over twenty-one 



COLD MARBLE 267 



temperament, his literary propensities, and the circumstances 
under which he entered the Military Academy, it was almost a 
foregone conclusion that he would not stay long in a place where 
even determination and military ambition are often not sufficient 
to produce a diploma. Two years in barracks had already in- 
formed him as to the amount of freedom that he could expect, 
and the discipline at West Point was even stricter. Nevertheless, 
there was no alternative. John Allan's help was contingent upon 
his making the most of the opportunity, and there was nothing 
else to do but to starve. Up until the last, however, Poe continued 
to further his literary plans, for while in Baltimore on his way 
to West Point he took the occasion to call on Mr. Nathan C. 
Brooks of semi-literary character, to whom he read some of his 
manuscripts and promised to send a poem for an annual that 
Brooks then had underway. This Poe never did. It seems also 
that he borrowed some money from a former schoolmate to 
whom he imparted another version of his legendary adventures 
abroad. 359 

Poe probably went by way of Philadelphia to New York, and 
thence to West Point, 860 where he arrived in time to take the 
examinations for admission during the last week of June, 1829. 
On June 28, he writes John Allan that the examinations for admis- 
sion are just over, and adds with a true Virginian naivetS that 
a great many cadets of " good family " have been rejected. Even 
the son of a governor was found deficient! Mr. Allan's remarks 



at the time of his entrance at West Point, and to accuse him of " duplicity." As 
a matter of fact to this day both at Annapolis and West Point various " dodges 
are worked" by candidates to circumvent the letter of the law about appoint- 
ments: mail is sent to establish "legal residence " in other districts than that from 
where the candidate hails, etc. Poe's age was afterward a joke at West Point. See 
Chapter Xin, page 274. It is now known that the Secretary of War himself gave 
Poe assurance that he could call himself twenty-one until his twenty-second birth- 
day. See this chapter, page 249, also Valentine Museum Letters, letter No. 15, page 

159- 

359 Woodberry, vol. 1, 1909, page 67. 

seo This is not certain. It is thought that Poe took the opportunity to call on 
some literary friends in Philadelphia, as well as upon Carey, Lea & Carey. It 
may be that he arranged to publish the sonnet To Science in the Casket while in 
Philadelphia at this time. The poem appeared a few months later, October, 1830, 
and L. A. Wilmer is thought to have been connected with the Casket and the 
Saturday Evening Post about this time. 



2 68 ISRAFEL 

upon the Poe family were probably remembered. Doubtless, to 
the aspirant for social honors in Richmond, the shot went home. 
Evidently young Poe was somewhat taken aback by the business- 
like air of the Military Academy for he is careful to impress his 
guardian, as if in preparation for possible snags ahead, that less 
than a quarter of those who enter ever graduate. " I will be much 
pleased," he adds, " if you will answer this letter." He was not 
quite sure how the wind blew in Richmond, then, too, during 
the first few days in uniform, it is strangely comforting to hear 
from home. On July i, 1830, Poe took the oath at West Point 
" to preserve the Constitution of the United States and serve them 
against all their enemies whomsoever." The next morning, with a 
veteran's disgust, he found himself being awakened in a tent by 
the familiar sound of reveille, and donning a cadet's uniform. 

About the same time that Cadet Edgar Allan Poe was going 
through the manual of arms, with astonishing facility for a plebe, 
on the summer parade ground at the United States Military 
Academy, Mr. Allan was enjoying the hospitality of his friend 
John Mayo at Belleville Plantation near Richmond, despite a 
very annoying complication in his private affairs at home. Among 
the house guests was Miss Louisa Gabriella Patterson (the niece 
of Mrs. Mayo), a strong-minded lady from New York, about 
thirty years of age. Mr. Allan was attracted by her; -the attentions 
of the rich widower were well received, and they shortly after- 
wards became engaged. It was the stroke which severed Poe for- 
ever from the home of his youth. He was now finally and ir- 
retrievably an exile in a world hostile to dreamers. For a while he 
tarried as a stranger in the tents of the Military. 



CHAPTER XIII 
The West Point Interlude 



THE not inconsiderable period of his short life which Poe 
spent at West Point, trying to carry out John Allan's 
idea of what his career should be, may be considered, 
for the most part, as a spiritual and mental interlude. It lasted 
from June 25, 1830, to February 19, i83i, 861 and marked the 
passing of the days when he made his final decision to cast off all 
outside dictation and to follow, without further delay or indirec- 
tion, a literary career. During the periods of drill and recitation 
his body, and the secondary part of his mind, was marched back 
and forth on the parade ground or to the classroom, but his spirit 
and desire were elsewhere. 

Upon arrival, in the last week of June, 1830, he seems to have 
passed the entrance examinations without difficulty, and to have 
been received by a Captain Hitchcock and a Mr. Ross, to whom 
he was previously known or bore letters of introduction. On July 
i, as we have already seen, he took the oath, and as the custom 
then was and still is, he immediately went to live under canvas 
in the annual summer encampment of the cadets. His tent mates 
were Cadets Read, Stockton from Philadelphia, and Henderson, 
the last a nephew of the Secretary of War. 362 

Upon arrival at " The Point," Poe had found waiting for him a 
letter from his guardian which had been forwarded by his brother 



861 These dates are deduced from the Valentine Museum Letters. Poe arrived 
at West Point in time to take the entrance examinations, which lasted two days. 
He probably arrived the day or the afternoon before. On June 28, 1830, he writes 
John Allan saying the examinations are over. The date of his leaving is from the 
letter written to John Allan from New York, February 21, 1831, in which he 
says he left West Point two days before. This for the first time gives Poe's stay at 
West Point its proper duration. 

862 This, and some of the other material not hitherto included in Poe's 
biographies, has been taken from the Valentine Museum Letters, Nos. 22, 23,. 24, 
and 25, all but the last written by Poe from West Point, and all covering the 
period with interesting new data. 



270 



ISRAFEL 



Henry from Baltimore, containing a $20 bill, and a com- 
plaint that he had taken some articles from home which did not 
belong to him. These it appears from his reply were some books 
from his own room and probably a brass inkstand, sand caster, 
and pen holder marked with John Allan's name and the year 
> I3 BOS These articles must have been in Poe's possession for 
years in his own room, some of the books were doubtless the 
gift of Frances Allan, or his own scant little library. Nothing 
shows the strong sense of Mr. Allan's overpowering sense of prop- 
erty, and his petty parsimony more than this incident. 

Financially Poe's experience at West Point was largely that of 
the fiasco at Charlottesville. The $20 was evidently to see him 
through the Military Academy. It, and the pair of blankets which 
he drew from Ellis & Allan in May, were the last evidences of 
any warmth which he received from his guardian, who now felt 
that on the generous cadet's salary of $28 a month, and rations, 
Poe was amply upon his own. It was customary for the parents 
of cadets to make a deposit for the boys to draw upon, for their 
instruments, books, clothes, and other incidentals. But this was 
not done for Poe, although he writes later asking for " instru- 
ments and a Cambridge Mathematics' 9 but the letter received no 
reply. Indeed, his guardian did not communicate with him at all 
between June, 1830, and January, 1831. From the day Poe took 
the oath, it is quite obvious that John Allan considered and hoped 
that their intimate association was at an end. 

About the year 1830, the Military Academy at West Point con- 
sisted of five fairly large stone buildings for administrative pur- 
poses, classrooms, and dormitories scattered about the " parade," 
the heights above the Hudson. There were, in addition, six brick 
buildings for the officers and professors near the river, and some 
old military store houses of Revolutionary date for arms and 
equipment. The original barracks had been burnt some years 
before Poe's arrival. 

In 1830, the Academy was twenty-eight years old and there 

s*3 As Poe had these with him for years, and at no time after the Spring of 
1830 had an opportunity of taking any " souvenirs " from the Allan house, it is 
reasonably certain he brought them from Richmond when he left for West Point. 
See also Chapter IX, page 130, note 182. 




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THE WEST POINT INTERLUDE 271 

were some thirty odd professors, instructors, and assistants for a 
corps of about 250 cadets. First preference in appointment was 
given by law to the descendants of Revolutionary officers, which 
accounts for Poe's anxiety in looking up his grandfather's record 
in Baltimore, the sons of the officers of 1812 coming next. 
The legal age for appointees was between fourteen and twenty- 
one, most of the boys being admitted in the early 'teens, so that 
Poe was far more mature than the average cadet of his time, 
both in years and experience. 

The course lasted four years, but was by no means so rigidly 
organized as at present. Under the conditions, Poe's hope of re- 
ceiving advanced standing owing to his previous military expe- 
rience and attendance at the University of Virginia, might have 
possibly have been accorded him had he consistantly distinguished 
himself. Some of the more advanced cadets were allowed to take 
part as instructors, for which they received additional pay. A 
cadet's salary was fixed by law at $330, with certain allowances 
for rations and permission to purchase equipment at army rates. 
Text books, and articles of personal use were not provided, how- 
ever, and Poe soon found himself in debt for necessaries which 
the parents of the other students either furnished, or provided by 
deposit. In his final letter from West Point, he complains bitterly 
of this and of the similar lack of the small necessities of life 
which John Allan's parsimony had also inflicted upon him at the 
University of Virginia. To be without soap, candles, writing mate- 
rials, room furniture, fuel, and clothing; to be forced to borrow 
even the minor articles for personal cleanliness and comfort, is 
a situation which is essentially exasperating and degrading. Poe 
took a peculiar pride in the neatness and care of his person and 
complains justly of the unnecessary " fatigues and degradations " 
which he was forced to undergo. The household economy of the 
time, particularly the Virginia plantation, supplied many of the 
articles, which are now purchased as a matter of course. In Poe's 
day it was difficult, sometimes even impossible to buy them at 
all. 864 Such a situation does not need to be enlarged upon, 

364 Soap, candles, toilet preparations, minor articles of clothing, mattresses, 
towels, linen of all kinds, and articles of knit and woven ware were made at home 



272 ISRAFEL 

At Charlottesville the story of his birth had undoubtedly some- 
what compromised his social position with the sons of Virginia 
aristocrats. At West Point this condition did not exist, Poe, in- 
deed, seems to have definitely allied himself there with Virginians, 
who, up until the Civil War, constituted themselves a group apart, 
yet the Military Academy was by no means democratic. It 
had its own peculiar snobbery. This consisted in affecting to look 
down on one who had served in the ranks. Future officers, and 
the sons of officers had their own opinion about one who had so 
far erred as to have been a common soldier. He did not " belong," 
and his mannerisms, especially since they were marked, were 
doubly open to suspicion. In Poe's history at West Point this 
played its part, and helped to make the already bitter, a little 
salt. To offset this, Poe gave himself out as a young man of 
many adventures, one who could tell much of strange places if 
he cared to. Thus the " mystery " was continued. 

As for the rest, there was certainly something to be gained: 

The Course of Study is completed in four years, each being devoted 
to a class; and includes the French language, drawing, natural and ex- 
perimental philosophy, chemistry, and mineralogy, geography, history, 
ethics, and national law, mathematics in the highest branches, and lastly 
artillery and engineering. 865 

The country about the Academy was not without its attractions, 
had there been any time to enjoy them. The view from West 
Point down the gorge of the Hudson as far as Horse Race and 
Anthony's Nose is peculiarly beautiful and was impressed firmly 
on the young poet's memory. Old Fort Putnam on the hill behind 
the barracks had at that time the remains of various subter- 
ranean chambers, the Catskills, which had already been cele- 
brated by Irving, were nearby, and in the neighborhood of the 

for the most part. Not to have these, argued oneself homeless, and a nobody. 
With no cash to buy these, Poe's condition at Charlottesville and West Point can 
be imagined. It was one of the things that not only made life unbearable but com- 
promised his social position. A borrower is always a nuisance. Poe had been sent 
to West Point with a handshake and $20, the rest was silence. He was right in 
resenting this bitterly. 

365 xhe Northern Traveler, third edition, revised and extended, published by 
G. & C. Carvill, New York, 1828 (and after). "A reliable guide book and com- 
pilation of information for travelers from official sources." 



THE WEST POINT INTERLUDE 273 

post was Stony Point, the scene of Major Andre's sad adventure 
and the treason of General Arnold, in which, as we have seen, 
Poe might feel himself entitled to take a peculiar interest. But 
there was no time to wander among the hills as there had been at 
Charlottesville. A paternal government claimed his time and the 
intervals of leisure were few. Nevertheless, West Point left its 
mark, and later appears vaguely in some of Poe's descriptions of 
New York scenery. 

The cadets rose early; breakfasted, we may be sure, frugally; 
attended lectures; dined; and about four P.M. returned to the bar- 
racks to get into uniform for the " parade " or drills which occu- 
pied the bulk of the remaining hours of daylight. After supper 
there was a study period, with call to quarters about nine o'clock 
and early taps. Leaves were few and far between, with holidays 
even rarer. Here was scant time for dreaming. 

From the West Point period, the beginning of Poe's physical 
troubles definitely dates. 866 It is reasonably certain that he was of 
a type which matured early; he probably reached the prime of 
life before the full strength of manhood in many others began. 
Despite his early prowess as a swimmer, it is known that he was 
generally averse to physical exercise and easily fatigued. 867 He 
had a weak heart and little energy. Any long continued regimen 
of drill and exercise must have left him morose and unstrung. 
The conditions at West Point were precisely the worst that he 
could be called upon to undergo, because the most vigorous, and 
there was no time at all for escape and solitude. Every incident of 
his daily routine, and the forced intimacy of tent and barrack life, 
was an interruption to that stream of consciousness which, to a 
man of Poe's type, was all in all the reverie from which he 
hoped from time to time to snatch something worth preserving. 

The ordinarily constituted man, certainly the cadets who sur- 
rounded Poe, could never have an inkling of the sense of hope- 
lessness, nervous irritability, and spiritual frustration which 
comes to the artist as he feels those rare periods when conscious- 
ness becomes creative being interrupted by the trivialities of 

see See Poe's own statement, Valentine Museum Letters, letter No. 24. 
**7 Testimony of classmates at the University of Virginia* 



274 ISRAFEL 

petty conversation, the necessity to appear polite, or the call of 
duty to some ultimately useless task. The result is like losing 
something out of the mouth while dining. No matter how much is 
eaten afterward the sense of loss is still there. Six months of this 
seems to have been sufficient to prostrate Poe and send him into a 
nervous collapse. 868 A boyhood in the same house with John Allan, 
followed by a period of wild anxiety, starvation, the loss of his 
sweetheart, and the death of his "mother" was an excellent 
preparation. Whether this entitled Poe to sympathy is not the 
question to be raised, the facts, and their result on tide man who 
was subjected to them, are, however, pertinent matter of inquiry. 

The drills, during the summer encampment at West Point, are 
notoriously severe. It is then that the raw plebes are knocked into 
some kind of form for the coming academic year by the combined 
efforts of the military instructors, and the officious attentions of 
the upper classmen known as " hazing," which is as much, and as 
important a part of the character and life-forming aim of the 
Military Academy as the text books or the sermons in Chapel. 

Poe seems to have escaped some of the attention of the upper 
classmen by the fact that he had already passed two years in the 
army, and bore somewhat the character of a veteran. His age, 
which was several years greater than most of the others, and 
his evident maturity, seem also to have distinguished him from 
the rest and to have aided in building up a certain glamor and 
curiosity about his name and antecedents. He became known for 
his aloofness and pride, and the joke was circulated that having 
obtained an appointment for his son who had died, Poe had him- 
self taken the boy's place and entered West Point. It was the 
dignified " father " whom they now beheld. All this the ex-ser- 
geant major seems to have taken not too good-naturedly while he 
added to his prestige by indicating that he was a youth with a 
romantic and thrilling past. Brother Henry's adventures were 
now liberally drawn upon again for his own account, and to them 
Poe added certain other items about voyages to the Mediter- 
ranean, and experiences while penetrating the mysterious interior 



868 Valentine Museum Letters, letter No. 25. Poe from New York to John 
Allan just after leaving West Point. 



THE WEST POINT INTERLUDE 275 

of Arabia that probably reflect the sources of his reading for 
Israfel, and the secondary oriental literature which engaged his 
attention about this time. That anyone could imagine such vivid 
experiences was probably beyond the literal horizon of his fellow 
cadets. The aura of the legend which Poe undoubtedly began to 
build up about himself, even at the University of Virginia, now 
took on a more definite form, and the stories of his "foreign 
voyages " were long remembered by his West Point classmates, 
stories that come to life years later in their reminiscences to con- 
firm the myth for biographers. 369 Even the cold records of the 
War Department have scarcely been able to destroy their effect 
Someone at West Point also heard the story (which Poe had a 
year before written to John Allan) that tie romantic looking 
cadet was a grandson of Benedict Arnold, and this tale began to 
be whispered about the corridors of South Barracks. A friend at 
last made bold to ask Poe himself, and there is good authority for 
the statement that he would neither deny or affirm it. The truth 
seems to be that Poe really knew so little about his mother and 
her antecedents that he was not sure himself. Her maiden name, 
he knew, had been Arnold, and he knew little more, in addition 
the tale undoubtedly added a strange, and to him a delightfully 
diabolic color to his reputation. 

Part of this desire for a mysterious notoriety was undoubtedly 
due to Poe's own feeling of the necessity for padding out his 
personality in certain directions in which it lacked or had been 
frustrated, and for making a frame for the strange face in the 
portrait of himself, that he early set about painting. Both the 
frame and the countenance that looked out from it were largely 
artificial, but they were nevertheless works of art. A delight in 
gulling the simplicity of those about him, a belief in their sim- 
plicity which begot in him a dangerous sense of superiority and 
contempt, was also present. As he grew older this sense of su- 
periority became more and more necessary to his own thought to 
offset the sense of weakness that came to afflict him, as he began 
to disintegrate physically and psychically. The romantic hero 

369 Allan B. Magruder, a classmate of Poe, to Prof. George E. Woodberry 
April 23, 1884. See Woodberry, 1909, vol. I, page 70. 



27 6 ISRAFEL 

was the first to appear, only to be replaced later by the perfect 
logician. 

It would have been an excellent thing for the young gentleman 
adventurer known as Cadet Edgar Allan Poe, whose critical in- 
tellect had already freed him from the narrow enthusiasm of 
patriotism, and unmasked for him the empty banality behind the 
brassy glitter of military life, if, at this period of his existence, he 
could have been removed by some miracle to an environment 
where he might have listened to and taken part in the debates and 
conversation of his superiors and equals. As it was, there was no 
one about him with whom he could talk. The personnel at the 
Academy, while he was there, seems to have been without ex- 
ception of the completely usual stamp. No one of his classmates 
had any mental ambitions, and none of them ever achieved any 
distinction beyond that of brevet-general or pastor emeritus of an 
evangelical church. To them, Poe's babel of critical remarks 
about poets and philosophers of whom they had never heard 
before, and seldom heard mentioned again in the warlike or 
peaceful events of their hide-bound lives, must have been incom- 
prehensible and suspect. 

The truth is that, even at the age of twenty-two, Poe had few 
contemporaries in the United States. 370 There were a few circles 
in Boston, New York or Philadelphia where his remarks might 
have found an audience. Baltimore was later on to provide an- 
other. For the rest, the old tradition of classical culture was fast 
disappearing along with the old generation which had founded the 
"Republic." The new Jacksonian "Democracy" was already 
climbing into the saddle, the frontier democracy, which the fol- 
lowers of Jefferson mistakenly took for their own. It was no 
longer fashionable to be a " gentleman," or to know anything. 
The tide of romanticism and secondary German philosophy, which 
Longfellow and Emerson were later on to introduce in America, 
had not yet begun to be mentioned. So far Poe had spoken in an 

370 It must be remembered that Poe's environment, even in Richmond, was 
largely Scotch; his primary education was founded in English schools, and his 
reading had been largely in the English periodicals found at Ettis & Allan. At 
the University of Virginia he had come across the rare Germanic influence then 
scarcely known in this country. Poe read French, Italian, and Latin. 



THE WEST POINT INTERLUDE 277 

atmosphere so ratified that it could not produce even an echo. At 
West Point the vacuum was complete. 

American history has produced no more ludicrous paradox than 
this young literary genius shut up in an institution which was 
then, and for some years later, partly given up to educating and 
providing the military technique for many of those who were 
later on to use the knowledge they had so gained in trying to de- 
stroy the nation which provided the means for so doing.' The world 
in which Poe moved had nothing to do with all this. The section- 
alism which was even then beginning to divide the nation, the 
controversy over slavery, the awakening of industrialism, and the 
muling and pe'wking of the young democracy, even then beginning 
to strike out against all those who raised their heads above its 
level of thought or morals, did not exist for him. His world lay 
in the realms of thought, criticism, and the philosophy of Eu- 
ropean molding which he had first found in the pages of the 
English reviews upon the counters in the book loft at ElUs & 
Allan. Here he had met the young Macaulay, and " Christopher 
North," become interested in Shelley, Keats, and Byron, Words- 
worth, and the giant Coleridge, and it was with them that he 
thought, and out of them that he moved forth armed with a 
genuine comment on the philosophy of the time and the only last- 
ing creative urge in romantic poetry that the United States pro- 
duced. Longfellow and Emerson translated, remolded, and ex- 
plained, but Poe took the data of romanticism and out of it 
created something new, a unique utterance in poetry, and a criti- 
cal comment and application of philosophy to his time and en- 
vironment that is only now beginning to become appreciated. 871 
His art in prose and verse has already won its cloud-streaked place 
in the sun. In the scattered leaves of his critical and philosophical 
comments lie some of the earliest suggestions of the possible re- 
sults of science upon the world and the spirit of man, doubts as 



871 This " comment " is scattered and sometimes dulled by Poe's aping of 
greater knowledge than he possessed, and carelessness about facts, but it is 
there, nevertheless, in his (criticism, his stories, and in Eureka. Lowell said, " As it 
is, he has squared out blocks enough to bufld an enduring pyramid, but left them 
lying careless and unclaimed in many different quarries." J. R. Lowell in Graham's 
Magazine, 1845, vol. XXVH, no. 2, page 50. 



27 8 ISRAFEL 



to the ultimate self-sufficiency of democracy, queries as to the 
human value of a society which made physical comfort its goal, 
strange philanderings in psychology, and in the mathematics of 
astronomy. 

As yet it was all very vague and youthfully crude, yet it was 
there, in embryo, in the young man in a swallow tail coat and 
bowler shako, who was being marched back and forth on the hot 
August parade ground at West Point, learning the precise angle 
at which the rifle must be held at "-port arms," and how to 
salute the flag which did not represent anything that he really 
cared very much about, and a great deal that was positively dis- 
tasteful to him. For this performance he received three meals and 
about ninety cents a day. The strange result was that, in spite of 
it, he evolved from Coleridge and others his own critical theory 
of poetry and somehow, somewhere, continued to write poetry, 
poetry which did not view the change which even then he saw 
creeping across the machineless world into which he had been 
born with the undivided enthusiasm of most of his contempo- 
raries. 372 In the Philadelphia Casket for October, 1830, appeared 
reprinted from the 1829 volume the young West Point cadet's 

SONNET TO SCIENCE 

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art! 

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. 
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, 

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? 
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise, 

Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering 
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, 

Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? 
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? 

And driven the Hamadryad from the wood 
To seek a shelter in some happier star? 

Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, 
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me 
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree? 



872 The cocksure optimism of Victorianism is utterly lacking in Poe. He was 
one of the few to see the implications of harm in the age of machinery just 



THE WEST POINT INTERLUDE 279 

In the meantime, General Scott had visited West Point on a 
tour of inspection, probably, about the end of the summer en- 
campment, and was, so Poe tells his guardian in a letter written 
home that Fall, most cordial in his attentions to the young Vir- 
ginian. 373 General Scott was probably more than casually inter- 
ested, for John Allan was by that time engaged to a lady who 
was one of his relations. 

The Summer of 1830, indeed, had been a crucial one in the 
changes which it brought about in Poe's relations with John 
Allan, and any projects which he may have had for the future fa- 
vors of his guardian. None of Poe's letters home had been an- 
swered. Mr. Allan was summering on his Lower Byrd Planta- 
tion in Goochland, and passing the time most pleasantly in 
courting the lady of his choice at Mr. Mayo's on Belvedere. Poe 
no doubt heard of the turn which affairs had taken through the 
visit of some Virginian friends to West Point, Mr. Chevalier and 
Mr. Cunningham. 373 He could not help being much interested 
for he must have realized that in a very real sense he had in- 
terests at stake. The possibility of a legitimate heir would un- 
doubtedly greatly weaken the already slender claim which he 
might still feel he had upon the favor and affection of John Allan. 
On October 5, 1830, Mr. Allan was married in the Patterson 
house in New York to his second wife, the wedding being at- 
tended by the Gaits and other Richmond friends and relatives. 
The happy pair returned to live in Richmond. Poe tells his 
" father " that he had hoped to have a visit from him at " The 
Point," as the other boys were visited by their relatives, but such 
an event was probably the last idea in John Allan's mind. 373 With 
the new wife, both the dark and the bright memories of the first 
were swept away. John Allan had confessed the faults and the 
results of former indiscretions to his new partner before his mar- 
riage, 374 he had been accepted in spite of them, and naturally 



coming into its own. His chief quarrel with it, was that it destroyed beauty and 
leisure. As a Virginian and an egoist Poe despised mobocracy and a Santa Claus 
view of science; as an artist he depicted the ugliness of industrialism. See The Elk. 

878 Valentine Museum Letters, letter No. 23. 

874 John Allan in his will made at Richmond, Virginia, April 17, 1832. See 
the copy of John Allan's will, Appendix HI. 



2 8o ISRAFEL 

enough he did not care to renew the past, or the possibility of 
future complications by even a mention of Poe. He belonged to 
the realm of Frances Allan, and that world, for the good mer- 
chant, now enjoying an Indian Summer of youth, had completely 
passed away. To the new wife, Edgar Allan Poe was a name, the 
son of actors and a scribbler; to her husband a troublesome mem- 
ory. It was hard, almost impossible for Poe to believe this. He 
still continued to write " affectionately " to " Dear Pa." But there 
was no answer. 

At the end of the Summer the battalion of cadets moved into 
their winter quarters. Poe's room, which he shared with two 
others, was Number 28 of the old South Barracks, and here the 
final phase of Israfel in brass buttons dragged its way to an 
abrupt end through the Fall and Winter of 1830-31. 

Number 28 was furnished, as were all the rooms in the bar- 
racks, with a more than Spartan simplicity. There were three 
beds, perhaps as many chairs, and a table shared in common by 
the inmates. A wardrobe for each, contained their equipment and 
clothes, for which a precise position was indicated by the regu- 
lations. No ornaments or pictures were tolerated, but as a special 
concession, certain lares might be " displayed," upon the upper 
shelf of the cupboard. A broom, a few basins, slop tubs, and pitch- 
ers completed the domestic scene of a cadet's background, to 
which an open fire, if the room was fortunate enough to abut on 
a chimney flue, and a few candlesticks, contributed the sole 
touches of warmth and light. Compared with this, Number 13 
" Rowdy Row " at the University of Virginia had been a luxurious 
apartment and a haven of private refuge. To the usual assortment 
of textbooks, Poe somehow or other had contrived to add some 
genuine literature. These works of imagination consumed by far 
the larger portion of his study hours as well as his spare time. 
Even a drill or formation was insufficient at times to interrupt 
a favorite passage, yet, despite this, until he deliberately set out 
to neglect his studies, he stood high in his classes at the end of 
the semi-annual examination: third in French, and seventeenth in 
mathematics, in a class of eighty-seven. 

There is a studied confusion about the incessant routine of a 



THE WEST POINT INTERLUDE 281 

military academy that no haphazard method of existence can hope 
to equal. The method itself is beyond approach for producing a 
continuous series of events that perpetually threaten to make 
everyone late to something. As a consequence, the unfortunate 
young gentlemen subjected to the process are forever rushing 
about changing clothes or books, dashing up and down stairs, 
arising, going to bed, winding themselves in long sashes, buckling 
on swords, answering oral orders bawled through the long corri- 
dors, or stampeding off to formations and yelping " here " to their 
names at roll call thousands of times. The method of existence is 
so complicated that living is impossible. 

The life of the inmates of Number 28 was further made more 
interesting, if less tolerable, by the visits at both stated and un- 
expected hours of the various officers of military and academic 
discipline who were charged with enforcing the list of thirty-three 
disciplinary " don'ts," each with its ingenious penalty; or by the 
intrusions of upper classmen who were tacitly licensed by the tra- 
ditions of the place to inflict the peculiarly exasperating personal 
annoyances of the code of hazing at any hour of the day or night. 
The blare of bugles and the crash of drums announced the begin- 
ning and close of the various and numerous periods into which 
the day was divided, a schedule which took no account of the 
value of leisure. There was literally no provision at all for privacy 
in barracks, and the cadets ate together in a large mess hall 
under the eyes of the officers. The hours of leave were so short 
as to preclude any trips into the country about, and if they had 
not been, there would have been no place to go. The observances 
of the ritual of rank and military restrictions, made visits to the 
married quarters of the officers uncomfortable when they were 
possible. 

West Point was, at that time, remote from all places of any 
size and the visits of relatives and parents were perforce labori- 
ous, brief, and far between. In short, there was no social life at all. 
The only relief to the bareness and monotony of the place seems 
to have been a combination store and illicit groggery run by 
" Old Benny Haven," who exchanged various petty, luxurious 
tidbits, and bottles of brandy for the small change of the cadets, 



ISRAFEL 



when they had any, and lacking that, conducted a usurious form 
of barter in the clothes, blankets, equipment, and even the soap 
and candles of the young gentlemen. His place just off the post, 
was, of course, out of bounds, and, although frequently visited by 
the officers for convivial refreshment, was at once the only solace 
and the main cause of trouble for the cadets. In addition to Old 
Benny's place, as often happens about military posts, the Com- 
missary seems to have provided a loafing place at odd times. 
Here Poe became acquainted with the Commissary Clerk, at 
that time one J. Augustus Shea, who it seems had some literary 
propensities as he afterward published poems. Little George Shea, 
the clerk's son, then a small child running about the grounds, 
was afterward recalled by Poe. Both father and son heard the 
poet deliver The Raven in New York fifteen years later when he 
was at the crest of his fame, and had renewed the old West 
Point intimacy. 669 In such surroundings the young Poe, who loved 
to imagine himself in luxurious and semi-oriental apartments, sur- 
rounded by sweeping draperies, a gloomy, religious light, and tri- 
pods of incense, found himself " at home." 

Number 28 South Barracks early attained the reputation of 
being a " hard " room. Those who aspired to a minimum of ap- 
pearances on the rolls of discipline soon learned to avoid its 
precincts. From it, from time to time, issued pasquinades and dia- 
tribes in rhyme upon the officers and faculty which were clever 
enough both to amuse and to annoy. Lieutenant Joseph Locke 
of Savannah appears to have distinguished himself as a merciless 
enforcer of discipline, and his doubtless too frequent visits to 
Number 28 were soon celebrated by the pen which has alone pre- 
served him to fame: 

As for Locke, he is all in my eye, 
May the devil right soon for his soul call, 
He never was known to lie 
In bed at a reveilte " roll call." 

John Locke was a notable name; 
Joe Locke is a greater; in short, 
The former was well known to fame, 
But the latter's well known " to report" 



THE WEST POINT INTERLUDE 283 

Even Colonel Thayer, the Superintendent did not escape, al- 
though Poe seems to have found in him one of the few men he 
could admire while at the Military Academy. 

Cadet T. H. Gibson was Poe's roommate, and from him, al- 
though he set down his memories many years later, we are in- 
debted for what is probably the most authentic picture of " Cadet 
Poe": 876 

. . . The first conversation I had with Poe after we became installed 
as room-mates was characteristic of the man. A volume of Campbell's 
Poems was lying upon our table, and he tossed it contemptuously aside 
with the curt remark: c Campbell is a plagiarist'; then without wait- 
ing for a reply he picked up the book, and turned the leaves over 
rapidly until he found the passage he was looking for. 

' There/ he said, is a line more often quoted than any other passage 
of his: " Like angel visits few and far between," and he stole it bodily 
from Blair's Grave. Not satisfied with the theft he has spoiled it in the 
effort to disguise it. Blair wrote: " Like angel visits short and far be- 
tween," Campbell's " Few and far between " is mere tautology.' 

Poe at that time, though only twenty years of age, 376 had the ap- 
pearance of being much older. He had a worn, weary discontented look, 
not easily forgotten by those who were intimate with him. Poe was 
easily fretted by any jest at his expense. . . . Very early in his brief 
career at the Point he established a high reputation for genius, and 
poems and squibs of local interest were daily issued from Number 28 
and went the round of the classes. . . . 

The studies of the Academy, Poe utterly ignored. I doubt if he ever 
studied a page of Lacroix, unless it was to glance hastily over it in the 
lecture room, while others of his section were reciting. It was evident 
from the first that he had no intention of going through with the course, 
and both Professors and Cadets of the older classes had him set down 
for a January Colt before the corps had been in barracks a week. 

From a letter written to John Allan before he entered the 
Military Academy, it is evident that Poe counted confidently 
upon his former army experience and his preparation at the 
University of Virginia to get him through the course at West 
Point in short order. He tells his guardian that he hoped to com- 
plete it in six months. It is probable that he found it, from the 

875 Harper's New Monthly Magazine, November, 1867. 

876 He was actually twenty-two, but had given his age in the records at West 
Point as nineteen years and some months. 



284 ISRAFEL 



nature of the arrangement of the curriculum, rather than from the 
difficulty of the subjects themselves, impossible to carry out the 
prediction. This miscalculation of the results of his abilities, com- 
bined with the prospect of the increased length of stay at West 
Point which it involved, and the growing distaste for the bare 
existence he found there, probably accounts for the discontented 
and haggard look which his roommate recalled over thirty years 
later. In the army itself Poe had found means to escape much of 
the physical drudgery of drills, and the way to considerable leisure 
for his dreams and composition by engaging in the clerical work 
which conferred such privileges. At West Point there was no way 
of avoiding the ironclad routine, and the young poet found him- 
self bound, and turning ceaselessly upon a wheel where the tor- 
ture became more irksome with each revolution. To look forward 
to an endless life of that kind of thing was not to be contemplated 
without despair. Indeed, it is probable that even the unexpected 
lengthening of its temporary continuance was more than he cared 
to face, and that he had, as his roommate seems to think, made 
up his mind to shake the dust of the place from his feet as early 
as the Fall of 1830. In addition there was the change in the affairs 
of John Allan which probably removed from Poe the last incen- 
tive to continue the situation. 

Mr. Allan's marriage had interfered sadly with these hopes. 
That it made Poe uneasy there can be no doubt. It was for that 
reason that he wrote John Allan in November that he regretted 
that his guardian had not felt it worth while to come up from 
New York to pay him a visit, although a sight of the man who 
had so often reviled and reproached him, could have brought little 
satisfaction. Doubtless there was some element of affection due 
to memories of old and happier times, but these were now remote* 
Nevertheless, Mr. Allan's indifference, and the fact that he had 
ignored Poe, was alarming, so the November letter to Richmond 
may be regarded as a " feeler-out." Poe tells his guardian that he 
has found West Point not unpleasant and that he is at that time 
(November 6, 1830) standing first in all his sections. 

The roommate's inference and recollection that Poe neglected 
his classes, probably arises from composite memories set down 



THE WEST POINT INTERLUDE 285 

years later. That Poe was on the whole discontented and nervous, 
there is every reason to believe to be correct. 

Poe's standing academically, however, was not much affected. 
He probably did not have to study much; he was brilliant; had 
an excellent preparation, and seems to have found no difficulty in 
distinguishing himself in languages and mathematics. When he 
did decide to go, as he did, it was not by the route of failure 
in the classroom, but by disregarding the rules of discipline. For 
a little while he was not sure enough of the actual state of affairs 
in Richmond to cut the last tie which bound him to his past 
without some further thought. 

This was probably the condition of his affairs, an uneasy con- 
dition, through the Fall and early Winter of 1830. It was a state 
of spiritual limbo that must have been particularly trying. Never- 
theless, he was not quite ready to take so irrevocable a step on his 
own initiative. Nor can we blame him, for by this time he knew 
full well what it meant to starve. Even he could not afford to be 
independent on nothing at all. Byron, and not Chatterton was his 
model. 

During this interlude he again began to drink. As nearly al- 
ways just a little; but that little for him was a great deal too 
much. It probably helped to deplete his nerves already badly 
strained. Having experienced the effects of gulping, he now took 
to sipping. The stories as to his being raving drunk in the guard 
house are not true. Had they been so, he would not have been 
under the necessity of deliberately neglecting his duty to procure 
his release. There was, however, it seems often enough a bottle 
of brandy present in Number 28, occasionally resorted to in com- 
pany with such friends as its contents and the inspired conversa- 
tion of the owner might attract. About the time of the letter home, 
Poe's roommate again pulls aside the curtain for a brief glimpse 
at Number 28: 

It was a dark, cold, drizzling night, in the last days of November, 
when this event came off. The brandy bottle had been empty for two 
days, and just at dusk Poe proposed that we should draw straws the 
one who drew the shortest to go down to Old Benny's and replenish our 
stock. The straws were drawn, and the lot fell on me. 



286 ISRAFEL 

Provided with four pounds of candles, and Poe's last blanket, for 
traffic (silver and gold had we none, but such as we had we gave unto 
Benny), I started just as the bugle sounded 'to quarters.' It was a 
rough road to travel, but I knew every foot of it by night or day, and 
reached my place of destination in safety, but drenched to the skin. 
Old Benny was not in the best of humors that evening. Candles and 
blankets and regulation shoes, and similar articles of traffic, had accu- 
mulated largely on his hands, and the market for them was dull in that 
neighborhood. His chicken suppers and bottles of brandy had disap- 
peared very rapidly of late, and he had received little, or no money in 
return. 

At last, however, I succeeded in exchanging the candles and blankets 
for a bottle of brandy, and the hardest-featured, loudest-voiced old 
gander that it has been my lot to encounter. To chop the bird's head 
off before venturing into barracks with him was a matter of pure neces- 
sity; and thus, in fact, Old Benny rendered him before delivery. I 
reached the suburbs of the barracks about nine o'clock. The bottle had 
not as much brandy in it as when I left Old Benny's, but I was very 
confident I had not spilled any. I had carried the gander first over one 
shoulder and then over the other, and the consequence was that not 
only my shirt front, but my face and hands were as bloody as the 
entire contents of the old gander's veins and arteries could make them. 

Poe was on the lookout and met me some distance from the barracks, 
and my appearance at once inspired him with the idea of a grand 
hoax. 377 Our plans were perfected in an instant. The gander was tied, 
neck and feet and wings together, and the bloody feathers bristling in 
every direction gave it a nondescript appearance that would have defied 
recognition as a gander by the most astute naturalist on the continent. 
Poe took charge of the bottle, and preceded me to the room. c Old P. J 
was puzzling his brains over the binomial theorem, and a visitor from 
the North Barracks was in the room awaiting the result of my expedi- 
tion. 

Poe had taken his seat, and pretended to be absorbed in the mysteries 
of Legons Frangaises. Laying the gander down outside the door, I 
walked or rather staggered into the room, pretending to be very drunk, 
and exhibiting in clothes and face a spectacle not often seen off the 
stage. ' My God! what has happened? ' exclaimed Poe, with well-acted 
horror. 

* Old K old K. ! ' I repeated several times, and with gestures 
intended to be frantically savage. 

877 Poe's ceaseless desire to perpetrate hoaxes was not due solely to a sense 
of humor. The feeling of superiority which it conferred on him as the person who 
stood behind the curtain, was the main motive. This is frequently one of the minor 
manifestations of an exaggerated ego. 



THE WEST POINT INTERLUDE 287 

' Well, what of him? > asked Poe. 

c He won't stop me on the road any more ' and I produced a large 
knife that we had stained with the few drops of blood, that remained 
in the old gander. ' I have killed him! ' 

' Nonsense! y said Poe, c you are only trying one of your tricks on us.' 

* I didn't suppose you would believe me,' I replied, * so I cut off his 
head and brought it into barracks. Here it is! ' and walking out of 
the door I caught the gander by the legs, and giving it one fearful 
swing around my head dashed it at the only candle in the room, and 
left them all in darkness with what two of them believed to be the head 
of one of the professors. The visitor leaped through the window and 
alighted in the slop tub, and made fast time for his own room in the 
North Barracks, spreading, as he went, the report that I had killed old 
K , and that his head was there in number 28. The story gained 
credence, and for a time the excitement in barracks ran high. When 
we lit the candle again, " Old P." was sitting in one corner, a blank pic- 
ture 87S of horror, and it was some time before we could restore him to 
reason. 

So the barracks were able to credit even murder to the dis- 
contented occupant of Number 28. A strange fellow after all! 
There was something about him one could not understand. Al- 
most anything might be suspected of one who actually dared to 
be different and was proud of it. " Benedict Arnold's grand- 
son! " Interesting no doubt, but dangerous. And so he continued 
here, as elsewhere, lonely; sad that he was set apart, and yet 
proud of it. It was this combination of pride, loneliness, and home- 
sickness the necessity of expressing his sense of malaise, and 
the desire for the comfort that nothing but dreams could bring 
him, which seems to have memorably combined at West Point and 
to have projected itself for the first time into great poems. 

One can imagine him, after taps, waiting for the roommates 
to drift off into the dreamless sleep which was so often denied 
him by their mutterings, and by the beating at the bars of the 
restless wings of his own spirit, one can imagine him getting up 
in the bare, cold room, and by the light of a carefully shaded 
candle, setting down the proud words of Israfel. How could 
they know, these heavy sleepers, those solemn memorizers of the 

378 oid P." was the other roommatertt-appears. See the apocryphal, for 
the most part reminiscences of Timothy Pickering Jones, " Poe and I were class- 
mates, roommates, and tent mates." New York Sun, May 10, 1903. 



288 ISRAFEL 

banalities of textbooks that in their midst, brooding over them 
in the long hours of the night, sat a spirit whose song was sweeter 
and clearer than that of the archangels of God! How human and 
earthy, and how comforting to his own feelings it was, to imagine 
that even in heaven his voice would be heard above all others, and 
be found more acceptable. Out of this gigantic and almost insane 
pride of heart welled up the lines of the poem ending at last in 
the majestic paean: 

If I could dwell 
Where Israf el 

Hath dwelt, and he where I, 
He might not sing so wildly well 

A mortal melody 
While a bolder note than this might swell 

From my lyre within the sky. 879 

It was to Richmond, and the happier early days with Frances 
Allan and the friends of childhood, that he returned in homesick 
reveries, for homesick he was. Poe was one of those sensitive 
natures to which the incidents of existence were often painful. 
Ensconced in the old and familiar, this feeling was lulled; bleak 
and new surroundings became, by contrast, unbearable and 
served to make the past a heaven by contrast. Besides, his own 
intense consciousness of self, a consciousness so supreme as to 
render the outside world pale and remote, was of the type which 
tends to extend much of its self-love to the places where it has 
dwelt, so that a town, a room, or even a tree that has been a 
refuge becomes romantic and important, as do all things that have 
been pleasantly familiar in the past. 

All this seemed true now of Richmond; the houses, the fields, 
the river, the ghostly figures that walked in the past of his boy- 
hood, moved in a golden and vernal landscape, with something 
sacred about it, a shrine, a green isle in the sea. Oh, the lost 
loved faces! the silent tones of voices! the dear, dear past for- 
ever wild with all regret! It was the only time when he had been 
happy, at one with himself, and beloved. This is the grand nos- 

879 The last verse of Israjel is quoted here as given in the 1845 version. The 
1831 text shows numerous variations. 



THE WEST POINT INTERLUDE 289 

talgia, the immortal regret, the famished yearning out of which 
so often springs great poetry. It was the only thing that comforted 
him, the idealized images of the past, witness: 

Helen, thy beauty is to me 
Like those Nicean banks of yore 
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, 
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore 
To his own native shore . . . 

and the lines written some years later to Sarah 

When melancholy and alone, 
I sit on some moss-covered stone 
Beside a munn'ring stream; 
I think I hear thy voice's sound 
In every tuneful thing around, 
Oh! what a pleasant dream 

and Poe's dreams of the past were so vivid that he heard voices 
of the dead and lost speaking; not only the eye but the ear also 
had its memories: 

The bowers whereat, in dreams, I see 
The wantonest singing birds, 
Are lips and all thy melody 
Of lip-begotten words. 

Amid this longing for the past, in the presence of an always 
unbearable present, his spirit constantly stood 

A voice from out the Future cries, 
"On! on! " but o'er the Past 
(Dim gulf) my spirit lies 
Mute, motionless, aghast! 

And it was into this gulf, which he so brooded upon during the 
long hours of the night, while the rest of the inmates of the 
barracks slumbered around him, that Poe let down the leaky 
bucket of inspiration and drew forth To Helen, The Sleeper, The 
Pcean, Fairy Land, and The Valley of Unrest, that most beautiful 
of all his reveries. These poems are rich with the dark jewels of 



2 9 o ISRAFEL 



sorrow, the dim northern twilight of Scotland and the Celtic folk 
tales he heard from the old people at Irvine, the mystic land- 
scapes of Carolina, and the exotic compound of his " oriental " 
readings best exemplified, perhaps, by The City in the Sea. These 
he felt were worth preserving and adding to his already published 
verses. Before he left West Point he had made arrangements to 
do so. 

The new manuscript collection, which included the poems pub- 
lished in Baltimore, and the new ones written at Mrs. Clemm's, 
in Richmond, or at the Military Academy, he seems to have sub- 
mitted to Colonel Thayer, who approved of them, and granted 
permission to allow the members of the cadet corps to subscribe 
towards their publication at seventy-five cents a copy (sic), the 
amount to be deducted from their pay. This permission, and Colo- 
nel Thayer's probable appreciation of Poe's work, expressed per- 
haps in some personal interview, seem to account for the young 
man's admiration for that officer, the only personal enthusiasm of 
which we have any mention during the West Point interlude. 
Possessed of a guaranteed sale in advance of several hundred 
copies nearly everyone seems to have subscribed Poe wrote 
to Elam Bliss, a New York publisher, who, it seems, came per- 
sonally to West Point, sometime about the end of 1830, and made 
arrangements with the young author to bring out the volume. 

The enthusiasm for it among the cadets was by no means liter- 
ary. They had no idea of the real nature of the book to which 
they subscribed, but undoubtedly thought it would contain a col- 
lection of the humorous verse satirizing the officers and the 
faculty, which had from time to time proceeded from the strange 
but clever fellow who inhabited Number 28. Poe on his part un- 
doubtedly knew this, but he used the opportunity to get out his 
book, probably knowing full well that he would not be present 
to receive the personal expressions of disgust and disappointment, 
when its real nature became known. Some of the pearls, as the 
preface to the book shows, were intended to be cast where they 
might be audibly appreciated, as for the grunts of disapproval 
from the ostensible audience, Poe would neither hear nor care, 
The important thing was, that a new book was underway. Mr. 



THE WEST POINT INTERLUDE 291 

Bliss, or his agent, returned to New York with the manuscript 
ready for the printer, and with little or no effort the cost of the 
forthcoming volume was guaranteed. 

How long Poe would have lingered at West Point doing " fours 
right " and " shoulder arms," it is hard to tell. His decision to 
depart was undoubtedly hastened by an event in Richmond that, 
as the future proved, removed him from all prospects of any 
immediate or death-bed generosity which John Allan might 
fondly be hoped to display. The event was unexpected and un- 
comfortably disconcerting. 

Sergeant Graves, " Bully," had evidently waited up until about 
the end of the year (1830) in hopes that the money owed him, 
about which Poe had written so reassuringly the previous May, 
might be forthcoming. By that time the patience of the soldier 
who was still at Fortress Monroe, was exhausted, and he wrote 
to John Allan himself in no uncertain terms, demanding that the 
matter should be settled at once. As Poe had informed this soldier 
that Mr. Allan was seldom sober, the nature of the information 
which he possessed must have insured the prompt payment of his 
demand. It would never do, for a newly married man in Mr. 
Allan's situation, to have allowed a common soldier to go about 
with a letter from his adopted " son " which plainly made such 
damaging assertions. In the concise words of the second wife 
" Mr. Allan sent him the money . . . and banished Poe from his 
affections." That much, at least, of the good lady's explanation 
seems to be literally true. The rest of her statements may well 
have been the convenient interpretation which, out of self-de- 
fense, her husband was forced to put upon it. No one can blame 
John Allan, in this instance, at least, for being outraged. The fact 
that Poe had never meant the letter to come home to roost, does 
not excuse his lack of loyalty in writing it. It is impossible to at 
once claim the benefits of intimate association, and to violate its 
confidences. Sergeant " Bully " Graves of the First United States 
Artillery had, by reason of the writings which he possessed, fallen 
heir to the only financial " legacy " that the Gait-Allan fortune 
was to contribute to tEe name of Edgar Allan Poe! An unfortu- 
nately flourishing signature of that young gentleman adorned the 



292 ISRAFEL 

bottom of the fatal letter. Not only the cat, but all expectation of 
kittens, was now let out of the well-known bag. 

Mr. Allan wrote Poe a furious letter, which must have been a 
masterpiece of invective. It reached Poe just in time to wish him 
a happy New Year for 1830. He was informed that he was dis- 
owned and that no further communications from him were de- 
sired. On January 3, 1830, Poe replied in what is probably the 
most literally autobiographical letter that he ever wrote. 880 

The mask that the sense of favors to come, or the lingering 
traces of real affection which Poe may have still retained the 
necesssity for patience and dissimulation that these had enforced 
in previous letters to his guardian, were now removed. With noth- 
ing to be lost by open defiance, he spits back the bitter truth. 

The letter to " Bully " is acknowledged and the charge of Mr. 
Allan's drinking reaffirmed. The truth, he says, he leaves to God, 
and John Allan's conscience. The rest of the letter is given up to 
a multitude of reproaches, which, even when every allowance is 
made, still remain as a tremendous indictment of the character 
of John Allan. The parsimony so fatal at Charlottesville had also 
done its sharp work at West Point, but, above all, Poe in effect 
reproaches his guardian for his lack of affection and tells him 
that it was only Frances Allan who cared for him as for her own 
child. " If she had not died while I was away, there would have 
been nothing to regret." 

Perhaps, the most significant sentences of all, in this burning 
letter, are those in which Poe speaks of his own health. Despite 
the undoubted presence of some self pity, there is a hopeless 
truth in his statements that he knows he will not live long 
" Thank God! " and that his future will be one of indigence and 
sickness. He says, and this statement seems to be especially sig- 
nificant, that he has no energy nor health left, and he complains 
of the fatigues of "this place" 'fatigues which his absolute 
want of necessities had subjected him to. The letter concludes 
with the announcement that he intends to resign. If the permis- 
sion is not granted from home, he curtly informs John Allan that 



380 Valentine Museum Letters, letter No. 24. The AUan-Poe controversy can- 
not be understood thoroughly without a knowledge of this letter. 



THE WEST POINT INTERLUDE 293 

from the date of the letter he will neglect his studies and duties. 
Should the permission not be forthcoming he will leave West 
Point in ten days. Otherwise says he, " I should subject myself to 
being dismissed. 37 Poe's resolution was evidently made while he 
was reading John Allan's letter. The careful phrasing of the 
indignant reply evidently occupied a day or so in which the exact 
course to be pursued was turned over in Poe's mind most care- 
fully. This letter to John Allan begun on the third of January, 
1831, was not mailed till the fifth. A few days later in Richmond 
John Allan himself endorsed upon it: 

I rec'd this on the loth and did not from its conclusion deem it 
necessary to reply. I made this note on the i3th and can see no good 
Reason to alter my opinion. I do not think the boy has one good 
quality. He may do or act as he pleases tho' I would have saved him 
but on his own terms and conditions since I cannot believe a word he 
writes. His letter is the most bare-faced one-sided statement. 

A careful comparison of dates in the case of this letter may serve 
to make clear exactly what happened. Poe's last letter from West 
Point was begun on the third, mailed on the fifth (postmark), 
and received by Mr. Allan on the tenth of January. John Allan 
then considered his decision about it for three days before making 
his endorsement on the thirteenth. But the court-martial records 
show that after January seventh Edgar Attan Poe ceased to func- 
tion as a cadet at West Point. In other words, he did not wait 
to hear from Mr. Allan, for, before the letter got to Richmond, 
Poe was already " on strike." 

There were, in reality, only two parties in this passage at 
arms. Between the granite-like obstinacy of John Allan and the 
final, nervous explosion of Poe's indignation, West Point was a 
mere incident. If Mr. Allan's consent to a resignation had been 
obtained, Poe would have profited to the extent of the traveling 
expenses which he needed and that would have been all. Mr. 
Allan's guardianship was at an end. The letter of January 3, 
1831, to Richmond was the young poet's moral Declaration of 
Independence. 

There was, indeed, a much deeper cause for the declaration 
than has heretofore been suspected. A comparison of certain pas- 



294 



ISRAFEL 



sages in John Allan's will with the date of Poe's letter to Sergeant 
Graves ("Bully")? and the mention of the quarrel between 
" father " and " son " on the same date (" . . . The time was 
within half an hour after you had embittered every feeling of 
my heart against you by your abuse of my family, and myself, 
under your own roof and at a time when you knew that my 
heart was almost breaking . . .") gives, rise to some pertinent 
speculations. 

Why had Mr. Allan been drinking about this time; why did he 
quarrel with Poe; and above all, why did he abuse Edgar's 
family? Poe underscores the word family, and it can scarcely 
refer to anything else but the sore point about Mrs. Poe and 
Rosalie. 881 Nothing would be more likely to drive the foster-son 
out of the house immediately. But why drive him out, why! 
What was the motive? One sentence from John Allan's will illu- 
minates all these old letters, like switching on a light in a dark 
room full of musty documents: 

The twins were born some time about the first of July 1830. 

They were illegitimate. No wonder Mr. Allan was then " seldom 
sober." That was why he was frantic with anxiety to get Edgar 
out of the house when he did return to Richmond in 1830, and 
why he kept urging and urging Poe to get his appointment and 
even tried to hurry the War Department. The appointment came 
in March; but Poe did not leave. On May 6 Mr. Allan picked a 
violent quarrel with his ward, the old calumny against Edgar's 
mother was revived as a desperate but sure expedient to get rid 
of him " under your own roof at a time when you knew my 
heart was almost breaking." 355 A few days later Poe drew the 
blankets from Ellis & Allan, and left via Baltimore. " When I 
parted from you at the steamboat, I knew that I should never 
see you again." The same day that Poe took the oath at West 
Point, the twins were born in Richmond. 

881 Mr. Allan would scarcely " abuse " Mrs. Clemm or Edgar's paralyzed 
grandmother. The Poe cousins were not known to him personally. Henry might 
have come in for a tongue lashing, but all the probability here points to Edgar's 
parents, "my family, and myself." He may have included Mosher Poe in his 
remarks. 



THE WEST POINT INTERLUDE 295 

So it was not so very simple after all! Like all important and 
long enduring human relationships it was very, very complex. 
John Allan and Edgar Poe loved each other. In the inmost realm 
of the spirit they were father and son. Time and fate had made 
them so. That is the only satisfactory explanation of the enor- 
mous agitation behind their correspondence; the reason, why, in 
spite of all, they could never quite break it off. Even on the last 
West Point letter, the older man endorses: " He may do or act as 
he pleases tho' I would have saved him but on Ms own terms. . . ." 
In the last analysis it was John Allan's sensuousness and obstinacy 
that ruined the two finest associations of his remarkable life. It 
killed Frances Allan, and it blasted Poe. The strange, Scotch 
parsimony was only a concomitant. Even after his second mar- 
riage the revelation of " Bully's " letter was a sore blow. The 
raveled thread was snapped; Poe left West Point, and went into 
a nervous collapse. If this was not tragedy, the word to describe 
it has not been coined. 

The process of cutting the bonds of military discipline was 
more protracted than Poe surmised. Mr. Allan's consent was not 
forthcoming, so the young man had to set about it the next 
way. The manner was simple enough; it consisted in taking the 
path of least resistance. After the receipt of the letter from 
Richmond, Poe simply gave up. Although the plan was deliberate, 
it also bears out his own testimony that he was too physically 
ill to go on. From January 7, 1831, he absented himself from all 
military formations, recitations, and from church, and he dis- 
obeyed the orders of his superiors when he was directed to take 
part. The prime military virtue of obedience was thus hopelessly 
insulted, beyond that there was no "moral offence" involved. 
The story that he deserted either from the Army proper or from 
the Military Academy, is a legend which it is scarcely necessary 
to deny. 

On January 5, 1831, it appears that a court-martial under the 
presidency of Lieutenant Leslie of the Engineers was convened at 
West Point to try several cadets for offences against discipline. 
For some reason the sittings of the court were postponed until 
January 28. During the two weeks prior to that event there were 



296 ISRAFEL 

scarcely any duties which Cadet Poe did not ingeniously manage 
to neglect. As a consequence after disposing of some other 
cases 382 

The Court next proceeded to the trial of Cadet E. A. Poe of the 
U. S. Military Academy on the following charges and specifications: 

CHARGE ist GROSS NEGLECT OF DUTY 

Specification ist In this, that he, the said Cadet Poe, did absent 
himself from the following parades and roll calls between the yth 
January and 27th January 1831. . . . 

Specification 2nd In this, that he, the said Cadet E. A. Poe, did 
absent himself from all Academical duties between the isth and 2?th 
January 1831. . . . 

CHARGE 2nd DISOBEDIENCE OF ORDERS 

Specification ist In this, that he, the said Cadet Poe, after having 
been directed by the officer of the day to attend church on the 23rd 
of January 1831, did fail to obey such order. . . . 

Specification 2nd In this, that he, the said Cadet Poe, did fail to 
attend the Academy on the 25th January 1831, after having been di- 
rected to do so by the officer of the day. 

Poe pleaded gwlty to all but the first specification of the first 
charge, to which he pleaded not guilty. As that charge was auto- 
matically proven by the rollbooks for formations, he thus put him- 
self beyond all recommendations for mercy. " After mature de- 
liberation on the testimony deduced," the " prisoner " was found 
" Guilty on all the charges and specifications," and it was adjudged 
"that he, Cadet E. A. Poe, be dismissed the service of the 
United States." 882 The sentence was made effective as of March 
6, 1831, in order to provide sufficient sums out of his pay to sat- 
isfy his indebtedness to the Academy. On that date Poe was offi- 
cially discharged with a balance to his credit of twenty-four 
cents. Long before that, however, he was on his way to New York 
City. 

The findings of the court-martial were approved by the Secre- 
tary of War on February 8, 1831, and seem to have taken a week 

82 An abbreviated transcript of Military Academy Order No. 7, Engineer 
Department, Washington, February 8, 1831. Prof. James H. Harrison prints this, 
vol. II, pages 374-376> from Ingram. 



THE WEST POINT INTERLUDE 299 

or so before they were returned to West Point. Poe must have 
had some qualms imagining the face of Major Eaton as he read 
the record of the trial and called to mind the enthusiastic promises 
of a certain Richmond youth a little over a year before, one who 
had walked from Baltimore to plead his case personally. That, 
however, deterred neither Mr. Secretary nor Cadet Poe, and on 
February 17 or 1 8 the latter was given his release. 

One can imagine him upon the evening of that eventful day 
packing up his books, John Allan's inkstand, a few uniforms 
which he kept to remind him of past glories, and the lares and 
penates which accompanied even the poorest of waif poets in 
the iron-bound trunk that John Allan had sent him by steamboat 
to Baltimore. Then he made the rounds, saying good-bye, not 
without a certain relish for the brief glamor that surrounds a 
departing spirit at the Military Academy, who has dared to defy 
the delegated authority of the United States and survived. And 
we can imagine him, too, selling off for what he could get, a few 
picayunes and fipenny bits at most, the scanty remains of his 
outfit. Perhaps there was a shako, or a slim sword exchanged 
next morning at Old Benny's for a thin second-hand suit of 
citizen's clothes, a parting nip with the old rascal " on the house," 
with " here's luck." It was, we know, a cold, a very cold day. 

On February 19, 1831, -the steamboat from Albany stopped at 
the desolate West Point wharf to take on board a lonely figure 
dressed in a nondescript costume consisting of a thin and badly 
worn suit of second-hand clothes rendered somewhat grotesque 
by a cadet's overcoat and a battered hat. A small iron-bound 
trunk was trundled on board, and the old side-wheeler " Henry 
Eckford " thrashed her way down stream toward New York. 883 
The young man on the deck shivered and fingered the lonely 
coins in his pocket somewhat apprehensively. No one, who saw 
the nervous trembling of the bird-like fingers, would have sus- 
pected that they had just relinquished the sword and were al- 

883 From The Northern Traveler, a guidebook of the time, and a contemporary 
steamboat schedule, it appears that the steamer "Henry Eckford,'* with two 
freight barges in tow, plied between New York and Albany and made local stops. 
The fare from New York to Albany was $1.00. The "Henry" called at West 
Point Dock, February 19, 1831, on the down trip. 



300 ISRAFEL 

ready* reaching ambitiously for a mightier weapon. The fare was 
at least seventy-five cents, and that was about all he had. The 
two freight barges behind the " Henry " took up the slack of 
the tow line with a swish and trailed on behind; the departing 
wail of the steamer's whistle echoed up the gorge of the Hudson, 
to be answered by the notes of a bugle from the heights above. 
Future generals of the United States and the Confederacy were 
on their way to recitation and the several stars that afterwards 
adorned their shoulders or collars. Israfel was following his own. 



CHAPTER XIV 
The Weary, Wayworn Wanderer 

POE arrived in New York about February 20, 1831, and 
seems to have remained there until the end of March 
of that year. During this sojourn, his movements and 
doings are exceedingly obscure. The young man who took up 
lodgings somewhere close to Madison Square can best be de- 
scribed in his own words as " a weary, wayworn wanderer." He 
was literally penniless, and thinly clad. There was no Ellis & 
Allan to draw upon for even a mourning suit now; he was just 
out of West Point and without sufficient civilian clothes. His 
scheme seems to have been to obtain literary work of some sort, 
probably with the newspapers, while the forthcoming volume held 
out some hopes of a small return. But in the meantime he must 
eat, and he was also very ill. 

In the last letter from West Point, Poe had assured John Allan 
that he would never trouble him again. Faced by starvation and 
the prospect of a serious illness, however, he was once more forced 
to eat humble pie, lacking anything more substantial. Two days 
after leaving the Military Academy he writes in his New York 
lodging from what he feels is probably his death-bed, asking his 
" father " to send him enough to keep from starving. 

The break at West Point and the severance of all home ties, 
with the consequent necessity of making an immediate about face 
in his plans and order of life, had undoubtedly entailed a fierce 
mental and spiritual struggle. He was, in fact, in one of those 
nervous emotional crises which make or mar a career. 384 This 
was reflected in his physical condition. He left West Point in a 
depleted and fatigued state. The trip down, we are told, was bit- 
terly cold, and he had no adequate clothing, " no cloak " he 

as* New light upon Poe's condition, and the date of his arrival in New York, 
has been thrown on this period by the Valentine Museum Letters, letter No. 2$, 
New York, February 21, 1831. 



3 02 ISRAFEL 

says, although it is known that he brought with him from the 
Military Academy his cadet's overcoat and wore it years later 
even at Fordham. 885 However that may be, he contracted an al- 
most fatal " cold," complicated by ear trouble. The result seems 
to have been one of those periods of complete nervous and psychic 
exhaustion that occasionally overtook him from now on, in which 
a weak heart played an important part. 884 In the midst of this he 
wrote the despairing letter to Richmond. 884 

In this letter, in addition to his desperate appeals for help, 
which even the disordered and blotted writing stamps as genuine, 
Poe attempts to defend himself for his course of procedure; lays 
the blame for being " dismissed " on his guardian's refusal to give 
him permission to resign; and expatiates on his excellent standing 
in class, and the sympathy of his superiors and classmates. This 
sympathy, he says, he possessed; adding that sickness was the 
real cause of his dropping out, and everybody at " The Point " 
knew it. In the meantime he is writing from his " death-bed," 
and a little help during his last hours would be grateful. 

The letter is undoubtedly exaggerated in its self-pity, but it 
was written during a time of great pain from a discharging ear, 
with the horror of starvation near, alone in a strange city, and 
by a terrified and delicately sensitive young man. Where else 
could he appeal but to " Dear Pa " and " home." " Do not tell 
my sister," he pleads "I shall send to the post office every 
day." But he sent in vain. That home which he addressed was his 
no longer. The letter was smugly filed away to receive over two 
years later a coldly furious endorsement from a stern hand. 

Somehow, doubtless to his own surprise, Poe recovered in a 
week or so and found himself able to read proofs at the office of 
Elam Bliss at in Broadway, where "the second edition" of 
Poems was underway. Mr. Bliss, who was a kindly man, may 
also have taken pity on the young poet and have invited him to 
dine with him at his home at 28 Dey Street, where we may be 
sure the hospitality was, to the guest at least, no empty formality. 



885 This coat, and various other items of military attire, evidently relics^ of 
West Point days, are mentioned by several persons who knew Poe from this time 
on. 



THE WEARY, WAYWORN WANDERER 303 

One of the few reminiscences of Poe at this time comes from 
Peter Pindar Pease, an erstwhile clerk at a Charlottesville store, 
who says he had met Poe in Boston when in similar desperate cir- 
cumstances and who now ran across him again in New York. 888 
From him it seems that it was Poe's custom to walk under the 
elm trees in Madison Square, and, that upon one occasion, Poe 
dined with Peter Pindar Pease and informed him that he had at 
last " struck it hard"; meaning that he was in good luck, and 
probably referring to the new book. The statement is, character- 
istic. Nothing could tame the young poet's pride; the possibility 
of fame from the book must have filled his mind. Despite the 
indications of poverty which Pease noted, he found Poe in a 
confident and boastful mood. Who paid for the dinner, we do 
not learn. 

At this period Inman, the artist, had his studio at 48 Vesey 
Street, and it was now, if at any time, that he painted the portrait 
of Poe with which he has been credited. It is doubtful if he 
really did so, however, as the picture does not resemble the other 
known authentic likenesses of Poe in later life. All that can 
be said is that it shows a well-dressed, rather slight, sensitive 
featured, and delicately bred young man in his early twenties, and 
that it might be Poe. If so, it is the earliest picture of the poet 
known. Mr. Bliss may have arranged for it on the strength of the 
forthcoming book, but it is extremely unlikely. Poe was penniless 
and unknown, and there is no indication that Inman was his close 
friend. The picture may be any young dandy in the costume of 
the time. 

It was a hard time financially, too, Jackson's fast and loose fis- 
cal policy was already beginning to make money tight, and the 
times were distinctly close ones for the inhabitants of the avenues 
as well as Grubb Street. 887 Evidently the bulk of the money for the 

sse From an untraced clipping from an article. " P. P. Pease " is alluded to else- 
where as an early prohibitionist and anti-saloon man. Dr. Mabbott suggests The 
Outlook. I have been unable to verify this as the source. 

887 Andrew Jackson was attacking the charter of the Bank of the United 
States, and the period of financial chaos, state banks, and " wild cat " money was 
being ushered in. While Poe was in New York in February, 1831, the attack was 
going on in Congress. (Benton, View, 1. 187-325 ; Deb., XI. 143-6*0 The effect was 
alarming* 



ISRAFEL 



new book was not forthcoming until it was delivered at West 
Point. Perhaps a few advances saved the day. So it was hard 
sledding at best. Poe wrote to his brother Henry, for whom he 
had already gone into debt, but his brother was now dying in 
Baltimore and could not aid him. By the beginning of March it 
was evident that New York would not afford a living to an un- 
known pen, and we find the young poet writing to Colonel Thayer, 
the Superintendent at West Point, whose favor he seems to have 
over-estimated. Colonel Thayer had probably been " kind," but 
he doubtless, for all that, had his reservations about young gen- 
tlemen who were dismissed for not attending church, even when 
directed to do so by the officer of the day! Temporarily, Poe 
seems to have considered becoming a soldier of fortune. 
The letter read: 

New York, March 10, 1831. 

SIR; _ Having no longer any ties which can bind me to my native 
country no projects nor any friends I intend by the first op- 
portunity to proceed to Paris with the view of obtaining through the 
interest of the Marquis de La Fayette an appointment (if possible) in 
the Polish Army. 

In the event of the interference of France in behalf of Poland this 
may easily be effected 388 at all events it will be my only feasible 
plan of procedure. 

The object of this letter is respectfully to request that you will give 
me such assistance as may be in your power in furtherance of my views. 

A certificate of ' standing ' in my class is all that I have any right to 
expect. 

Anything further a letter to a friend in Paris or to the Marquis 
would be a kindness which I should never forget. Most respectfully, 

Yr. obt. s't., 

EDGAR A. POE 
Col. S. Thayer, Supt. U. S. M. A. 88 * 



888 In 1830-31 the Poles rebelled against the tyranny of Tsar Nicholas I. 
Patriotic secret societies drove the Russians out of Warsaw November 29, 1830. 
On January 2$, 1831, the independence of Poland was proclaimed; the help of 
France was hoped for. A few months later the rebellion was suppressed with 
frightful cruelty on both sides. By September, 1831, it was over. Poe evidently 
watched these events carefully. 

389 Printed in the New York Sun for October 30, 1902, from manuscripts left 
to the Association of West Point Graduates by General Cullum. 



THE WEARY, WAYWORN WANDERER 305 

What an impression La Fayette had made on Poe, and how 
much he counted on the influence of his grandfather's friend is 
plainly shadowed forth in this letter. Colonel Thayer did not 
reply, it seems, and the young writer evidently soon gave up all 
thought of following a military career any longer. It was the last 
gesture in that direction, and a desperate one at that, but it is in- 
teresting to note that, even at this date, Poe felt it might be well 
for him to go abroad. Perhaps he felt instinctively that his talents 
might be appreciated where he, indeed, first received the greatest 
recognition. There was evidently no place for him in New York. 
Assured of this, he began once more to turn his thoughts toward 
Baltimore. Richmond offered nothing. In Baltimore, at least 
there were family relations, and, through them, he might hope to 
gain friends. If nothing else, Mrs. Clemm's house offered maternal 
affection and a roof. In the meantime the poems had appeared, 
and Poland had capitulated. In that, the letter to Colonel Thayer 
had received a conclusive answer. 

Sometime about the end of March, 1831, Elam Bliss seems to 
have completed Poems by Edgar A. Poe, " second edition," and 
the cadets at West Point were pondering and grumbling over the 
incomprehensible lines of Israfel, To Helen, Lenore, The Sleeper 9 
and The Valley of Unrest. Nor did the inscription 

TO THE U. S. CORPS OF CADETS 
THIS VOLUME 

IS 
RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED 

tend to ease the sting of having been gulled. No one, of course, 
suspected that it was the most enduring compliment that a cer- 
tain " corps " could receive. For a few minutes, the dark figure 
that had been a stranger among them was recalled. Then the busy 
bugles blew again drowning out the disgruntled laughter. It 
seemed as if for a third time the young poet's assault upon ob- 
livion had called forth nothing but derision, and a few, a very 
few coins. On these he remained some days longer in New York, 
and on the remainder, a very scant remainder, set out wayworn 
and weary shortly afterward for Baltimore. It was at least a move 



306 ISRAFEL 

towards his own native shore. The loadstone of " home," how- 
ever, still fluttered the directing needle because, for Poe, Rich- 
mond never lost the peculiar quality of a magnet. Elmira was still 
there, and all the other invisible lines of magnetism were set 
strong. 

Poe's third book, Poems (second edition) New York, published 
by Elam Bliss, 1831, was a duodecimo volume of 124 pages bound 
in pale green boards, and rather poorly printed on ordinary rag 
paper. The exact number of the edition is not known, but it cer- 
tainly did not exceed five hundred. 800 The title page bore the line 
from La Chausee, 301 " Tout le monde a Raison" this sentiment 
being a sort of plea for a liberal attitude toward the contents of 
the book and for the critical theories which it advocated in the 

preface entitled, "Letter to Mr. ." This anonymous 

person is addressed as "Dear B," and may have been Elam 
Bliss himself. The poems were here reprinted in revised form 
from the earlier Baltimore edition of 1829. In that sense only the 
1831 Poems was a second edition. 

The " Letter to Mr. B " is somewhat rambling, and was evi- 
dently written in off-hours at West Point, whence it is dated. In 
this preface, Poe informs us, amid a rather youthful parade of 
erudition resounding with the names of Shakespeare and Milton, 
that in his revisions of earlier work he has learned the lesson of 
the shears, and that these poems now appear with " the trash 
taken away from them in which they were embedded." The most 
interesting thing in the epistle to " Mr. B," however, is the ap- 
pearance here for the first time of Poe's theory of poetic criticism. 
Literary reputation, he says, percolates the social pyramid from 
" a few gifted individuals who kneel around the summit, behold- 
ing, face to face, the master spirit who stands upon the pinnacle." 
After a brief comment on the difficulty of an American author 
being taken seriously he continues: 

390 This is a liberal estimate and allows for the number distributed at West 
Point, and about two hundred fifty for general distribution half and half 
a not improbable arrangement. 

391 Dr. Thomas Oliive Mabbott finds that this line, heretofore attributed to 
Rochefoucauld, is from La Chausee, the whole quotation meaning, " When all the 
world is wrong, all the world is right." 



POEMS 



EDGAR A. POE. 



TOUT LE 9&OKD& A TiAISON. 



SECOND EDITION. 




Title Page of Poems Second Edition 
Published in New York by Elam Bliss in 1831 

EDGAR ALLAN POE'S third published Volume usually known as the "West 

Point Book" 

Courtesy of a New York Collector 



THE WEARY, WAYWORN WANDERER 307 

You are aware of the great barrier in the path of an American 
writer. He is read, if at all, in preference to the combined and estab- 
lished wit of the world. Our antiquaries abandon time for distance, 
our very fops glance from the binding to the bottom of the title page, 
where the mystic characters which spell London, Paris, or Geneva, are 
precisely so many letters of recommendation. . . . 

After this brief beginning of what was later to develop into one 
of the favorite themes of his acrid criticism, Poe leaps rapidly 
past Aristotle, taking the opportunity to shy a brick at didactic 
poetry, which leads him to Wordsworth whom he handles roughly. 
Coleridge he mentions next with reverence. To him indeed, he 
owed most of his theory of poetry with which he ends this rather 
remarkable but nevertheless jejune preface: 

A poem, is in my opinion, 392 opposed to a work of science by having, 
for its immediate object, pleasure not truth: to romance by having for 
its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem only 
so far as this object is attained: romance presenting perceptible images 
with definite, poetry with indefinite sensations, to which end music is 
an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefi- 
nite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is 
poetry, music, without the idea, is simply music: the idea without the 
music, is prose from its very definiteness. 

This was the germ of the famous lecture of years later on The 
Poetic Principle, and the source, having its roots, in the discus- 
sions of Coleridge, from which he developed and elaborated his 
own canons for both writing and criticizing verse. Like nearly 
all poetic criticism by poets, it was, in its final analysis, a special 
and ingenious plea for the kind of poetry he himself wrote* Despite 
the leaven of considerable truth, it remains as an interesting ex- 
ample of " rationalization." 

The body of the book contained eleven poems, notably: To 
Helen, Israjel, and The Doomed City, the first version of the 
later a much improved City in the Sea. To Helen has, in its re- 
vised form, taken its place as one of the great lyrics of the lan- 



the exception of the words "in my opinion," this theory is lifted 
verbatim from Coleridge's Biographic Literaria, chapter XIV. I am indebted to 
Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch for this reference showing the early effect of Coleridge 
on Poe. 



3 o8 ISRAFEL 



guage, while Israfel is undoubtedly the first, wildly clear burst 
of song of the " bitter, bright, cold morning " of a winter day that 
was to end, like all winter days, in early night. No more golden 
notes of prideful promise have ever been uttered as a prelude. As 
usual the sources of the poems betray a strange mixture of auto- 
biography, with real and imaginary landscapes. 

I could not love have except where Death 
Was mingling his with Beauty's breath, 
Or Hymen, Time and Destiny 
Were stalking between her and me. 

strongly recalls the experiences of the past decade with the tragic 
death of Mrs. Stanard and Frances Allan, the unfortunate out- 
come of the affair with Elmira Royster, and the troubles at home. 
The figure of the " Lost Beloved " now first comes strongly into 
its own. "Helen" is probably a combination and imaginative 
synthesis of Jane Stith Stanard and Frances Allan with the ab- 
stract longing for the perfect Beloved common to all young men. 
Lenore seems to be more definitely applicable to Elmira. As for 
Israfel it is undoubtedly about Poe himself. The City in the Sea, 
and the Valley of Unrest combine the peculiar effects of brows- 
ings in Oriental literature, and the memories of Scotland and the 
Carolina Low Country fused with a mystical magic. Some of the 
lines, and even whole poems, approach perilously near the banal, 
but they are nearly always saved by a certain distinction. Many 
of the selections, notably, Irene, later called The Sleeper, owed 
their fame to the revisions of later years. But despite all this, 
there are many great lines in the book, and it can safely be said 
that it constitutes an important addition to American poetry. Al 
Aaraaf again appeared together with Tamerlane, now, for the 
second time, considerably revised. Israfel itself still waited the 
sure and final touches of the now rapidly maturing hand. For 
the first time Poe had written poems which in conception, music, 
and content were wholly and peculiarly his own. 

For the time being, however, the inward knowledge of this ac- 
complishment had to be its own reward. The only concrete evi- 
dence of public approbation was a few dollars left over from the 



THE WEARY, WAYWORN WANDERER 309 

subscription, which Mr. Bliss paid to the poet, several author's 
copies, and the following obscure notice whose very source has 
been forgotten. 

The poetry of this little volume has a plausible air of imagination, 
inconsistent with the general indefiniteness of the ideas. Everything in 
the language betokens poetic inspiration, but it rather resembles the 
leaves of the sybil when scattered by the winds. . . . 89S 

Packing a few copies of his poems and his pitiably scant 
" wardrobe " in what must have been a very cheap or second- 
hand carpet-bag, Poe took the few dollars that remained to him, 
after Mr. Elam Bliss and the printers were satisfied, and made 
his way to Baltimore, probably immediately after his writing the 
letter to Colonel Thayer. That seems to have been a final gesture 
of sheer desperation. 894 

A guidebook of the time, 865 evidently written for prudent and 
conservative travelers, informs the wary voyager that in New 
York " it is best to go to the steam boat ten or fifteen minutes 
before the time of departure to avoid the crowd which always col- 
lects at the dock. Caution, if luggage is sent by a porter, ask 
him for his number, so that if he is negligent or dishonest, he may 
be reported at the police office." This caution we may be sure Poe 
did not have to observe upon the blustering March day in 1831, 
when he set out for Baltimore via Philadelphia. If the iron-bound 
trunk largely filled with Poems, second edition, accompanied him, 
it must have done so upon a wheelbarrow, side by side with the 
faded flowers upon a carpet-bag, and the " crowd " at the docks 
just above the Battery, doubtless looked somewhat askance at 
the starved and Spanish-looking young gentleman attired in a 
cadet's overcoat and a beaver hat. A pair of clumsy army boots 
disguised what would otherwise have been a rather neat and deli- 
cate foot. 

There were at that time four steamboat lines connecting with 
Philadelphia, the first stage of the journey taking the traveler as 



sss Woodberry prints this from some anonymous press dippings. 
89* The letter to Colonel Thayer was written from New York on March 
10, 1831; on May 6, 1831, he wrote in Baltimore to William Gwynn. 



3io 



ISRAFEL 



far as Perth Amboy or New Brunswick. The boats left from 
" downtown " docks, and, as they pulled out for the Jersey side 
of the Hudson, the little city of New York lay spread before one. 
It was a delightful old town. A dash of green along the Battery 
" on summer evenings the place is supplied with music, and often 
fireworks . . . and Castle Garden has a fine promenade. . . . 
Broadway, the most fashionable promenade in the city, is most 
crowded with passengers between one and three o'clock, or in 
hot weather, after dinner." There were forty-two fire engines, 
besides two hook and ladder companies! Eight (8) large brick 
schoolhouses, " averaging nearly forty-two by eighty-five feet in 
size/' where no less than five thousand children enjoyed the maps, 
globes, and libraries, and the uniform system of the Lancasterian 
Plan at $1.25 a quarter, although two of them were " given over " 
to Africans. 865 The mass of low-roofed, white framed and brick 
houses topped by a few flat steeples, extended in a solid mass as 
far north as Washington Street. "The village of Hoboken is 
seen a mile or more up the river and the hills of Weehauken, but 
on the eastern shore of the river opposite the Palisades ... the 
soil is inferior; and the woodland encroaches too much upon the 
fields and orchards." Here, in the middle distance, glimmered the 
spire and the farmhouses of Greenwich Village. "The Lunatic 
Asylum, about seven miles from the city, is a large building of 
hewn stone, occupying a commanding position." 

The world across which the young Poe moved from New York 
to Baltimore wore, as yet, an ancient face. It was the world which 
had remained largely stationary from Julius Caesar to Napoleon. 
Its rhythms were those of the coach horse and the water mill, and 
its thoughts were secondary reflections on the sages and poets of 
Palestine, Greece and Rome. Only here and there a subtle change 
was beginning to come across it. Now and then white sails were 
prophetically veiled by steamer smoke, here and there a factory 
chimney disputed the eminence of the church steeple; the prisms 
of canals cut across the landscape, or groups of surveyors began 
to whisper through the yet colonial countryside the strange 
syllables of "railroad." Groups of farmers would shortly be 
gathering to toss up their hats as their first iron-horse roared by. 



THE WEARY, WAYWORN WANDERER 311 

The quiet of the landscape was, however, deceptive, for, in the 
towns, the giant of an industrial democracy had already begun to 
stretch himself. The unexpected surplus in the Federal Treasury 
was being divided among the states for " national improvements." 
Under the eager demands of the Western voters who had left the 
stains of their muddy boots on John Quincy Adams' aristocratic 
furniture, as Andrew Jackson entered the White House with a 
whoop, canals were already stretching their arms across the 
mountains, and railway routes were following fast. The making, 
the carrying, and the marketing of things as an end in itself, was 
about to become the be-all and the end-all here. It was the last 
comprehensive glimpse at the undisturbed world into which he 
had been born that Israfel was to have. In a few years a gigantic 
change was to sweep across the landscape, altering the very aspect 
of things, disturbing that subtle balance and blend of objects, the 
eternal fitness of one thing with another, which only nature can 
produce on a grand scale, and which men have called " beauty." 
Nor was this process, which went on so rapidly and, in its first 
crude essays, under the eyes of Poe, unseen by him or uncom- 
mented upon. The young poet who had already written: 

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art! 
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. 
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, 
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? 

was thoroughly aware of the secrets which the " peering eyes " 
had found, secrets that were being applied to " dull realities " to 
" alter all things, to drive 

... the Hamadryad from the wood 

To seek a shelter in some happier star. . . ." 

He too sought a shelter in a happier star. It was the sphere of 
his dreams, made up largely of the visions of the early more in- 
tegrated world of his childhood and the reveries extracted from 
the literature of other epochs. This was the world for which he 
longed, and looked back upon with a heart-uneasy homesickness, 
that strange longing which lends a romantic retrospect, and a 



3I2 ISRAFEL 



mystic delight, to the many hermitages which he evoked with 
words; such as, The Valley of Grass, The Landscape Garden, and 
the Domain of Arnheim. Along with this desire " to return," so 
impossible of fulfillment, as he grew older, was the ever-widening 
angle between himself and the world of reality around him, a pro- 
gressive and cumulative advance of nervous and psychic incom- 
patibility that made him less and less capable of coping with an 
environment which grew more and more out of harmony with his 
desires. From now on, this divergence must be reckoned with as 
we watch Israfel tossed from horn to horn of an impossible 
dilemma; that of a personality without a neighborhood. The re- 
fuges, and anodynes, the seductive subterfuges to which he re- 
sorted were often more fatal than the trouble itself. Indeed, the 
very medicines which their victim prescribed, were, in a large 
sense, the symptoms of the progressive disease which he sought 
to allay. It was a strange acceleration of blended cause and effect 
that fused into one tremendous cause, destined to finally hurl 
him out of a world which he found intolerable, a cumulative 
tragedy, that ended in a smash resounding through time. Fortu- 
nately, for us, the spectators, both the victim and the rapidly 
shifting world across which he moved were strangely, almost 
grotesquely, interesting. 

Poe had been born into the easy-going, sedate, and in many 
ways self-sufficient world of the early Republic, its conventions 
were those of a primarily agricultural society. Its methods and 
means of life had culminated in attitudes which were the result 
of generations of experience, and its taste was reflected in the 
semi-classical costume, architecture, and furniture of the day. 
That, in short, was its objective comment upon life. It was a 
world of gentlemen and ladies, who regarded themselves in the 
half-English, half-Roman Republic that they founded, as the 
natural directors and patrons of the society which they were born 
to administer. Across this quiet picture the hand of " progress " 
suddenly moved an erasive sponge dipped in a solvent of the new 
ideas and forces released by mechanical science, and the drab 
wash of a frontier democracy without tradition. For a few decades 
all the colors in the social picture, ran and blended; outlines and 



THE WEARY, WAYWORN WANDERER 313 

perspective were lost in the total effect of a crude smear. It was 
through these decades that Poe lived; at the end of the incredible 
forties, when he died. He disliked the strong solution on the 
sponge, and he doubted the direction of the hand which employed 
it. From this disturbed picture of running colors in the stage of 
solution, the domains which he perfected in literature were his 
escape. Like other men he could not climb completely out of his 
own time, but the physical means which he employed to escape 
out of its rococo frame, constitute the story of his own undoing. 

In 1831, the first daubs of the sponge were just beginning to 
be apparent. The Republic was ended and the Democracy had 
begun. Andrew Jackson had introduced the spoils system. 395 It 
was a political idea that had many social ramifications. 

Poe had seen the port of New York in 1820, upon his return 
from England. It was then scarcely more than an enlarged and 
hustling colonial town enmeshed in a mass of yards and rigging 
of the sail-borne argosies of the world. In 1831, a new note was 
upon the water and the landscape. Here and there a factory chim- 
ney raised its dark plumed head amid the steeples, and against 
the snow banks of sails crossed the nervous spider web of walking- 
beams driving over half a hundred side-wheel steamers that, 
even at that date, threaded the harbor and rivers of Manhattan. 
Their paddles ate steadily into the problem of distance with an 
astonishing and prophetic speed. Characteristically enough, the 
passengers did not care very much where they were going; all 
that they knew was that they were going faster. For them, and 
for their descendants, it has been enough. The age of marvels 
had begun. 

The " Philadelphia Steam Boat Line " at that time ended at 
New Brunswick in New Jersey where travelers took up the second 
lap of the journey on the " Forenoon Line " of stages, after stay- 
ing at the hotel all night. We are assured by good contemporary 
authority S65 that " the view is pretty from the hill ... whence 



895 During the first year of Jackson's presidency about 690 officers were re- 
moved. The subordinates removed by these swelled the number of those who lost 
their positions to about 2000. The total number of removals by all former Presi- 
dents was 74. 



3I4 ISRAFEL 

public buildings appear to good advantage, particularly the The- 
ological Seminary, which is under the synod of the Dutch Re- 
formed Church thence the route led to Princeton, covered be- 
hind laboring post horses, with dinner at the stage-house just 
opposite Nassau Hall in the center of the town. Just across the 
street was the large college yard, the heavy shade trees, and the 
" fashionable burying ground," where " sober " travelers could 
walk off the fumes of poker-heated toddy by perusing the edify- 
ing epitaphs of Aaron Burr, Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Davis, 
Samuel Finley, John Witherspoon, and even Samuel S. Smith. 
Then it was only ten miles by way of Lamberton and the State 
Prison to Trenton, over a bridge on the Delaware, " a handsome 
structure with five arches" that gave approach to "a town of 
considerable size, with a great number of stores and the aspect of 
business." Doubtless Poe took it all in from the less comfortable 
but cheaper and more " aspect-informing " top of the " Forenoon 
Line." 

At Trenton, the Union Line Steamers left for Philadelphia, 
" except when the water is low," paddling by Coal Haven a little 
cove on the west side of the river where " arks " laden with coal 
from the Lehigh mines waited to be towed to Philadelphia 896 
and thence past Bordentown on a steep sandbank through which 
a road cut down to the dock. Just north of the village stood the 
long white house of Joseph Bonaparte, the Count de Survilliers 
and one time King of Spain with the two low square towers 
at the end, and a great shot tower near it on the river. Bristol was 
passed next, " where a number of gentlemen's seats adorned the 
river banks with much admired flower gardens along the verge 
lington with a row of fine residences facing the river. Before it 
ornamented with fine weeping willows." A little beyond, lay Bur- 
ran a wide, grassy street with a beautiful sloping embankment. 
Below Burlington, the banks of the Delaware widen and flatten 



396 At Philadelphia is located the Bank of the United States, an institution, 
which, while it has signally failed in its prime object of producing a stable national 
currency, is heated by a furnace centrally located and fructified twice daily by 
Lehigh coals." Extract from a notice evidently written by a Jackson man, in a 
contemporary (1831) guide book. This sentence is peculiarly explanatory of the 
times. 



THE WEARY, WAYWORN WANDERER 315 

out into a low and marshy country on the eighteen mile run to 
Philadelphia. It is, says the Northern Traveler, " quite unfriendly 
to the picturesque " but it was then the haunt of reed birds, 
and wild, crimson-breasted ducks who fed sedately upon the 
edible cresses of the salt marsh, riding the waves of the passing 
steamers so confidently that they became the temptation of travel- 
ing sportsmen, who shot at them from the decks of steamboats, 
tilting their beaver hats back and discommoding their stocks to 
draw a bead along the elegantly chased barrels of English fowl- 
ing pieces belching forth a deal of white smoke and a loud 
" bang." 80T 

About here supper was ready. The captain sat at the head of 
the long, white table set with a profusion of side dishes and thick, 
ruddy glasses, while overhead the chain chandeliers jangled 
musically at every down stroke of the simple engine; the whistle 
wailed away over the marshes; the alternate jets of steam darted 
upward, now to port, and now to starboard from the stand-pipes, 
and the smoke rolled backward from the trim smoke-stacks 
topped with the prim lace of pointed iron-cuffs. 

Over this placid fertile Delaware valley, which had been the 
home of Mark Woolston, Cooper's hero of the Rancocus and The 
Peak stories that were familiar to Poe young Israfel gazed 
from the hurricane deck of the Union Line Steamer on a March 
day in the early thirties, when around a great bend in the river a 
distant steeple and a high shot tower overtopping the low roofs 
of the Quaker City came into sight. 

Three glass-houses near the water, with white walls and black 
roofs, next engaged the attention of the curious traveler, with 
the shipyards behind; then the boat house in the Navy Yard 
rising over a little island in the river loomed up, and the steamer 
swung into the Market and Arch Street wharves. There was a 
tangle of the spars of square-riggers along the waterfront, gilded 
figure-heads leaping out from the arch bows of fast clippers load- 
ing for London, China, and the wide world; a rumble of drays 
along the cobbled quays and the crowd of gentlemen with high 

397 The habit of shooting at game from public conveyances was an American 
custom upon which foreign travelers of the time comment with disgust. 



316 ISRAFEL 



hats and gold-knobbed canes, ladies in rustling silk skirts with 
bustles, poke bonnets, absurd little cloth slippers peeping in and 
out under their dresses, and little girls with lace frilled pantalettes 
rushed out of the dock-houses to climb high busses with eagles 
and landscapes painted on their sides, or to be bustled, valises, 
leather trunks and all, into high-backed carriages that rumbled 
and swayed homeward over the joggling flagstones of the nar- 
row streets, lit dimly here and there by a chained whale-oil 
lamp. 

The sanded floor of some waterfront tavern where candles 
burned dimly in the small square-paned windows probably ex- 
tended its humble hospitality to Poe. Like Franklin, a century 
before, he had arrived in Philadelphia with only a few pennies in 
his pockets. There was, of course, the United States Hotel on 
Chestnut Street opposite the Great Bank, or the Mansion House 
on South Third, or, for the more domestically inclined, Mrs. 
Sword's on Walnut Street, whose scrapple and sausage breakfasts 
were famous, or Mrs. Allen's on Sixth Street near the State 
House, who went in for " sparrow-grass " and reed birds smoth- 
ered in butter but all of these implied the possession of bank 
notes. Besides, New York money was at a discount in Penn- 
sylvania. We may be sure that a certain young man, the author 
of three books of poems, lately dismissed from West Point, dried 
his army overcoat before a far less pretentious fire somewhere 
near the Market. 

About the same time a poor youth by the name of Horace 
Greeley arrived in New York with all his worldly goods bundled 
in a handkerchief. 

Whether Poe called on his friend, Mr. Lea, at Carey & Lea, 
the publishers, or on the editor of the Philadelphia Casket during 
this sojourn of a few hours in the Quaker City is not known. He 
seldom missed an opportunity to cultivate an editor, but this 
time he was provided with neither the clothes nor the mood to 
make an impression, and it is not probable that he was advertising 
the fact in influential quarters that he had been dismissed from 
West Point. The state of his purse also admitted of no delay, and 
the day after his arrival probably saw him on the way to Balti- 




On the Philadelphia Trenton Line 

From an old print 
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Historical Society 




Philadelphia from the Navy Yard 

/'/om aw oW ^>rtw^ 
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Historical Society 




-S2 



o> 

CO C 

oo a 



S 



a 

(L> 
-O 



OJ 
W 

o 2i .2 





s 



.S 



Q 






THE WEARY, WAYWORN WANDERER 317 

more on the steamboat line by which he had made the trip two 
years before. 

Baltimore was then the third city in the United States. Owing 
to the development of ship canals between it and Philadelphia, 
and the building of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, it was like 
many other American towns of the time, just entering upon a 
period of surprising enterprise. Along with this, there was a 
considerable publishing business of newspapers and more or less 
intermittent periodicals sponsored by various literary groups. 
" The harbor in the Patapsco River has a narrow entrance and 
is well protected by high ground. On the side opposite the city is 
an abrupt elevation of considerable size, where is a fort, and 
whence a commanding view is enjoyed." The city itself consisted 
of broad streets with a number of public monuments and impos- 
ing public buildings whose architecture was largely confined to 
their facades. Above the low, black roofs, projected the dome of 
the cathedral, the turreted Washington Monument, the steeple 
of St. Paul's Church, and the strange round cylinder of a high 
shot tower. The river front itself was a mass of red brick ware- 
houses bordering long slips which gave the harbor somewhat the 
appearance of the keys of a piano. Along these lay steamers with 
the rakish lines of Aladdin's slippers, and crescent paddle boxes 
blazoned with their names; also schooners, lumber and produce 
rafts, and the rake-masted Baltimore clippers. 308 Fells Point, 
about a mile below the more fashionable higher levels, was the 
business section where most of the stores and shipping interests 
were situated. It was in this district, in Mechanic's Row on Milk 
Street (now Eastern Avenue), where Poe's aunt, Maria Clemm, 
still resided. 

Here it was that sometime about the end of March, 1831, Poe 
came home. One can imagine the ecstatic welcome of Virginia 
(" Siss " was now grown to be quite a fair sized girl) as Cousin 
Eddie came into the upstairs room with his wonderful soldier 
coat on, and Mrs. Clemm dropping her sewing to welcome home 

398 The description of Baltimore, which provided the scene in which Poe was 
to move for the next few years, has been taken from old prints and letters of 
the day. 



3l8 ISRAFEL 

the wanderer with a somewhat perplexed but nevertheless hearty 
hug from her strong motherly arms. There was also a feeble but 
well-meant handshake from the pale and hollow-cheeked Henry, 
and a wan smile from paralytic Grandmother Poe, now com- 
pletely bed-ridden. That night " Muddie " set another place at 
the table, and put another cup of water in the soup, while Eddie 
unpacked his few clothes and disposed his books and papers on 
the third floor. He was back in the attic room with Henry again. 
Thanks to Mrs. Clemm, there was a roof over them both, and 
something to eat. For Edgar it was a permanent arrangement. 
Henry was dying. 



CHAPTER XV 
" The Mysterious Years " 



SPEAKING of Poe many years later, in New York, Eliza- 
beth Oakes Smith, one of the literati, remarked, " men, 
such as Edgar Poe, will always have an ideal of themselves 
by which they represent the chivalry of a Bayard and the heroism 
of a Viking, when, in fact, they are utterly dependent and tor- 
mented with womanish sensibilities." 8 " There can be little doubt 
that, in this estimate, Mrs. Smith was essentially correct. Balti- 
more, 1831, marks the beginning of the period, which extended 
through all the rest of his life, when Poe gave himself up, in his 
domestic life, to a complete dependence for sympathy and physi- 
cal comfort upon his aunt, Mrs. Clemm. As time went on, his 
cousin Virginia gradually took her own peculiar place in the 
circle of domestic pillars upon which he leaned. All attempt to 
realize objectively the Viking-military ideal had passed with 
West Point the letter to Colonel Thayer, and the contemplated 
trip abroad to enter the Polish Army, was the last move in that 
direction. But the romantic, Bayard-chivalric idea still lingered, 
and was evident to the end in the various episodes with women, 
more especially in the juvenile affairs of the years in Baltimore 
and Richmond. 

Hence, one of the first glimpses we have of the young poet 
after his arrival in Baltimore, 400 is his calling in full cadet regalia, 
and in company with Brother Henry, upon a young lady by the 
name of Kate Blakely who lived nearby. Miss Blakely was the 
daughter of Matthew Blakely, the proprietor of the Armstead 
Hotel on Short Swan Street between Jones Fields and the Market 
Space. She was probably one of the elder brother's flames. They 

399 Selections from the Autobiography of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, edited by 
Mary Alice Wyman, Lewiston Journal Company, Lewiston, Maine, page 119. 

400 Information supplied from letters by a member of the Poe family hi 
Maryland. 



320 



ISRAFEL 



sat together in the hotel parlor. Kate seems to have been con- 
siderably impressed, and not a little flattered, by the attentions 
of " Mr. Allan Poe," as he called himself, and by the pale, rather 
willowy elder brother. Edgar enlarged upon his prospects in 
Richmond, and later on addressed verses to the young woman, 
who was, of course, flattered. The combination of brass buttons 
and poetry is a solvent one upon the young female heart, and per- 
haps Poe played the part well even in a hotel parlor. Kate's 
heart was fluttered, while Edgar had merely provided for himself 
a little stage upon which he might strut in costume, with a mild 
glow about the heart. The incident ended there. What Henry 
thought we do not know. 

Edgar was tolerantly fond of his older brother who also wrote 
heart-smitten lyrics, and supplied an audience for the new book. 
Whether Henry was still attempting work in Mr. Didier's office 
is doubtful. He was far gone in consumption and lapsed fre- 
quently into drink. The two young men probably still shared 
Mrs. Clemm's attic room together. A good deal of the time of the 
younger brother must have been taken up nursing Henry, as the 
periods of his prostration became longer and more frequent. The 
nature of tuberculosis was still a mystery. It was then a " poetic," 
and a " genteel " disease. 401 

As early as May, Poe was casting about for steady literary 
work. On May 6, 1831, he wrote to William Gwynn of Baltimore, 
editor and owner of the Federal Gazette, asking him for work on 
a salary basis. 402 Mr. Allan's marriage, Poe said, had completely 
changed his prospects, and his guardian was anxious that he 
should remain in Baltimore. 403 Poe, it seems, had already quar- 

401 The statement is nowhere directly made in any correspondence that Henry 
Poe died of tuberculosis. From various indications and references to his ill health, 
his early death, the long period of his illness, and the fact that no specific name 
is given to his complaint, it is morally certain that consumption complicated by 
alcoholic excess was the cause. 

402 A Baltimore correspondent sends information of a Balloon-hoax story con- 
tributed by Poe to a Baltimore newspaper about April i, 1831. It has not been 
possible to verify this. Dr. Mabbott informs me he " doubts it." 

403 This was pure fiction on Poe's part as there had been no communication 
between him and John Allan since the letter of February 21, 1831, in New York. 
The only basis for the statement is that Mr. Allan was certainly desirous of Poe's 
staying away from Richmond. Poe evidently still counted on his guardian's help, 



" THE MYSTERIOUS YEARS " 321 

relied with Gwynn, probably over the latter's treatment of Al 
Aaraaj*** For this he now apologized and asked the editor's 
indulgence. Neilson Poe had only recently left Mr. Gwynn's em- 
ploy, and Edgar may have had some hopes of supplying his place 
in some humbler manner. But Mr. Gwynn did not see fit to reply. 
Poe was unable to see him personally as he (Poe) was confined 
to his room by " a severe sprain to his knee." The next move was 
to write his friend Dr, Nathan C. Brooks, upon whom he had 
called on his way to West Point, 405 asking him for a position as 
an usher (assistant-teacher) in a boys' school which Dr. Brooks 
had lately opened, at Reisterstown, Maryland. The position was 
already filled. The possibility of teaching, Poe seems to have kept 
in mind during most of the Baltimore sojourn. 406 It implied, at 
least, the possibility of salary and some leisure for the never-for- 
gotten writing. 

A little later Mrs. Clemm's sore pressed household was re- 
lieved of one of its helpless burdens by the prime remover of all 
difficulties. The Baltimore American for Tuesday August 2, 1831, 
contained this notice: 

Died last evening, W. H. Poe aged 24 years. His friends and acquaint- 
ances are invited to attend Ms funeral this morning at 9 from the dwell- 
ing of Mrs. Clemm in Milk Street. 

Henry was buried in the graveyard of the old First Presby- 
terian Church. 

So June and July of 1831 must have been pretty well taken up 
with nursing the dying brother. As John Keats sat beside the bed- 
side of his dying brother Tom, so Edgar Poe watched the pass- 
ing of Henry under the spell of the same dread disease. There 
could have been time for very little work, and the whole process 
was enormously depressing, complicated as it was by a terrible 
poverty. 



and therefore hoped to seem to act according to his desires. It will be remembered 
that Mr. Gwynn had been a law student with David Poe, the poet's father. 

404 See Chapter XII, page 262. Also Poe to Gwynn, Baltimore, May 6, 1831. 

406 See Chapter XII, page 267. Brooks continued Poe's friend for years; also 
Chapter XIX, page 441. 

400 See Poe to Kennedy, Baltimore, March 15, (1835). 



ISRAFEL 



One can recall a little group of friends and relatives gathered 
upstairs at Mrs. Clemm's on a hot August morning in Baltimore. 
The depressing old hymns, little Virginia's terror, and the faint 
bird-like calls of the paralyzed grandmother as the shuffling feet 
carried the long burden downstairs, Mrs. Clemm in her widow's 
weeds, weeping. After the short journey to the churchyard, 
Edgar returned to find himself the sole occupant of the attic 
room. Perhaps a physical relief, but there was no one there now 
to whom to read the Valley of Unrest or to help cap rhymes. 
Henry's only legacy to his brother was the memory of his ad- 
ventures and a debt, both of which Edgar claimed. 407 Only a dim 
memorial of Henry exists in a few obscure amorous verses pub- 
lished in the columns of the extinct Baltimore North American 
in 1827. Save for the curiosity of antiquaries and the reflected 
glory of Edgar, whose talents and vices Henry seems to have 
shared, William Henry Leonard Poe is a wasted and youthful 
shadow. The Poe and Herring cousins may have helped, probably 
with food. Edgar is known to have contracted a debt of $80 
during his stay in Baltimore in 1829, part of which, he says, was 
for Henry. 407 The difficulties resulting from this debt occupy the 
chief place in the story of the remainder of the year. John Allan 
again figures in it largely. 

For the time being, Poe evidently did not consider Henry's 
debt as his own, for on October 16, 1831, he wrote John Allan 
an affectionate and homesick letter in which he tells him that he 
is clear of the difficulty that he spoke of in his last letter (Poe 
may have been writing to Richmond after settling in Baltimore, 
but these letters have been lost). This letter, 408 however, com- 
pletely does away with the story that at this time the young poet 
was receiving an allowance from John Allan; evidently nothing 
of the kind occurred, for Poe distinctly says that he grieves that 
it is so seldom he hears from John Allan or even of him. He is 
now writing, he says, because he has nothing to ask; but being 
by himself, and thinking over old times and " my only friends," 

407 The debt was probably a note, endorsed for Henry in 1829 to help pay 
for doctors and medicines. 

408 Valentine Museum Collection, letter No. 26. 



" THE MYSTERIOUS YEARS " 323 

his heart is full. The letter contains a note of self-reproach, and, 
despite the possibility of mercenary interest a possibility 
which Poe carefully counters the letter can only be taken for 
a genuine expression of regret and affection. He ends with a 
postscript asking if his " father " will not write one word to him. 
The letter is addressed in care of William Gait.* 09 Poe hoped 
that this good friend would learn of its contents when he put it 
in John Allan's hands. It would thus be delivered by a messenger 
in favor. The epistle is, when all is said and considered, nothing 
short of the cry of an exiled soul for news from home, 

Poe had now had ample opportunity to reflect and feel the 
effects of his own total neglect of John Allan's advice. Despite 
the enormously complicated and aggravated circumstances of 
their long association, there was still an element of affection be- 
tween them which cannot be denied. The very fact, that each 
could forever hurt the other, shows that a tie still existed, despite 
the written denials of both. Underneath the events of both their 
lives, the unshed tears of a father and son lost to each other 
murmured dismally in the deepest caverns of being. John Allan 
could not understand how he could ever lose anything that he had 
once possessed; Edgar Poe could not conceive how anyone could 
be finally angry with him. Call it sentimental or what not, but, 
" Dear Pa " says Edgar, " God bless you." In Richmond, John 
Allan kept turning over the old letters from Poe, endorsing them 
from time to time with evident emotion. 

Yet all the ramifications of their long and bitter quarrel were at 
work in the inevitable chain of cause and effect. The letter which 
John Allan had written to Henry Poe in i824 41<) complaining of 
Edgar, must inevitably have had its effect upon the Baltimore 
relatives. Henry would almost surely show it to his cousins. Its 
vague attack on Edgar, and the dark insinuations which it con- 
tained against Mrs. Poe and Rosalie, made Mrs. Clemm forever 



400 Mr. Gait was looking after the business at Ellis & Allan for Mr. Allan who 
was now often absent. The address to William Gait thus insured its not being read 
by the clerks, and its getting into the correct hands. Poe was evidently anxious 
to reopen communication with Richmond; the long silence had greatly alarmed 
him. 

410 See Chapter VII, page 125. 



ISRAFEL 



uneasy. From time to time she hinted that there was " a great 
mystery." 411 From Mrs. Poe's letters, that Edgar so carefully 
guarded, she knew the truth, whatever it was, and this evidently 
was troubling enough. The Poes and Herrings, on their part, 
must have viewed the situation somewhat practically. Edgar, as 
far as they knew, seemed to have lost a literally golden oppor- 
tunity. He had cast off the care of a rich guardian, and somehow 
or other managed to get disowned. The reasons for it could not 
be plain. It must have been, and as a matter of fact, it was, partly 
his own fault, so what he said was discounted. In the meanwhile, 
here was an unknown scribbler apparently content to live on Mrs. 
Clemm. One might help her, but, as for Edgar, it was well to be 
a little wary, especially as he fascinated one's daughters. All this 
affected Poe's attitude towards his cousins, particularly the Neil- 
son Poes, and played its part shortly in his approaching clandes- 
tine marriage with Virginia. 

Mrs. Clemm, on the other hand, took a more "motherly" 
view. With Henry dead and her own son " of not much account " 
(he was drinking and later went to sea) she felt strongly the 
necessity of a man in her household who was at least a protection 
and a putative bread-winner. Anyone who could get money for 
stringing words, she thought, must be a genius, and, above all 
this, she loved Edgar Poe. His personality, appearance and blood- 
relationship were enough. To a woman of her nature, the fact that 
he needed help was an irresistible appeal. From the day that he 
entered her door in 1831, he was at once sheltered and bound in 
the strong arms of a powerful and masterful, yet completely 
feminine woman, who only surrendered him at last, and then with 
a supreme and touching reluctance, to death. The marriage with 
Virginia was the cementing bond of the most overpowering rela- 
tionship of the latter half of his life. For in the last twenty years 
of Poe's existence Maria Clemm assumed the major r61e in his 
affairs that John Allan had occupied during the first. Otherwise 
there was no comparison. A just and clear understanding of Mrs. 

411 Mary Devereaux spoke of this remark by Mrs. Clemm, see this chapter, 
page 333. Mrs. Clemm was not referring to conditions in Richmond, but to a Poe 
family mystery as she continued to hint of it years later after the Allan affairs 
were aired in court. 



" THE MYSTERIOUS YEARS " 325 

Clemm's vital influence upon Edgar Allan Poe is one with the 
comprehension of the man himself. 

Maria Poe Clemm was born March 17, 1790, the younger 
sister by some five or six years of the poet's father, David. Her 
parents, " General " David, and Elizabeth Cairnes Poe were then 
living in Baltimore. On July 13, 1817, at the age of twenty-seven, 
she married William Clemm, Jr., a widower with five children, a 
little property, and some prospects, the ceremony taking place 
at St. Paul's Church, Baltimore. Mr. Clemm died February 8, 
1826, leaving Mrs. Clemm penniless with two living children of 
her own: Henry, born September 10, 1818, and Virginia Maria, 
born August 15, i822. 412 A third child, Virginia Eliza (named for 
Mrs. Herring, Poe's aunt), died in infancy. What little property 
Mr. Clemm had left, had gone to the children by the first wife 
or was in litigation. Henry, the son, was, as we have seen, a stone- 
cutter. But he was of little real help, being an intermittent drinker. 
His movements and whereabouts are as obscure and uncertain as 
his character. Thus, in a double sense, Edgar Poe came into the 
life of Mrs. Clemm to take the place of a son. The tragic picture 
of the household was complete with Mrs. Elizabeth Poe, Vir- 
ginia's and Edgar's grandmother, who had become bedridden in 
1827 from paralysis, and, except for an insignificant pension, was 
totally dependent upon Mrs. Clemm. Edgar was thus living with 
the closest relations he had left, his aunt, and his full cousin 
Virginia. In 1831, Virginia was only nine years old, yet it was 
only four years later that she became Poe's wife. How important 
or significant either her inclination or judgments were in the mar- 
riage, can best be arrived at by a comparison of dates. A full 
discussion of this must be deferred to its proper place in the cal- 
endar while, in the meantime, the little girl goes to school. 

During the Summer of 1831 Poe tried to alleviate the distressing 
conditions at the house in Milk Street, while he was still helping 
to nurse Henry, by competing for a $100 prize offered by the 

412 There is some conflict about dates here, August 12, and August 22, 1822, 
are also given by family tradition. The church record is followed, from St. Paul's 
Parish Baltimore, see Woodberry, 1904, vol. I, page 137, note i. The thanks of 
the author are also due to Mrs. Sally Bruce Kinsolving for making a search of the 
St. Paul's Parish Records. 



326 ISRAFEL 

Philadelphia Saturday Courier, a paper like the old Saturday 
Evening Post. The prize was for a short story. Poe submitted 
a number of tales but the award went to a Mrs. Delia S. Bacon 
for a story called Love's Martyr. Poe's effort was not entirely 
unsuccessful, however, for the editor accepted his Metzenger stein 
which appeared in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier , January 
14, 1832. It was his first short story to be published (sic), and 
shows that he was turning his attention from poetry to the more 
lucrative field of prose. It is possible that without the merciless 
spur of poverty he might never have done so. In verse, the dreamer 
found his true dream within a dream and received only a 
dreamful compensation. 

The sale of a story in January, 1832, nevertheless, did not serve 
to put anything on the table through the Summer of 1831. Mrs. 
Clemm was probably under the necessity of going elsewhere 
than to the market with her market basket, a large wicker affair, 
vividly recollected by many who were repeatedly called upon to 
contribute to its contents, notably the Neilson Poes and the 
Herrings. Mrs. Clemm in her widow's cap and large motherly 
person, her broad benign face troubled with an eleemosynary woe, 
was wont to appear at irregular but disconcerting intervals, the 
basket upon her arm, her fine gray eyes yearning with stark 
anxiety, and a tale of dole upon her lips that would have drawn 
tears from the mask of Comedy. No one was proof against her; 
for what she had to say was always painfully true: Virginia was 
naked; "dear Eddie" was so ill; or old Mrs. Poe was about 
to die (had been about to die indeed for five years) ; she herself 
was a poor widow; Henry was drinking again; the fire had gone 
ou t and there was nothing to eat! What could one do in her 
large, neat, appealing, and irrefutable presence? The only reply 
was a contribution to the basket. Its wide and insatiable mouth 
gaped darkly, engulfing a child's garment, a chicken, half a peck 
of potatoes, turnips, or loaves of bread shut to the tune of her 
departing blessing, and it and the incident were both temporarily 
closed. But never completely so. It was impossible that the con- 
junction of all the ill luck which was so generously hers could 
ever end. Fortunately for a great poet, Mrs. Clemm had a knack. 



" THE MYSTERIOUS YEARS " 327 

a technique, indeed, which she soon acquired, of cutting under 
all intelligence and stabbing straight for the heart. She belonged 
in one part of her nature to that great, dark-garmented sisterhood 
that her own black widow's weeds recalled, those who are forever 
flitting from door to door reminding the conventionally prosper- 
ous that poverty, bastardy, and suffering are mysteriously pres- 
ent facts and that alms are in order. Much as, from innate 
respectability, she hated her role, Mrs. Clemm played it surpass- 
ingly well. She was in this respect a little half-sister of St. Francis. 
Her lips, her gestures, and her own sacrifices pleaded for starving 
old age, childhood, and irresponsible genius. Only editors could 
resist, and even they did so with tears. On several occasions Mrs. 
Clemm actually borrowed money from an anthologist. Charity 
records no more signal triumph. 

Yet sometimes her greatest skill was in vain. On November 7, 
1831, Edgar Allan Poe was arrested in Baltimore for a debt 
" which I never expected to have to pay." 418 It was the $80, prob- 
ably the note which he had endorsed for Henry, who was now free 
from all but celestial duns. 407 Edgar immediately wrote to John 
Allan. Prison was staring the young poet directly in the face. 
He was in bad health and he says he cannot undergo as much 
hardship as formerly. The debt laws in Baltimore were strict. 
One could then be confined for a debt of $5, and citizens of an- 
other town were not allowed the relief of bankruptcy. Besides, 
the debt was already two years old and it was Winter. " P. S.," he 
adds, " I have made every exertion but in vain." The letter was 
written on the eighteenth but it received no reply. Over two weeks 
later, on December 5, Mrs. Clemm seconded the appeal to Rich- 
mond in a heart rending letter to John Allan 41 * that in both style 
and content does her credit. She had herself by some miracle 
raised $20, but that was not sufficient. She reminds Mr. Allan 
that Poe has no other place to which to appeal; says that besides 
this $80 he is not in debt; and closes by stating that the young 
man had been extremely kind to her as far as his opportunities 



418 Valentine Museum Letters, letter No. 27, Baltimore, Maryland, November 
18, 1831 (Thursday). See also note 407. 

414 Valentine Museum Letters, letter No, 28. 



328 ISRAFEL 

would permit. There is some indication in this letter that Mr. 
Allan had " refused " to help Edgar, but it probably refers only 
to his long silence. 

Ten days later Poe again writes to John Allan in sheer despera- 
tion. The prison door is evidently yawning. The letter is one of 
the most pitiable that a poet was ever forced to write to a patron. 

Bait. Dec. isth, 183 1 415 
DEAB PA, 

I am sure you could not refuse to assist me if you were well aware 
of the distress I am in. How often have you relieved the distress of a 
perfect stranger in circumstances less urgent than mine, and yet when 
I beg and entreat you in the name of God to send me succour you will 
still refuse to aid me. I know that I have no longer any hopes of being 
again received into your favour, but for the sake of Christ, do not 
let me perish for a sum of money which you would never miss, and 
which would relieve me from the greatest earthly misery. . . . 

Poe then contrasts the blessings of wealth and happiness which 
his guardian was then enjoying with his own terrible misery, and 
adds: 

If you wish me to humble myself before you I am humble Sick- 
ness and misfortune have left me not a shadow of pride. . . . 

How differently he would act, were their situations reversed, is the 
burden of the letter's close. It reminds one of the last stanza of 
Israfel. Alas, for a poet in a world of sweets and sours so 
strangely portioned! 

John Allan was not really so emotionally unassailable as this 
letter would indicate, although the accidental cause of events 
warranted Poe in thinking so. Mrs. Clemm, as we have seen, had 
written Mr. Allan on December 5, on the seventh, Mr. Allan had 
warranted John Walsh, a Baltimore correspondent of Ellis & 
Allan to " procure Poe's liberation and give him $20 besides to 
keep him out of further difficulties," but for some reason un- 
known, the merchant neglected to mail the letter until January 
12, 1832. Mr. Allan was considerably troubled by this, an unusual 

* le Valentine Museum Letters, letter No. 29. 



" THE MYSTERIOUS YEARS " 329 

oversight on his part in a financial transaction, for he endorses 
on the back of Poe's letter of December 15. " Then put it in the 
(post) office myself." This letter, written two days later, was 
evidently intended to answer Mrs. Clemm's letter of the fifth. 

In the meantime, of course, Poe knew nothing of all this. Christ- 
mas day, 1831, must have passed in an agony of suspense, and, 
on December 29, he again wrote to Richmond making a final 
curt appeal. 416 The letter begins " Dear Sir/ 7 and contains a re- 
minder that it is from one who in old times once sat upon the 
knees which the writer is now forced to embrace. Some two weeks 
later Poe was probably startled by the unexpected intervention 
of Mr. Walsh. It was after the crisis was over. 

What had happened is not exactly clear. Poe does not seem to 
have been actually imprisoned. Probably someone of the cousins 
intervened to save the family name from disgrace; the importu- 
nate creditors were prevented; and Edgar Poe was absolved from 
the misery of hearing the New Year's bells of 1832 ring through 
prison walls. For an underfed young man with a weak heart and a 
tendency toward melancholy, it was more than a fortunate es- 
cape it was an extension of his lease on existence. The nadir 
had been reached. 

The year 1832 still remains the most mysterious in the annals 
of Edgar Allan Poe. In many respects it is a blank, there is no 
correspondence covering the period, and his exact whereabouts 
during part of the time is open to reasonable doubt. The prepon- 
derance of evidence, however points to the fact that he was in 
the garret of Mrs. Clemm's Milk Street house, and that the stories 
which began to appear in 1833 i* 1 the Baltimore Saturday Visitor, 
The Tales of the Folio Club, and the Coliseum were under way 
there. 417 The short stories which appeared in the Philadelphia 



41 Valentine Museum Letters, letter No. 30. 

417 Several legends about Poe's going abroad in 1832, and of his being in 
Baltimore unknown to the Clemm's, exist. I have assembled the bulk of the mate- 
rial dealing with this year and considered all the correspondence before and after 
it, and all the circumstances implied. There is no genuine evidence to imply that 
Poe was not in Baltimore in 1832, and all the implications are that he was. The 
Valentine Museum Letters are silent but indicate, at the last, that Poe had re- 
mained in poverty in Baltimore. Mary Devereaux's story shows Poe very palpably 
a year or two before John Allan's death in 1834, and must necessarily cover part 



33 o ISRAFEL 

Saturday Courier during 1832, of which there were five, probably 
represent the work of 1831. 

Although it is impossible to present the events covering this 
" mysterious year " with any assurance as to the precise order 
of time in which they occurred, there is a considerable mass of 
evidence relating to the stay of Poe in Baltimore, some of which 
undoubtedly tends to fill in what has long remained more or less 
of a blank. Before touching on this, it should be stated that none 
of the traditions of this time indicate that the young poet was 
dissipated. The reliable facts, indeed, prove the reverse. He was, 
it seems, in ill health part of the time, probably caused by the 
weak heart that threatened to cease to beat altogether two years 
later, after the extreme poverty and deprivations that he was 
forced to undergo. It is now definitely known that absolutely no 
help was received from Richmond. The aid received from John 
Allan in January, 1832, was the last help he was ever to experi- 
ence from that quarter. 418 Writing was Poe's sole resource. 

Among other places where Poe is known to have been seen 
about this time was E. J. Coale's bookstore on Calvert Street, 
which he is said to have haunted, and Widow Meagle's Oyster 
Parlor on Pratt Street near Hollysworth. Here he met a sailor by 
the name of Tuhey who played the flute. The proprietress was a 
good-natured Irish woman who made much of the " Bard," as he 



of the " mysterious " period. The amount of manuscript material which Poe had 
on hand a year or so later, taken together with the work that he is known to 
have done in 1831, shows that he must have been writing through 1832. Had he 
made all of the " voyages " and trips, been dying of fever, in jail, etc., etc., during 
this time, we would have some authentic record, or some real evidence about it. 
The blank simply means an unknown author hard at work on his manuscripts. 
The account given here has been put together with painstaking analysis, where 
surmise has been resorted to it is the result of the elimination of the impossible. 
4i8 AS this statement contradicts that of all other biographers and Poe himself 
to John P. Kennedy, the reader is referred to the Valentine Museum Letters cover- 
ing the second Baltimore period, 1831-1833, which show beyond peradventure that 
John Allan did not give Poe an " annuity." During the period, John Allan prob- 
ably (sic) sent Poe a small gift in November, 1831, the $80 to save him from 
prison, too late, " and $20 besides." In his last letter to John Allan (Poe from 
Baltimore, April 12, 1833,) the latter says, " It is now more than two years since 
you have assisted me ... three since you have spoken (written) to me." Poe 
would scarcely lie to John Allan about what Mr. Allan had done himself. Prof. 
Woodberry's contrary statements were made before the complete evidence was 
available. 



" THE MYSTERIOUS YEARS " 331 

was called. Persons who went there, afterward remembered hear- 
ing Poe recite his own poetry, and the flute playing of Tuhey be- 
side the inn fire. 419 The Tavern was a resort of sea-faring men, 
and those who gathered there were wont to exchange stories. Poe 
was still forced, it appears, to wear various articles of his West 
Point uniform, partly from necessity, probably, and partly from 
desire. There is some tradition of his drilling the street gamins 
about the neighborhood of Fells Point, and the young lads of the 
vicinage were said to have been fond of him, and to have followed 
him whenever he went through the streets. The Baltimore Li- 
brary, then at the corner of Holiday and Fayette Streets, seems 
also to have been a refuge, and to have provided the source for 
the many literary and historical gleanings that appeared a few 
years later in the Southern Literary Messenger as Tid-bits. There 
may have been some "flying visits" to Philadelphia when the 
purse permitted, probably to see the editors of the Courier* 2 * 

The chief event of this period, however, was a romantic affair 
with a Miss Mary Devereaux a neighbor of the Clemms. The 
recollections of that young lady were not contributed until about 
forty years afterward, so that the exact time which they covered 
cannot be definitely ascertained, but, from numerous indications, 
it appears that part of the events which she described took place 
during the year 1832,*" 

Mrs. Clemm's attic room looked out upon the rear of the 
houses upon Essex Street, in " Old Town." Poe was much in this 
attic, writing, and, as he looked out of the third story window 
one day, across the fluttering clothes in the backyards between 
Milk and Essex Streets, he noticed a pretty girl who wore her 
auburn hair in " frizzed puffs," as the style then was. She was 
sitting in the rear window of a house opposite. A handkerchief 
flirtation began in which another girl Mary Newman, who lived 
next door to Mary Devereaux on Essex Street, soon joined. 421 

* 19 See J. H. Whitty's Memoir, large edition, page xxxv. There are also other 
accounts confirming this. 

420 This is conjectural, although there are some doubtful references to it by 
Mary Devereaux. 

421 It is said that Poe for awhile boarded at the Newmans, but Mary Dev- 
ereaux's story indicates that he knew Miss Newman as a neighbor and lived at the 
Clemm's, whence Virginia carried notes. 



332 



ISRAFEL 



The white signals were alluring, and soon led to a closer acquain- 
tance. Both the girls knew that Poe was a young soldier and a 
poet, and their hearts as well as the handkerchiefs seemed to 
have been agitated. A battledore and shuttlecock game of kisses 
was soon being played with hands for rackets, until Mrs. Deve- 
reaux once inquired, " What takes you upstairs so much, Mary? " 
One summer afternoon when Mary Devereaux and Mary New- 
man were seated talking together on their adjoining front stoop 
on Essex Street, with only a balustrade between them, 422 Edgar 
Poe passed " as usual " on his way home to Mrs. Clemm's. 421 
The impressive Edgar stopped and bowed. Virginia it seems had 
already been sent to Mary Devereaux for a lock of the bright hair 
which had first attracted his attention. The favor had been 
granted. One can therefore imagine the excitement of the two 
Marys as the romantic figure of the Milk Street window actually 
seemed about to speak. " Do you know him? " whispered Mary 
Newman to Mary Devereaux. "No," replied Miss Devereaux 
lying valiantly despite the burning lock of hair. " Why, that's 
Edgar Poe who has recently came from West Point. He writes 
poetry, too. Why I declare! There he comes across the street. 
Oh! Isn't he handsome! " With a few omissions, perhaps " Poe's 
Mary " can best tell the rest of the story for herself. 422 

Mr. Poe, having crossed the street, came up the Newman's stoop. 
As he did so, I turned my back, as I was then young and bashful. He 
said * How do you do, Miss Newman? ' She then turned and introduced 
him to me, and then happened to be called into the house. Mr. Poe 
immediately jumped across the balustrades separating the stoops, and 
sat down by me. He told me I had the most beautiful head of hair he 
ever saw, the hair that poets always raved about. . . . From that time 
on, he visited me every evening for a year, and during that time, until 
the night of our final lover's quarrel, he never drank a drop, as far as 
I know . . . Affectionate! ... he was passionate in his love. . . . 
My intimacy with Mr. Poe isolated me a good deal. In fact my girl 
friends were many of them afraid of him and forsook me on his account. 
I knew more of his male friends. He despised ignorant people, and 
didn't like trifling and small talk. He didn't like dark-skinned people. 

422 The account here given, and the conversations are taken from Poe's Mary 
by Augustus Van Clef, Harpers New Monthly Magazine, March 1889, pages 634-* 
640. Also see note 745. 



" THE MYSTERIOUS YEARS " 333 

When he loved, he loved desperately. Though tender and very affec- 
tionate, he had a quick, passionate temper, and was very jealous. His 
feelings were intense and he had but little control of them. He was not 
well balanced; he had too much brain. He scoffed at everything sacred 
and never went to church. 428 If he had had religion to guide him he 
would have been a better man. He said often that there was a mystery 
hanging over him he never could fathom. He believed he was born to 
suffer, and this embittered his whole life. Mrs. Clemm also spoke 
vaguely of some family mystery, of some disgrace. . . , 411 Mr. Poe 
once gave me a letter to read from Mr. Allan, in which the latter said, 
referring to me, that if he married any such person he would cut him 
off without a shilling. 

Eddie and I never talked of his poetry then or in later years. He 
would not have done that; he would have considered it conceited. We 
were young, and only thought of our love. Virginia always carried his 
notes to me. . . . Eddie's favorite name was * Mary/ he said. He 
used often to quote Burns, for whom he had a great admiration. We 
used to go out walking together in the evenings. We often walked out 
of the city and sat down on the hills. 

One moonlight summer night we were walking across the bridge, 
which was not far from our house. At the other end of the bridge was 
a minister's house. Eddie took my arm and pulled me, saying. * Come, 
Mary, let us go and get married; we might as well get married now as 
any other time.' We were then but two blocks from home. He followed, 
and came in after me. We had no definite engagement, but we under- 
stood each other. He was then not in circumstances to marry. When 
my brother found that Mr. Poe was coming so often he said to me: 
* You are not going to marry that man, Mary? I would rather see 
you in your grave than that man's wife. He can't support himself, let 
alone you.' I replied, being as romantic as Eddie was, that I would 
sooner live on a crust of bread with him than in a palace with any 
other man. . . . The only thing that I had against him was that he 
held his head so high. He was proud and looked down on my uncle 
whose business did not suit him. He always liked my father, and 
talked with him a good deal. . . . 

One evening a friend of my brother's, a Mr. Morris, was visiting us. 
He knew that Mr. Poe's favorite song, which I often sang him, was 

428 This implied a much more definite philosophy at that time than now. To 
be "a free thinker" was a serious charge in 1832. The author has contemporary 
letters showing that young men who took Sunday walks had to hide the wild 
flowers they picked on such sinful rambles under their beaver hats on returning 
to town or they would lose their jobs. See The Young Man's Sunday Book, 
Philadelphia, Desilver, Thomas and Co., 1836, for some startling remarks on young 
men who do not go to church. - 



334 



ISRAFEL 



Come Rest in TUs Bosom. He asked me to sing it in order to tease Mr. 
Poe. I went to the piano to sing. Mr. Morris stood by me and turned 
the leaves. Mr. Poe walked with one hand behind his back, up and 
down the room, biting the nails of the other hand to the quick, as he 
always did when excited. He then walked over to the piano, and 
snatched the music and threw it on the floor. I said that it made no 
matter, and that I could sing the song without music, and did so. Mr. 
Morris, knowing me well called me 'Mary/ That also made Eddie 
jealous. He stayed after Mr. Morris left, and we had a little quarrel. 

Our final lover's quarrel came about in this way: One night I was 
waiting in the parlor for Eddie, and he didn't come. My mother came 
into the room about ten o'clock and said, c Come Mary, it's bed-time/ 
The parlor windows were open, and I lay with my head on my arms 
on one of the window sills. I had been crying. Eddie arrived shortly 
after my mother spoke to me, and he had been drinking. It was the 
only time during that year that I ever knew him to take anything. He 
found the front door locked. He then came to the window where I was, 
and opened the shutters, which were nearly closed. He raised my head, 
and told me where he had been. He said he had met some cadets from 
West Point when on his way across the bridge. They were old friends, 
and took him to Barmtm's Hotel > 424 where they had a supper and 
champagne. He had gotten away as quickly as possible, to come and 
explain matters to me. A glass made him tipsy. He had more than a 
glass that night. As to his being an habitual drunkard, he never was as 
long as I knew him. 

I went and opened the door and sat on the stoop with him in the 
moonlight. We then had a quarrel, about whose cause I do not care to 
speak. 425 The result was that I jumped past him off the stoop, ran 
around through an alleyway to tie back of the house, and into the 
room where my mother was. 

She said, * Mary! Mary! what's the matter? ' 

Mr. Poe had followed me, and came into the room. I was much 
frightened, 425 and my mother told me to go upstairs. I did so. 

Mr. Poe said, c I want to talk to your daughter. If you don't tell 
her to come down stairs, I will go after her. I have a right to! ' 

My mother was a tall woman, and she placed her back against the 
door of the stairs, and said, 'You have no right to; you cannot go 
upstairs.' 

424 This hotel, Bamum's, was a famous Baltimore hostlery noted for its 
diamond-back terrapins, and canvas-back ducks " done rare." The place was built 
in 1827. The Post Office was on the ground floor. This was the end of the Phila- 
delphia stage line, just then (1832) about to go out of business. 

* 25 " Mr. Poe " had evidently carried matters to extremes. The reader ia 
asked to note this passage for future reference. 



" THE MYSTERIOUS YEARS " 335 

Mr, Poe answered, ' I have a right. She is my wife now in the sight 
of Heaven! ' 

My mother then told him he had better go home and to bed, and he 
went away. 

He didn't value the laws of God or man. He was an atheist. He 
would just as lief have lived with a woman without being married to 
her as not. ... I made a narrow escape in not marrying him. I don't 
think he was a man of much principle. 

After the quarrel ... I broke off all communication with Mr. Poe, 
and returned his letters unopened. My mother also forbade him the 
house. He sent me a letter by Virginia. I sent it back unopened. He 
wrote again, and I opened the letter. He addressed me formally as 
* Miss Devereaux,' and upbraided me in satiric terms for my heartless, 
unforgiving disposition. I showed the letter to my mother, and she in 
turn showed it to my grandmother, who was then visiting us. My grand- 
mother read it, and took it to my uncle James. My uncle was very indig- 
nant, and resented Mr. Poe's letter so much that he wrote him a very 
severe, cutting letter, without my knowledge. Mr. Poe also published at 
the same time in a Baltimore paper a poem of six or eight verses, ad- 
dressed To Mary. The poem was very severe, and spoke of fickleness 
and inconstancy. All my friends and his knew whom he meant. This 
also added to my uncle's indignation. 

Mr. Poe was so incensed at the letter he received that he bought a 
cowhide, and went to my uncle's store one afternoon and cowhided 
him. My uncle was a man of over fifty at the time. My aunt and her 
two sons rushed into the store, and in the struggle to defend my uncle 
tore his assailant's black frockcoat at the back from the skirts to the 
collar. Mr. Poe then put the cowhide up his sleeve and went up the 
streets to our house as he was, with his torn coat, followed by a crowd 
of boys. When he arrived at our house he asked to see my father. He 
told him he had been up to see his brother, pulled out my uncle's letter, 
said he resented the insult, and had cowhided him. I had been called 
down-stairs, and when Mr. Poe saw me, he pulled the cowhide out of 
his sleeve and threw it down at my feet, saying, * There, I make you 
a present of that! ' 

Shortly after this exciting and melodramatic scene, the Dev- 
ereauxs moved away from Baltimore 42e and did not come across 
Poe until many years later. There are one or two very significant 
things about Mary Devereaux's account, evidently by an unedu- 
cated but intelligent girl, it bears considerable weight as the direct 



426 TO Phfladelphia , and afterward to Jersey City. 



336 



ISRAFEL 



evidence of one who knew him exceedingly intimately. The ex- 
treme difficulty of living with a man of Poe's nervous and excit- 
able temperament needs little comment. It is a further testimony 
to Mrs. Clemm's everlasting affection and patience, while the pic- 
ture of Virginia as a mere child and the bearer of love notes sets 
aside completely the absurd romantic rubbish that has been built 
up about this little maiden at that time. 

Evidently she was a nice little schoolgirl in gingham and pig- 
tails, who carried and fetched for big Cousin Eddie, probably with 
a mischievous thrill in the case of Mary Devereaux. This can 
scarcely mean that, " from the first Edgar Poe recognized in her 
the one over-powering affection of his heart." If he did so, asking 
her to trot around the block to fetch him a lock of red hair from 
Mary's was a passing strange way of manifesting his "soul's 
worship " for Virginia. It is quite obvious to all but the senti- 
mentally purblind that the only " throne in the house of the great 
poet " occupied by his " spiritu-el cousin " was a chair at the 
table three times a day, when the state of Mrs. Clemm's larder 
permitted it. Mary says that Virginia was plump and hearty and 
a nice little schoolgirl with a pleasing disposition, "her chief 
charm. 3 ' Perhaps, Mrs. Clemm had her plans, but of these, like a 
wise mother, she said nothing then, we may be sure. 

The end of the affair with Mary was to be typical of several 
to follow later. She bears testimony that Poe was passionate. 
Evidently he meant to have what all men desire " He didn't 
value the laws of God or man " and the cause of the quarrel on 
the stoop Mary didn't care to talk about, 425 but it is also evident 
that the great excitement of sex, like all other " stimulants," com- 
pletely unnerved Poe. He was never capable of remaining calm 
and collected, even rational enough, to overcome the normal and 
proper difficulties that stood between love and the prize. Before 
marriage was possible, the emotional pressure became so great 
that it exploded along some other paths, anger, jealousy, exas- 
peration of some kind, ending in sheer exhaustion and in later 
years followed by collapse. Uncle So and So was cowhided, the 
husband, or prospective mother-in-law fearful for the family real 
estate, with other relatives, became alarmed, and the world al- 



" THE MYSTERIOUS YEARS " 337 

ways heard about it later through the secondary literary manifes- 
tations of poems or tales of woe. Of course, the neighbors talked, 
and in Poe's case the gossip has become immortal. 427 

About the same time, when according to Mary, John Allan 
was threatening to cut Poe off without a shilling, in case he mar- 
ried her, that gentleman in Richmond was making his will. This 
ode on the intimations of mortality was drawn April 17, 1832, due 
to the fact that, since his visit to the Hot Springs in 1829, Mr. 
Allan's health had been steadily failing, and the " intimations " 
were now again assuming a dropsical turn. 428 Poe seems to have 
gotten wind of this. A printer by the name of Askew is known to 
have carried letters back and forth for Poe from Richmond. 429 
The old servants in the house who had not forgotten either the 
old days nor " Marse Eddie," occasionally sent him news, or he 
may have heard through the Mackenzies, who were still intimate 
with Miss Valentine, of the doings at the big mansion. Rosalie 
Poe was still living with the Mackenzies. 

There were a hundred motives to take Poe to Richmond. Aside 
from going " home," and that was much, the chance of a favor- 
able reception by his " father " might mean the immediate relief 
of his desperate circumstances and a change in his entire future. 
Undoubtedly, too^ there were other than mercenary motives. 
Perhaps, they would let him rest in his old room. " Aunt Nancy " 
would still be there, and after all "Pa" had saved him from 
prison. He must care a little, A rumor of the making of the will, 430 
of Mr. Allan's ill health, or some chance kindly expression from 
John Allan may have been the deciding factor. We can be sure 
his heart was beating fast as he packed his bag and said good-bye 
to Mrs. Clemm. The steamboat left early. 

It was sometime in June, 1832, when Poe arrived in Richmond 
after an absence of over two years. 481 The return to an old scene 

427 In Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville Poe is still gossiped about as 
though he were still alive. Some of the legends are ingenious. 

428 John Allan had nearly died of dropsy in March, 1820. John Allan to 
Charles Ellis, London, March, 1820. Mis 6* Allan Papers. 

429 Information given to the author hi Richmond, July, 1925. 

480 Robert Cabell was one of the witnesses of the will. Young Robert Cabell 
was a close friend of Poe and may have been in touch with him. 

481 This date has been placed a year earlier and a year later by various biog- 



338 ISRAFEL 

revives all the familiar attitudes and emotions that go with it. 
The little Virginia capitol could scarcely have changed at all since 
he had left it, the very patterns of the vines on the walls of houses 
were old friends. It must have seemed impossible as he opened 
the gate of the well-known walk that he was not really " going 
home." All that lay about him was at the core of his dreams. Old 
" Dab," the butler, opened the door, and Poe told him to take the 
bag to " his room." It was not the gesture of presumption but the 
motion of old habit. At the same time he asked for Miss Valen- 
tine. She, it appears, must have been out, and the old butler in- 
formed him that "Marse Eddie's room" was now a guest 
chamber! There appears to have been some argument with old 
Dandridge about this. Poe regarded the room as his peculiar do- 
main. His things, he thought, were still there. 432 The old darkey 
must have been in a quandary. Poe then asked for Mrs. Allan 
who came down to the parlor. 

Here she found a young man, a stranger, acting like a member 
of the family. To her amazement, she found herself being re- 
proached for having ordered her own house to suit herself. Poe 
on his part, as usual under the stress of great excitement, could 
not control his feelings and found himself reproaching "the 
strange woman " who seemed to have usurped Frances Allan's 
place. The voice of an " heir " upstairs did not tend to soothe 
him. It is said that even the child came in for some acrid remarks 

raphers. The making of the will, and the known movements of Poe in 1831 and 
1833, place it in 1832 by elimination. The birth of young William Gait Allan, 
after which, according to the Allan tradition, Poe appeared, seems to fix it about 
June, Poe could not have appeared " after the birth of the first child " as he is 
said to have done, as that was at a time when he is known to have been elsewhere. 
482 These, it appears, had been " moved out," a fact that enraged Poe. The 
story of this visit comes from two distinct angles; the legends according to the 
Allan tradition, and the version derived from the Mackenzies to whom Poe went 
immediately after the event. I have tried to reconstruct the incident taking into 
consideration the personalities involved and the standpoints from which the stories 
were afterwards told. Mrs. Susan Archer Weiss and others, afterward presented 
the Mackenzie-Poe version. For the Allan version see the letters of Miss Mayo 
and Colonel Ellis also see Woodberry, 1909, vol. I, pages 95-96. The Valentine 
Letters show no indication of a visit in 1831. The only possible time was the 
early Summer of 1832. The second visit to the Allans took place shortly before 
Mr. Allan's death in 1834*. Poe's memorandum to Griswold we now know refers 
to letters written and received at West Point. Valentine Museum Letters, Nos. 
22-24. 



" THE MYSTERIOUS YEARS " 339 

on Poe's part, and that in his excitement he went so far as to hint 
that Mrs. Allan had not been without mercenary motives in 
marrying. The lady is said to have replied that, far from con- 
sidering Poe a member of the family whose wishes were to be 
consulted in the plans of the household, she knew him to be 
nothing more than a mere pensioner on her husband's bounty. 
The interview was undoubtedly acrimonious and, no doubt, 
enormously exasperating to them both. To Mrs. Allan, Poe's 
presence must have been an insufferable reminder, and an asser- 
tion of the rights of the beloved foster-son of the first wife, that 
struck at the very basis upon which her own existence and her 
children's lives, for there were now two of them, must rest. She 
sent for Mr. Allan, who was at the office, and is said to have 
coupled her message with the assertion that " Edgar Poe and her- 
self could not remain a day under the same roof." Poe was in- 
clined for a moment to stand upon "his rights," and seems to 
have remained seated in the parlor, but the emphatic sound of 
the lame man's cane clicking up the walk, and the clump of a 
well-known foot was sufficient to change his mind if not his feel- 
ings. He crossed the hall to the front door about the same instant 
that John Allan let himself in by the side entrance. 

Poe went to the Mackenzies, where he told his story. They were 
simple and kindly folk who understood. Rosalie was still there, 
and Jack Mackenzie his staunch boyhood friend. Rosalie had 
grown up, but she was still a little girl. Miss Valentine, who must 
have been out when Poe " called " at the big mansion, sent him 
money. The Mackenzies also probably contributed. After a short 
time Poe returned to Baltimore. 

Then the Richmond gossip began. It was rumored that Poe had 
thrust himself past the butler and gone to Mrs. Allan's room 
where she lay in bed with a new born infant in her arms. There 
he had " reviled her and the child " and had been thrown out 
by the servants after which he threw stones at the house. Only 
the arrival of Mr. Allan had prevented goodness knows what! 
Poe must, of course, have been drunk. What could one expect of 
the son of actors, a mad poet, after all Mr. Allan's kindness, 
too! A hundred eager Penelopes now took up the shuttle of rumor, 



340 ISRAFEL 

platting and unraveling the endless web of petty scandal, as the 
domestic knitting needles were laid aside, in order to weave the 
most delightful incident that had been suggested to designers 
along the James for years. 

Before the shuttles were discarded, a whole grotesque panel in 
the tapestry of the adventures of Israfel was completed for the 
corridors of legend. It was such an intriguing work of art that it 
appeared later as a lunette in one of the side halls of history. 

In the meantime, Mr. Allan's generosity had crystallized in his 
will in the form of certain codicils regarding the education of 
twin boys, on a side street in Richmond, who were now just two 
years old. Perhaps, the once beloved foster-son's indignation and 
the nervousness of the second Mrs. Allan had roots which even 
the longest knitting needle could not probe. Whatever may have 
been said between them that morning in the big octagon parlor, 
on Poe's part, the world was never the wiser. Others were not 
so reticent about him. 433 

The news of the outcome of the visit to Richmond could have 
brought very little cheer to the poverty-stricken hearth of Mrs. 
Clemm in Baltimore. If anything, Poe had only " succeeded " in 
making his alienation the more complete. John Allan never com- 
municated with him (Poe) again, and Poe only attempted to do so 
once with him. There was nothing left but for the pen in the 
garret to scratch on and on, with only the most glimmering pros- 



433 The second Mrs. Allan and her family, together with Colonel Thomas 
Ellis and a certain social group in Richmond, later on became the source of much 
invidious anti-Poe propaganda. They had had the advantage of living after Poe 
died, when all fear of the devastating reply that he might have made was removed. 
Then the world was informed of Poe's ingratitude to his " generous benefactor," 
forgery, and the embezzlement of the substitute's money. At the time that these 
assertions were allowed to " emanate," the documents which disproved them were 
in the hands of those who originated the stories. Only two conclusions arc pos- 
sible; either these people fabricated the legends, or they were too purblind to 
understand the letters which they themselves possessed. Considerable authority 
was attached to their assertions as coming from persons who had personal knowl- 
edge of the facts, as well as documents to which biographers were denied all 
access. The impression grew that the real facts were scandalous they were 
but not about Poe. The story of Poe's visits to Richmond were the beginning of 
this kind of thing. It is now high time, a century later, to lift " the mysterious 
veil" 



THE MYSTERIOUS YEARS " 341 

pects that the fine chirography of its industrious characters would 
ever be translated into print. There was a whole volume of stories 
at hand, the famous Tales of the Folio Club. 

Meanwhile, at the Baltimore Library, the same pair of eyes 
were eagerly scanning the Tales of Hoffman, German Philosophy, 
largely in a denatured and secondary English form, foreign and 
American newspapers and magazines. 

In the Autumn of 1832, there is a legend and some evidence 
that Poe made an ocean voyage as a sailor before the mast to the 
coast of Wexford in Ireland. 484 But both the legend and the 
evidence are uncertain. The incident remains to be proved, and 
the probabilities are that Poe remained in Baltimore. Henry 
Clemm may have accompanied Poe to Ireland, but Mary Dev- 
ereaux says he went West, about this time. An old acquaintance 
and boyhood chum also removed from Richmond into an even 
vaguer beyond. In the Fall of 1832, Ebenezer Burling died of 
cholera in Richmond. Whether Poe heard about it then we do 
not know. 

Edgar was much at his cousins' house as well as at the Clemms 7 . 
At the corner of Bounty Lane and Caroline Street lived a cousin, 
Mrs. Beacham, with several in her family. Here Poe was a fre- 
quent visitor, as well as at Mr. George Poe's house. A good deal 
of his time was spent at Mr. Henry Herring's on Asquith Street 
near Pitt. Mr. Herring was a prosperous lumber dealer and was 
able to afford a pleasant social background for his daughter. A 
circle of young girls met frequently at her house, and Poe seems 
to have been much in demand, reciting poetry, and writing in his 
cousin's album, a custom of the time which was so universal as 
to develop a distinct type of parlor literature. Poe seems to have 
been extremely fond of this Miss Herring, if not in love. She 
married a year or two later and left Baltimore to live in Virginia. 
The Cairnes, family relatives of old Mrs. David Poe, were also 



484 J. H. Whitty mentions this in his biographical sketch to the Complete Poems, 
Houghton Mifflin. The story comes from the memories of Foe's friend, F. W. 
Thomas, who said that he knew a sailor by the name of Tuhey, who played the 
flute, and that the sailor told him that Poe had gone with the said Tuhey to 
Ireland and back. 



342 ISRAFEL 

kindly and hospitable, 485 and there was a neighbor, a Mrs. Samuel 
F. Simmons, who was extremely kind. In recognition of this, she 
received some time later the manuscript of Morella in the neat 
scribal characters that mark it as part of The Tales of the Folio 
Club. About the same time, Poe was engaged in writing his only 
attempt at drama, Politian. 

It is noticeable that most of the houses which Poe frequented 
were the homes and rendezvous of pretty young girls. In 
their company, rather than in the companionship of youths 
of his own age, he seems to have been most at home. With them 
he doubtless found himself the object of interest and considerable 
admiration, an atmosphere in which he expanded. Seated on the 
Empire sofas, just then beginning to go out of fashion, in a 
parlor adorned with genre pictures of the day, each conveying an 
obvious but edifying moral, he wrote sentimental poems in the 
red morocco, brass-bound and betasseled albums, or looked at 
the incredible flounced nymphs simpering from the pages of a 
genteel magazine, with the head of a living replica tantalizingly 
near. Then, with a faint rustle of ruffles and the twinkle of low- 
heeled, beaded cloth slippers, they would all gather about the 
piano where the candles would be lit in the little brass side- 
sconces, brightening white lace-covered hands that leapt along the 
keys. A certain young gentleman with soulful grey eyes turned 
the music, whose quaint notes as large as tadpoles wriggled 
their way through the faint-ruled lines of an old song. Outside 
the passerby paused to be quaveringly informed that a young 
lady within was extending a contralto invitation to Come Rest in 
This Bosom. Then there was currant cake and a little sweet elder- 
berry wine. The conversation was in strict keeping with the re- 
freshments. In winter time the black lumps of canal coal melted 
slowly in the arabesqued cast iron paunch of an urn-topped stove; 
parckesi draughts advanced or returned on candle lit square; the 
strange designs of dominoes grew and dissolved on deal tables, 
amid breathless giggles; and there was an ancient game, never 

486 According to F. W. Thomas, Tuhey, the sailor, was also a guest at this 
house and Poe was so much in love with one of the Cairnes girls that, when she 
refused him, he went to Ireland in despair. See note 419 for the source of this. 



" THE MYSTERIOUS YEARS " 343 

old, played with a handkerchief or a pillow. Baltimore, after aU, 
had its relaxations. Above the monotone of poverty, if one listens 
carefully, can be heard the quaint grace notes of a thin piano and 
the whisper of skirts over carpets where the flowers of Victoria 
had not yet bloomed. Half a century later an old lady remembered 
a young man: * 86 

Mr. Foe was about five feet eight inches tall, and had dark, almost 
black hair, which he wore long and brushed bade in student style over 
his ears. It was as fine as silk. His eyes were large and full, gray and 
piercing. He was entirely clean shaven. His nose was long and straight, 
and his features finely cut. The expression about his mouth was beauti- 
ful. He was pale, and had no color. His skin was of a clear, beautiful 
olive. He had a sad, melancholy look. He was very slender . . . but 
had a fine figure, an erect military carriage, and a quick step. But it 
was his manner that most charmed. It was elegant.* 37 When he looked at 
you it seemed as if he could read your thoughts. His voice was pleasant 
and musical but not deep. He always wore a black frock-coat but- 
toned up, with a cadet or military collar, a low turned-over shirt 
collar, and a black cravat tied in a loose knot. He did not follow the 
fashions, but had a style of his own. His was a loose way of dressing 
as if he didn't care. You would know that he was very different from 
the ordinary run of young men. 

Thus, we get a fairly complete picture of Poe in the early 
i83o's. In the Fall of 1832, Mrs. Clemm moved from Milk Street 
to Number 3 Amity Street where she resided until the entire 
family left for Richmond in 1835. She was accompanied to the 
new dwelling by Virginia, "a handful of furniture," and her 
nephew Edgar, who, although nobody knew it but himself, was 
just on the threshold of fame. 

436 Mary Devereaux in 1888-9. Harpers New Monthly Magazine, December, 
1889. See note 422, page 332. 

487 For a person born in the 1820'$ and reared in the decades that followed, 
" elegant " was the last word of praise. The word has lost its glory. " Elegance " 
was interred at Frogmore. 



CHAPTER XVI 
Bottled Fame 



VERY scanty was the success that had met any of Poe's 
efforts, thus far, to obtain either sale or fame for the work 
of his pen. Here and there, one of his poems warmed 
someone capable of feeling the divine fire, and his immediate 
acquaintances spoke and thought of him as a poet. Beyond that, 
the three little books seemed to have dropped into a void. Belles 
lettres, it was only too painfully evident, would have led to the 
garret of Chatterton if it had not been for the garret of Mrs. 
Clemm. Poe, as we have seen, had therefore turned his efforts in 
a more marketable direction. The journalism of his time now com- 
menced to claim his attention seriously, and he began to study 
the contemporary prints, both newspapers and magazines, espe- 
cially the latter. The result was two-fold: he now earnestly began 
to write prose during 1832, five of his tales, the first of his 
published short stories were published in the Philadelphia Satur- 
day Courier where he had competed unsuccessfully for a prize, 
the other facet of his immediate interest was the beginning of his 
theories about American magazines and literary criticism. In the 
meanwhile, the muse did not entirely languish, The Coliseum, at 
least, was underway and even an attempt at drama, Politian. 
What he lacked was some point of publishing contact. So far, he 
had not been able to accomplish that in Baltimore. 438 The stories, 
and the first three books of poems, together with the cruder at- 
tempts at short stories which Poe is said to have written at the 
University of Virginia and to have destroyed there, represented 
the results of the longings of his youth, and the later and riper 
harvest of his first creative urge. But for awhile, especially in the 
Winter of 1833, it looked as if the stories were to die as unnoted 
and as unlamented as the poems. 

438 It is said that he had published verses in Baltimore newspapers, but the 
evidence is doubtful. 



BOTTLED FAME 345 

It was remarkable that Poe had been able to complete this con- 
siderable volume of literary output during the harassed years be- 
tween 1827 and 1833* It was more than remarkable, and speaks 
plainly for his overmastering desire to create, that he had been 
able to do anything at all. The Winter of 1833, in particular, 
must have been a starving time. There are many indications that 
the period of collapse and illness in New York was indicative of 
the too heavy drafts upon his physical capital. A disintegration 
seems to have followed, partly perhaps upon the lines which hered- 
ity dictated. A weak heart, which sometimes completely prostrated 
him, shattered nerves, and the beginnings of the conditions which 
afterward led to disturbed mental conditions, all played their 
several parts from now on. For, from the time of his escape from 
West Point, it is safe to say that he was never a completely well 
man. 489 There were, from now on, periods of vigor and creation; 
but there were also recurring and accentuated periods of collapse. 
Starvation, anxiety, disappointment, and dissipation all con- 
tributed to the final tragic result, only sixteen years later, in the 
same city where he had first found shelter with Mrs. Clemm. 

During the Winter of 1833, Poe must have been much about 
the streets of Baltimore trying to pick up odd jobs. The news- 
papers, despite the efforts of Neilson Poe, had failed to take him 
on. 

In all this year, there is only one letter to break the silence, 
and it speaks in the tones of despair. On April 12, 1833, Poe wrote 
his last letter to John Allan. 440 He says in it that Mr. Allan has 
not assisted him for over two years, nor " spoken " (written) to 

439 Prof. George E. Woodberry also dates the failure of Poe's health from 
about this time. See his Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1909, vol. I, pages 122-123: " He 
had begun normal, healthy and well; at twenty-five he was no longer so, nor was 
he ever to regain sound health," etc. 

440 One of the most remarkable coincidences in the annals of literary cor- 
respondence is connected with this letter. On the very same day that Poe wrote 
this letter in Baltimore, April 12, 1833, perhaps at the same hour, John Allan in 
Richmond was endorsing on the back of another letter of Poe's, written from 
New York, February 21, 1831, the following: "April 12, 1833, it is now upwards 
of two years since I received the above precious relict of the Blackest Heart and 
deepest ingratitude, alike destitute of honor and principle every day*' . . . etc., 
etc. The reader should compare letter No. 25 with letter No. 31 of the Valentine 
Museum Letters, a comparison that provides a strangely intimate glimpse into 
the past. 



346 ISRAFEL 



him for three, and that, although he has little hope of any answer, 
he cannot refrain from attempting to make one more attempt to 
interest his guardian. Poe says that he is utterly without friends 
and therefore without the means of obtaining employment, and 
that he is perishing, literally perishing for want of help. Yet, he 
adds pathetically, he is not idle, nor addicted to any vice, nor has 
he offended society in any way which should bring the fate of 
starvation upon him. " For God's sake pity me, and save me from 
destruction," was the last line that he ever wrote to his guardian. 
It reveals a soul in a waking nightmare and it received no reply. 

John Allan, indeed, was on the verge of a country where no 
postman could follow him. His dropsy was fast gaining upon him. 
During the Winter and Spring of 1833, he was, from time to time, 
engaged in writing various codicils in his will, the nature of which 
were so intimate that he employed his own handwriting in order 
to avoid the necessity of witnesses. In March, one of the illegiti- 
mate twins had died 441 which required further alteration in his 
will, but the removal of this claim on " charity " did not induce 
him to extend it to another claimant in Baltimore who had at least 
a moral hold on his interest. 

Towards the end of July, Mr. and Mrs. Allan, Miss Valentine, 
two baby boys, two nurses, two drivers, five horses, and two car- 
riages, all set out for Virginia Hot Springs in considerable style. 
One of the babies, Willie Gait, was teething; and Mr. Allan him- 
self was almost helpless from dropsy, yet not too weak to take a 
considerable pleasure in the important figure which he cut. " In 
fact," said he, " we made quite a little cavalcade." 442 He had at- 
tained all that the world could give him, wives, concubines, chil- 
dren, slaves, horses and the envy of his neighbors. 443 The note of 

441 See the statements in the will of John Allan, Appendix, or page 359 this 
chapter. 

442 Information gleaned from various items and letters in the Ellis 6* Allan 
Papers. 

443 Despite the " swank " attached to " The Springs," an English traveler a 
year later, 1834, informs us that " The Springs " were incredibly crude and un- 
comfortable. A Mr. Fry and his son, both great dancers kept the place. The food 
was disgusting, the meat was carved by Mr. Fry himself, dressed in a dirty blue 
smock, who made a point of dropping the knife to escort ladies to their seats 
on his arm. There were not enough "servants,' 1 i.e., slaves, and guests were 
awakened early in the morning by throat-clearing, shouts for hot water, and 



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BOTTLED FAME 347 

satisfaction is strong, but the cavalcade was nearing the end of 
the journey. In the meantime, a young man in Baltimore, who 
had refused at a great price to become an appendage of the cara- 
van had definitely started on the career which has caused the 
little domestic procession over the Virginia hills to be remem- 
bered. 

In July, 1833, the Baltimore Saturday Visitor, an ephemeral 
weekly newspaper then edited by a Mr. L. A. Wilmer with con- 
siderable local success, offered a prize of $50 for the best short 
story and $25 for the best poem to be submitted within a given 
time.*** The judges appointed by the editor were John P. Ken- 
nedy, Dr. James H. Miller, and J. H. B. Latrobe, who has left us 
the story of what happened: 

We met one pleasant afternoon in the back porch of my house on 
Mulberry Street, and seated round a table garnished with some old wine 
and good cigars, commenced our critical labors. As I happened to be 
the youngest of the three, I was required to open the packages of 
prose and poetry, respectively, and read the contents. Alongside of me 
was a basket to hold what we might reject. 

I remember well that the first production taken from the top of the 
prose pile was in a woman's hand, written very distinctly, as indeed, 
were all the articles submitted, and so neatly that it seemed a pity not 
to award it a prize. 445 

It was ruthlessly criticized, however, for it was ridiculously bad 
namby-pamby in the extreme and of the school known as the Laura 
Matilda school. ... Of the remaining productions I have no recol- 
lection. Some were condemned after a few sentences had been read. 
Some were laid aside for consideration not many. These last failed 
to pass consideration afterwards, and the committee had about made up 
their minds that there was nothing before them to which they would 



the sound of slops being poured from the windows. The beds did not permit a 
night's undisturbed rest. Sanitary conditions were those of the frontier. Only 
Virginia chivalry could survive the roads. A plague of flies added the last 
delightful touch. 

444 The statement of the amount of the prize has often been wrongly given 
heretofore as $100. It was, as a matter of fact, $50 for a story, and half that for 
a poem; Mr. Latrobe himself, one of the judges, afterwards misstated the amount 
which biographers have followed. 

445 In his egregious sketch of Poe, Dr. Rufus W. Griswold afterward tried to 
rob Poe of all credit in this matter by stating that the prize was awarded to the 
best written manuscript in point of penmanship. This was a sneer at Poe's beau- 
tiful Roman holograph of the Folio CM> Tales. 



348 



ISRAFEL 



award a prize, when I noticed a small quarto-bound book that had until 
then accidentally escaped attention, possibly because so unlike, exter- 
nally, the bundles of manuscript that it had to compete with. Opening it, 
an envelope with a motto corresponding with one in the book appeared, 
and we found that our prose examination was still incomplete. Instead 
of the common cursive manuscript, the writing was in Roman char- 
acters an imitation of printing. 

I remember that while reading the first page to myself, Mr. Kennedy 
and the Doctor had filled their glasses and lit their cigars, and when 
I said that we seemed at last to have a prospect of awarding the 
prize, they laughed as though they doubted it, and settled themselves 
in their comfortable chairs as I began to read. I had not proceeded far 
before my colleagues became as much interested as myself. The first 
tale finished I went to the second, then to the next and did not stop 
till I had gone through the volume, interrupted only by such excla- 
mations as ' Capital! ' ' Excellent! ' and the like from my companions. 
There was genius in everything they listened to; there was no uncer- 
tain grammar, no feeble phraseology, no ill-placed punctuation, no worn 
truisms, no strong thought elaborated into weakness. Logic and imagi- 
nation were combined in rare consistency. . . . There was an analysis 
of complicated facts an unravelling of circumstantial evidence that 
won the lawyer judges an amount of accurate scientific knowledge 
that charmed ... a pure classic diction that delighted all three. 

When the reading was completed there was a difficulty of choice. 
Portions of the tales were read again, and finally the committee selected 
A Ms. Found in a Bottle. One of the series was called A Descent into 
the 'Maelstrom, and this was at one time preferred ... all the circum- 
stances of the selection ultimately made have been so often since re- 
ferred to in conversation that my memory has been kept fresh, and I 
see my fellow judges over their wine and cigars, in their easy chairs 
both genial, hearty men, in pleasant mood, as distinctly now as though 
I were describing an event of yesterday. . . . 

Refreshed by this most unexpected change in the character of the 
contributions, the committee refilled their glasses and relit their cigars, 
and the reader began upon the poetry. This, although better in the main 
than the prose, was bad enough, and, when we had gone more or less 
thoroughly over the pile of manuscript, two pieces only were deemed 
worthy of consideration. The title of one was The Coliseum, the written 
printing of which told that it was Poe's. The title of the other I have 
forgotten, but upon opening the accompanying envelope, we found that 
the author was Mr. John H. Hewitt. 440 1 am not prepared to say that 

44 Mr. Hewitt's poem was entitled The Song of the Winds under a pen-name 
"Henry Wilton." 



BOTTLED FAME 349 

the committee may not have been biased in awarding the (poetry) 
prize to Mr. Hewitt by the fact that they had already given the (prose) 
. . . prize to Mr. Poe. I recollect, however, that we agreed that, under 
the circumstances, the excellence of Mr. Hewitt's poem deserved a re- 
ward, and we gave the smaller prize to him with clear consciences. I 
believe that up to this time not one of the committee had ever seen 
Mr. Poe. ... 

Not long afterward the Saturday Visitor for October 12, 1833, 
appeared with the following notice that must have come to Poe's 
eye with almost the relief of a reprieve. 

. . . Amongst the prose articles were many of various and distin- 
guished merit, but the singular force and beauty of those sent by the 
author of The Tales of the Folio Club leave us no room for hesitation 
in that department. We have accordingly awarded the premium to a 
tale entitled The Ms. Found in a Bottle. We cannot refrain from saying 
that the author owes it to his reputation, as well as to the gratification 
of the community to publish the entire volume. These tales are emi- 
nently distinguished by a wild, vigorous, and poetical imagination, a 
rich style, a fertile invention, and varied and curious learning. 

Signed JOHN P. KENNEDY 
J. H. B. LATROBE 
JAMES H. MILLER 

In the same number in which this notice appeared, the prize 
story was published. 

At a time when prizes for literary effort are so many and 
various as to have almost ceased to attract attention, the sig- 
nificance of this award can scarcely be appreciated. Not only 
was the cash itself supremely grateful, but, for the first time, the 
attention of a fairly large public was now focused upon Poe, for 
the news of the award was not confined to the pages of The 
Visitor. Poe had at last emerged from the shadow of the wings. 
The limelight had been definitely focused upon him, and, from 
this time on, his various entrances and exits on the literary stage, 
although they were not always accompanied by applause, were 
nevertheless followed by the magic glare. Perhaps of more im- 
mediate importance was the fact that he had gained some in- 
fluential friends. Among the most important and constant of 



350 



ISRAFEL 



these was a benevolent and wise gentleman, then a well-known 
Baltimore author, John P. Kennedy, Esquire. 447 

The Monday after the announcement of the award in the Satur- 
day Visitor was used by Poe to call upon all the members of the 
committee in order to thank them. Mr. C. F. Cloud, 448 the owner 
and publisher of the paper, had, it seems, already called on Mr. 
Kennedy on Sunday morning and given him such an account of 
the young author that the good gentleman's curiosity and sym- 
pathy were both thoroughly awakened. When Poe was introduced 
next day, he was cordially received, and the interesting reports 
about him fully confirmed by his conversation and appearance. 
He was invited to return to the house, then one of the most im- 
portant from a literary as well as a social point of view in Balti- 
more in short, in a limited but very definite and helpful way, 
Mr. Kennedy became Poe's patron. Never was a young poet 
more in need of one. 

An hour or so after the call upon Mr. Kennedy, Poe introduced 
himself to Mr. Latrobe, another one of the judges, in his office. 418 
From him comes a full and interesting account of the interview: 

I was seated at my desk on the Monday following the publication of 
the tale, when a gentleman entered and introduced himself as the writer, 
saying that he came to thank me as one of the committee, for the award 
in his favor. Of this interview, the only one I ever had with Mr. Poe, 
my recollection is very distinct, indeed, He was if anything, below 
the middle size, and yet could not be described as a small man. His 
figure was remarkably good, and he carried himself erect and well, as 
one who had been trained to it. He was dressed in black, and his frock 
coat was buttoned to the throat, where it met the black stock, then 
almost universally worn. Not a particle of white was visible. Coat, hat, 
boots, and gloves had evidently seen their best days, but so far as mend- 
ing and brushing go, everything had been done apparently, to make 



447 Swallow Barn was Mr. Kennedy's magnum opus. His kindness to Foe is 
his only genuine claim to literary remembrance. His work was like its author, 
urbane and impeccable. He commanded at one time a considerable and highly re- 
spectable public, especially in Baltimore. He is also " remembered " for Horseshoe 
Robinson. 

448 Descendants of Mr. Cloud in Catonsville, Maryland, have the only com- 
plete file of the Baltimore Saturday Visitor extant, I am informed by a Baltimore 
collector. 

The Mechanics Bank Building later. 



BOTTLED FAME 35* 

them presentable. 450 On most men his clothes would have looked shabby 
and seedy, but there was something about this man that prevented one 
from criticising his garments, and the details I have mentioned were 
only recalled afterwards. The impression made, however, was that the 
award in Mr. Poe's favor was not inopportune. Gentleman was written 
all over him. His manner was easy and quiet, and although he came 
to return thanks for what he regarded as deserving them, there was 
nothing obsequious in what he said or did. His features I am unable 
to describe in detail. His forehead was high, and remarkable for the 
great development at the temple. This was the characteristic of his 
head, which you noticed at once, and which I have never forgotten. 451 
The expression of his face was grave, almost sad, except when he be- 
came engaged in conversation, when it became animated and change- 
able. His voice I remember was very pleasing in its tone and well 
modulated, almost rhythmical, and his words were well chosen and 
unhesitating. ... I asked him whether he was then occupied with any 
literary labor. He replied that he was then engaged on A Voyage to the 
Moon, and at once went into a somewhat learned disquisition upon the 
laws of gravity, the height of the earth's atmosphere, and capacities of 
balloons, warming in his speech as he proceeded. 452 Presently speaking 
in the first person, he began the voyage . . . leaving the earth, and be- 
coming more and more animated, he described his sensation as he as- 
cended higher and higher . . . where the moon's attraction overcame 
that of the earth, there was a sudden boideversement of the car and 
great confusion among its tenants. By this time the speaker had become 
so excited, spoke so rapidly, gesticulating much, that when the turn up- 
side-down took place, and he clapped his hands and stamped with his 
foot by way of emphasis, I was carried along with him. . . . When he 
had finished his description he apologized for his excitability, which he 
laughed at himself. The conversation then turned upon other subjects, 
and soon afterward he took his leave. ... 

In his calls on the judges, Poe did not forget Dr. James Miller 
with whom he also struck up an acquaintance that later led to 
some letters between them. The friendship with Lambert Wilmer, 
the editor of the Visitor was kept up for some time. He and Poe 
discussed together the founding of a magazine in Baltimore and 
were evidently fairly intimate. It was the first of the many maga- 



450 So much for Mrs. Clemm ! 

451 Phrenology was then taken in all seriousness. 

452 See Chapter IX, page 131. 



3S 2 ISRAFEL 

zine projects which from this time on became a preoccupation 
with Poe and absorbed much of his thought and energy. Two 
items were always lacking in these schemes to found the great 
American periodical; i.e., capital, and stability in the character 
of the proposed managing editor. 

Wilmer describes Poe as the " most passionless " of men that 
he ever knew. His opinion seems to have been based for the most 
part on Poe's writing and an innate delicacy in his friend which 
he mistook for lack of vigor. As he must have known of the horse- 
whipping incident, which raised not a little dust in the neighbor- 
hood, his statement cannot have the force which the words alone 
would imply. Wilmer was doubtless soon sorry enough that the 
poetry prize had been given to Hewitt, for that young gentleman 
soon worked himself into the good graces of the owner of the 
paper, Mr. C. F. Cloud, and usurped the editor's chair. Wilmer 
was forced to leave Baltimore in 1834, penniless and on foot. The 
prospectus with which Poe provided him, outlining the plan for a 
magazine to be published in Baltimore, fell by the wayside. 468 
The " bouleversements " of the fly-by-night journalism of the 
time were generally sudden and often merciless and tragic, as Poe 
himself was to find out later. Even the modicum of humanity, 
usually embodied in the ethics of an organized profession was 
still lacking. 

Hewitt's complication with Wilmer did not, however, prevent 
Poe from becoming close friends with the former. The two poets 
were in a sense rivals, Hewitt had once been on the staff of the 
Minerva and Emerald which had handed Al Aaraaf so nonchal- 
antly, but their mutual interest in poetry seems to have brought 
them together frequently. There were long rambles in the country 
about Baltimore during which literature was the topic of conversa- 
tion, and Hewitt has left us a picture of Poe in Byron collars and a 
black stock, one who " looked the poet all over." Yet all this did 
not prevent Poe, when the occasion offered, from explaining just 
how it was that Hewitt had received the prize. After Wilmer left, 
the columns of The Visitor do not seem to have been so hospitable 



w When Wilmer left Baltimore, Poe sent him a prospectus for a Baltimore 
magazine. It was the first of many similar schemes. 




John P. Kennedy 

Poe's Baltimore Patron, author of Horseshoe Robinson, Swallow 
Barn, etc. Member of Congress, attorney, and famous host 

After a painting by Wilson 
Courtesy of tbe English Bookman 




Author of "Ten Nights in a 
Bar-Room" 

A friend of Poe in Baltimore 

/Vow *m etching in Godey's Lady's Book /or 2844. 



BOTTLED FAME 353 

to Poe. That paper fell later into the hands of T. S. Arthur, 454 
who in turn yielded to Dr. J. E. Snodgrass, the physician who 
was Poe's friend to the last. It was thus peculiarly linked with 
Poe's name, and with all of those connected with it he was for 
long, then and afterward, more or less associated. Lambert Wil- 
mer remembered Poe particularly well: 

. . . His time appeared to be constantly occupied by literary labors; 
... he lived in a very retired way with his aunt Mrs. Clemm, and his 
moral deportment as far as my observations extended was altogether 
correct. ... In his youthful days Poe's personal appearance was deli- 
cate and effeminate, but never sickly or ghastly, and I never saw him 
in any dress which was not fashionably neat with some approximation 
to elegance. Indeed, I often wondered how he could continue to equip 
himself so handsomely, considering his pecuniary resources were gen- 
erally scanty and precarious enough. My intercourse with Poe was al- 
most continuous for weeks together. . . . His general habits at that 
time were strictly temperate, and but for one or two incidents I might 
have supposed Mm to be a member of the cold-water army. . . . 

" The one or two incidents " were the occasion of the cadets' 
supper at the Barnum Hotel and a singular instance when Poe 
took Wilmer home and offered him some Jamaica rum after the 
universal custom of the time. Aside from these, there is no au- 
thentic, indeed not any attempt, to indicate drinking episodes 
during the entire period of the poet's residence in Baltimore. He 
was, as a matter of fact, unusually abstemious for a young man 
of the time much about a convivial Southern town. 

During the time of Poe's stay in Baltimore, from 1831 to 1835, 
there were two distinct literary groups in the city. The first of 
these gathered about John P. Kennedy, William Gwynn, and 
others of the old " Tusculum " Club. These were more literary than 
journalistic. The second group consisted of men, then only be- 
ginning to be known as writers, such as Arthur, Brooks, Dawes, 
Carpenter, Hewitt and Macjilton. These represented rather ably 
the various tendencies in cheap verse, magazine stories, and the 
more " popular " writing of the time. Their names are to be 
found frequently associated with that of Poe in the newspapers 



454 See the portrait included in this volume. 



354 



ISRAFEL 



and magazines of the period, and the decades to follow, and they 
were, at least during his lifetime, in some sense his rivals. It was 
from the first group that Poe, for the most part, received his in- 
spiration and his aid, principally from John P. Kennedy. The in- 
ference cannot reasonably be avoided that it was Mr. Kennedy 
who really smoothed the path, not only by advice and influence, 
but by actual physical help. He was one of the few friends that 
Poe kept to the very end, one to whom he was permanently 
grateful. 

The suggestion that the remaining Tales of the Folio Club 
should be published, was not lost upon Poe, and towards the end 
of 1833 he seems to have gone personally to Philadelphia, to 
try to prevail on his old acquaintance Carey & Lea to bring 
out the collection of tales to which others, it appears, were later 
added. Mr. Kennedy's help was probably largely instrumental. 
In addition to this, Cody's Lady's Book was induced to accept one 
of the series, The Visionary, which appeared in the issue of that 
magazine for January, 1834. 

Nevertheless, the last months of 1833, an d the greater part of 
1834, was a starving time for Poe in the little two-story brick 
house with a dormer window and double chimneys on Amity 
Street. Mrs. Clemm's basket must have frequently made the 
rounds for requisitions, her needle could not be busy enough. 
At one time she is said to have tried to eke things out by teach- 
ing school. With nothing but prospects in view, the Winter of 
1833 came to an end for the Poe-Clemm household in Baltimore. 
It had been a memorable year, the path ahead was smoother and 
brighter. It was the question of continuing to exist, until the 
editorial barriers were passed, that was now most perplexing. In 
the meanwhile, Virginia was entering upon womanhood, pro- 
pinquity was at work, and a cousinly affection was ripening into 
something more definite. With the opening of the new year the 
rumor of an approaching event, in which Poe could not help but 
be vitally interested, claimed his presence at Richmond. John 
Allan was dying. 

Sometime during the latter part of the Winter of 1833, probably 
in February, Poe, therefore, again found himself before the 



BOTTLED FAME 355 

familiar mansion in Richmond with the firm intention of having 
an interview with " Pa." His object must have been to plead his 
"rights," and to make plain his necessities; perhaps, once and 
for all to explain away all differences and, in the forgiving mood 
which he might expect to find at a death-bed, to be received again 
as a son who could hope to share in the benefits of affection. Evi- 
dently he had been reliably warned that the end was near, and 
there was a chance, even in the remote possibility of a reconcilia- 
tion, which he could not afford to neglect. All the memories of a 
lifetime, and the vital element of self-interest combined to make 
a motive powerful enough to cause him to try to force his way 
into the house where his last reception could leave no doubt as 
to the nature of his welcome as a member of the family. 

After the visit of the Spring before, the servants had doubtless 
been instructed by both their master and their mistress how to 
receive " Marse Eddie." But prophetic foresight here seems to 
have been of little avail. Poe arrived, is said to have thrust him- 
self past the butler, and to have run upstairs to the big front 
room overlooking the lawn. Mr. Allan was seated, with his cane 
beside him, propped up with pillows, and reading a newspaper. 
He was helpless from dropsy. The lines of youthful and amused 
irony that had once given him an almost sweet expression about 
the mouth, had long ago faded, and the hawk face and black eye- 
brows lowered menacingly at the lines of the daily news. Sud- 
denly the small piercing eyes looked over the edge of the Rich- 
mond Whig, and beheld in the doorway an apparition from the 
past. The young foster-son was standing there as if the years had 
rolled back, gazing appealingly at his " father," and, as always 
in that presence, looking ill at ease. For a moment they must 
have stared thus at each other, these two strongly opposed spirits, 
for the last time. Then Poe tried to make some advances to the 
older man, probably pitiful enough, he tried to come into the 
room. As if he were being attacked, John Allan seized the cane 
by his armchair and flourished it in the air. A torrent of impreca- 
tions and reproaches rolled from his lips. He threatened to beat 
Poe if he approached him, rising up in his invalid's chair like a 
dying eagle, dangerous, implacable, and able to strike till the 



3S 6 ISRAFEL 

last. His cries brought his startled wife and the servants to the 
room, and Poe was ignominiously thrust by the slaves from the 
door. One can imagine the invalid trembling and exclaiming, 
and the young poet returning to Baltimore, sorrowful and 
shaken, even to the roots of his ego, by the spectacle and the 
strange fact, of someone who hated him to the last. Had either 
of them cared less, the last infernal scene would have been 
impossible. Devastating demonstrations are not manifested by 
indifference. 

It is now time to relate the passing of the maai whose shadow 
of influence lies across the life of Poe from first to last. Edgar's 
visit to Richmond may well have hastened the end. That the 
intimations of his departure had lain heavily upon John Allan 
for almost two years, the dates, and the nature of his will, show 
clearly. In December, 1833, he was busy winding up the affairs 
of Ellis & Allan with his old partner, Charles Ellis. Poe's visit 
to Richmond followed a few weeks later, after which time Mr. 
Allan failed rapidly. On March 19, Miss Valentine stopped in 
at Ellis & Allan to tell the clerks that Mr. Allan " was a very sick 
man." About a week later the end came. At eleven o'clock on the 
morning of March 27, 1834, Mrs. Allan was in her husband's 
chamber attending to some of the duties of the sickroom, when a 
terrified scream from her brought the family and the servants 
hurrying in. John Allan had died suddenly in his easy-chair. The 
jaw had dropped. Up until the very last instant of life it had re- 
mained absolutely firm. There was only one thing that he could 
not overcome. 

Even about the semblance of the man who sat there propped 
up amid the pillows, there must have been something tremen- 
dous. The hands which had, at last, relaxed had never relented, 
and even after death they reached out strongly into time. By 
every worldly standard John Allan was a success. He had begun 
with nothing, but he died in full possession of ample monies, a 
handsome mansion, broad fertile acres, the arbiter, and abso- 
lute master of over half a hundred human souls. 455 Two ladies of 



436 Slaves, immediate family, and a host of relatives in Scotland. See his own, 
and the will of William Gait, Appendix III. 



BOTTLED FAME 357 

considerable force, beauty, and attainments had been his wives; 
at least two other women had shared his favors; he was the father 
of seven children 456 for his second wife was pregnant when he 
died. Of all those upon whom the dominant shadow of his per- 
sonality had so heavily fallen, Edgar Allan Poe, was the only one 
that had completely eluded him. That John Allan is remembered 
by the one and only item that he. failed to completely possess, is 
a comment which a generation that ignored irony failed to under- 
stand. The influence which finally relaxed the grasp of the Scotch 
merchant on the twenty-seventh of March, 1834, was a powerful 
one. It is no wonder that Mrs. Allan screamed. 

The will, in which there was not even an allusion to Poe, was a 
curious human and quasi-legal document containing clauses which 
throw a new light on the troubles that had long disturbed the 
Allan household, troubles in which the foster-son had played 
such an important part. There were, it now appears, a disconcert- 
ing number of children to provide for, and a domestic situation 
already so perplexing that the testator might well overlook a mere 
foster-child (who had merely been raised as the son of his bosom) 
in favor of those who were of his own blood. But, even of that 
motive, no one can be certain. If the intentions of the testator 
were benign, they were also unfortunately obscure, for both the 
grammatical and legal phraseology of the will were so faulty 457 
as to arouse the justifiable suspicion that it was meant to protect 
the posthumous reputation of the testator rather than to confer 
benefits upon the legatees. Whatever the motives or the intentions, 
they were not carried out. The widow refused to abide by the will 
itself, and, in a long and scandalous litigation, carried her case 
to the State Supreme Court, where she successfully established 
her intestate rights. To the proud and firm minded relict, who 
buried her husband in Shockoe Cemetery at noon, sharp, on 
Saturday the twenty-ninth of March, 1834, the sorrow of his 
taking off was somewhat mitigated by certain considerations to 



456 Edwin Collier, twin sons and a daughter by Mrs. W., two sons by his 
second wife, and a posthumous daughter. Mr. Allan never " acknowledged " the 
daughter by Mrs. W., but left her and her mother jointly $3000. See the will. 

467 For a legal analysis of the will, see Appendix III. 



358 ISRAFEL 



which the world at large was not then privy. The nature of these 
was revealed in his will: 45S 

In the name of God, Amen: I John Allan, of the City of Richmond, 
being of sound mind and disposing memory, do make and ordain this 
my last will and testament, revoking all other wills by me heretofore 
made. (Then follow items, and a provision constituting his beloved wije, 
Louisa Gabriella Allan, James Gait, and Corbin Warwick, executrix 
and executors. This part of the will is dated April 17, 1832, and is wit- 
nessed by Th. Nelson, M. Clark, and Robert L. Cabell. On December 
31 9 1832, in a second section of the will without witnesses, the intent 
of the first part of it was reiterated with some cwioits additions:) 

Mrs. Louisa Gabriella Allan, wife of John Allan 
John Allan, child and i enseignt 



ist pay all my debts. 

2nd. My whole estate to be kept under the management of my exors, 
hereinafter mentioned until my eldest child becomes of age, the house 
and all the ground contiguous and attached to the same, I hereby au- 
thorize and empower my executors, or such of them as may act, to sell 
if they shall think it advisable after the expiration of 5 years from this 
date, also lot at intersection of F and 2nd Street, opposite Mr. Ellis's 
... ^ of the net annual income of my whole estate to be paid to my 
beloved L. G. A. during her natural life or until my eldest child be- 
comes of age. At the division of my estate I desire that my wife shall 
have one-third of my estate for life. . . . 

To Miss Ann Moore Valentine $300 per annum and her board lodging 
and washing to be paid and found her out of my estate during her 
natural life, and this provision is to be in lieu of $2000 which I hold 
of her money, and of which my estate is to be discharged if she accepts 
this bequest. 469 To each of my sisters Nancy Fowlds, Jane Johnston, 
Elizabeth Miller 300 Sterling, and to my sister Mary Allan 100 Ster- 
ling, all residing in Scotland. 400 I devise the whole of my estate among 
my children which may be alive at the time of my death and of such 
as my wife may at that time prove to ensignt, in case they should be 
all boys I then desire that the estate may be equally divided among 
them in case of the birth of a daughter or daughters then I desire that 

458 The part of John Allan's will given here and the complete text given 
in the appendix are from a certified copy supplied the author by Mr. Charles 0. 
Savflle, Clerk of the Chancery Court of the City of Richmond, Virginia. 

450 This money had been left to Miss Valentine by William Gait in 1825. 
See his will, Appendix III, 

* See Chapter III, and Chapter V, for other mention of these relatives, 



BOTTLED FAME 359 

my son or sons as the case may be shall be entitled to double what my 
daughters may have, my children to take the part of such of them as 
may die under age. In case of the death of all my children without 
being married or arriving at the age of 21 years I then give and devise 
to my relations Wm. Gait & Jas. Gait and to Corbin Warwick and to 
their heirs, exors, and administrators all the estate given to my children 
... the remaining -J- part I wish disposed of in such manner as I may 
hereafter appoint by codicil. I desire that my executors shall out of my 

estate provided give to a good english education for two boys 

sons of Mrs. Elizabeth Wills, which she says are mine, I do not know 
their names, but the remaining fifth, four parts of which I have dis- 
posed of must go in equal shares to them of (or) the survivor of them 
but should they be dead before they attain the age of 21 years their 
share to go to my sister's Fowlds children in equal proportions with 
the exception of three thousand dollars, which must go to Mrs. Wills 
and her daughter in perpetuity. 

JOHN ALLAN, Dec. 3ist, 1832 

This memo, in my handwriting is to be taken as a codicil and can 
easily be proven by any of my friends. 

The notes preceding are in the handwriting of my friend, Jno. G. 
Williams. 

The twins were born sometime about the ist of July 1830. 1 was mar- 
ried the 3rd October 1830 in New York, my fault therefore happened 
before I ever saw my present wife and I did not hide it from her. In 
case therefore these twins should reach the age of twenty-one years 
and from reasons they cannot get their share of the fifth reserved for 
them, they are to have $4000 each out of my whole estate to enable 
them to prosecute some honest pursuit, profession or calling. 

March i$th, 1833, I understand one of Mrs. Wills' twin sons died 
some weeks ago, there is therefore one only to provide for. (With this 
happy natural simplification of so plwal a difficulty, the testator then 
delicately adds) : My wife is to have all my furniture, books, bedding, 
linen, plate, wines, spirits, etc., etc., Glass and China ware. 

JOHN ALLAN 

Even the "wines, spirits, etc., etc.," however, do not seem to 
have had the desired cordial effect. 

At a Circuit Superior Court of Law and Chancery held for Henrico 
County at the Capital in the City of Richmond, the 8th day of May 
1834. . . . Louisa G. Allan, widow and relict of the said John Allan, 
deceased . . . appeared in Court and renounced the Executorship, and 
also declared that she will not take or accept the provision of any part 
thereof. . . . 



3 6o ISRAFEL 



The second Mrs. Allan survived her husband by almost half 
a century, during a considerable portion of that time, several 
gentlemen practicing before the Richmond bar were able to join 
in the refrain of an old English song: 

God bless the testator who draws Ms own mil 

discreetly, but with substantial reasons for appreciation of the 
professional sentiment. 

There can be little doubt that even the hope of a legacy in 
Richmond had kept the young poet in Baltimore restless. John 
Allan could be, and we know often was, prevailed upon to help 
from time to time, so that the feeling of there being a final refuge, 
someone to depend upon in time of desperate need, had never 
been entirely absent in his former ward. The r61e of the cast-off 
rich man's son, even of the prodigal who might be forgiven at the 
last, was also a pleasant and interesting background which Poe 
never entirely abandoned. He was delighted to refer to it from 
time to time in letters, and we have already seen how frequently 
it cropped up in his conversation. Mr. Allan's death had now put 
an end to this as far as the reality went. The last ties of self- 
interest and lingering sentiment with the past were now demon- 
strably dissolved. " Dear Pa " was now beyond the appeal of even 
the most needy " man of genius "; and the will, silent about Poe, 
had been probated. The doubtless disappointed young man in 
Baltimore could no longer deceive even himself about the past. 
In grim earnest he must now look to the future for the tying of 
any ties that might bind. Those of his youth were now only the 
figments of memory. 

There was a certain side of Poe's nature which made him ad- 
mire and lean upon those who were capable of overcoming the 
difficulties of a physical world. He was, in a large sense, incapable 
of doing so himself, like so many other artists who find the ulti- 
mate reality in dreams, yet he instinctively felt the need and the 
worth of practical capacity. It was for that reason that he had 
never been entirely able to shake himself clear of John Allan, 
even in his own mind. He ivas not entirely selfish in this, it was 
merely the necessity of self-protection, a means by which he tried 



BOTTLED FAME 361 

to vicariously complement an accidental lack in his own charac- 
ter. Yet strangely enough he was never willing to admit that de- 
pendence implied possession. It was always at that point that the 
break inevitably came, and a new pillar was sought to lean upon, 
or another breast upon which to rest " a proud but weary head." 
The situation, in various disguises, occurred again and again in 
the future, as it had in the past, for instance: 

Once having freed himself from John Allan, starvation forced 
Poe to depend upon another guardian, the Army; finding that 
intolerable, he went through exactly the same motions with pre- 
cisely the same persons at West Point; free of that, with John 
Allan beyond recall, he sheltered himself upon the wide and will- 
ing breast of his Aunt Maria Clemm. It seemed providential to 
both of them, and psychologically it was so. On the return from 
the visit to Richmond in the early Winter of 1834, Poe must have 
realized in his inmost being that the little house on Amity Street, 
and not the great mansion in Richmond, was " home." 

Consequently, it was natural enough that it should occur to 
both Poe and Mrs. Clemm, if it had not been in their thoughts 
even earlier, that the arrangement, already in force at Amity 
Street, might be made permanent by a marriage with Virginia. 
She was still young, very young, only in her twelfth year in fact, 
but she was budding into womanhood, and marriage at that time, 
especially in the South, often took place very early. Many a girl 
was the mother of a family at sixteen. Edgar's affairs with other 
girls must have alarmed Mrs. Clemm. She could see herself left 
alone if Poe married, or making room for a young bride in her 
household, to the numbers of which, death only had brought 
relief. In addition she loved Poe, there can be no doubt of that. 
He was of her own blood, and she regarded herself now as his 
mother. It would be an excellent family arrangement, and some 
sort of an understanding was certainly arrived at by the young 
people. Henry Clemm had gone away, and his mother was anxious 
to have the protection and the support which Edgar's presence 
promised. Much has been made of this " romance." In sober real- 
ity it can scarcely be regarded as more than an acknowledgment 
of general convenience. Virginia was still too young for an imme- 



362 ISRAFEL 

diate ceremony and there was grave objection to an immediate 
marriage on the part of the Neilson Poes. 

Poe, on his part, was troubled in his heart by the fact that Vir- 
ginia was his full cousin, and by her extreme youth. He was 
troubled and yet attracted. The truth seems to be that he was a 
type which was so hypersensitive as to be somewhat revolted by 
the fully developed womanly form, and some of its more hearty 
implications. The infantile, and very youthful, bore a strange 
attraction for him that satisfied a craving for the abnormal mani- 
fest in other directions. Baudelaire describes it well. Poe was 
at once excited and repulsed. The relations with Virginia lie very 
close to the core of his inner mystery; they explain many of his 
heroines. It was not the charming and simple affair that those in 
love with convention would have us believe. About it was the 
haunted grey twilight of near incest that troubled his deepest 
dreams. He was twenty-five and she was about thirteen. The 
neurologist's eye is needed to probe deeper. One feels very near 
here to the secret of a strange soul. What were the real incidents 
of the wooing, no one will know. The kind Poe cousins were 
evidently alarmed, and are known to have remonstrated with 
Mrs. Clemm. 461 Thus matters remained for about a year. 

During the latter part of 1834 despite the brighter prospects 
opened up by the Saturday Visitor prize and a certain amount of 
"fame" which went with it, Poe's condition was more than 
usually desperate. No word had come from Carey & Lea, in 
Philadelphia, about the volume of short stories, and there seems 
to have been no remunerative work of any kind. Mrs. Clemm's 
entire attention must have been taken up by ministering to the 
old grandmother who was fast approaching her end. Edgar him- 
self was in ill health, approaching one of those periods of utter 
depression, due to nerve strain and a weak heart. The neu- 
rasthenic hero of the stories written during the Baltimore period 
shadow forth his own condition. The Visitor had published his 
poem, The Coliseum, earlier in the year. But even its columns 

401 Neilson Poe, who had a large place just outside of Baltimore, a little later 
offered to take Virginia and keep her as one of his family until she was eighteen. 
The objection was not to Virginia's marrying Poe, but on account of her extreme 
youth. The fact is significant. See Woodberry, 1904, vol. I, pages 137 and 144. 



BOTTLED FAME 363 

were now less hospitable, as his friend Wilmer had been forced 
out of the editorship into circumstances of great poverty and his 
place taken by Hewitt, who was a competitor of Poe and probably 
could not forget that Poe had approached him once asking him 
to allow the facts of the poetry award to become known. Finances 
for the little family on Amity Street were now at their lowest ebb, 
and in November, 1834, alarmed and dismayed by hearing no 
word from Philadelphia, Poe wrote the following letter to his 
friend Mr. Kennedy: 

Baltimore Nov. 1834 462 

DR. SIR, I have a favor to beg of you which I thought it better to 
ask in writing, because, sincerely, I had not the courage to ask it in 
person. I am indeed well aware that I have no claim whatever to your 
attention, and that even the manner of my introduction to your notice 
was, at best equivocal. Since the day you first saw me my situation in 
life has altered materially. At that time I looked forward to the inherit- 
ance of a large fortune, and in the meantime was in receipt of an 
annuity sufficient for my support. This was allowed to me by a gentle- 
man of Virginia (Mr. Jno. Allan) who adopted me at the age of 
two years (both my parents being dead) and who, until lately always 
treated me with the affection of a father. 463 But a second marriage on 
his part, and I dare say many follies on my own at length ended in a 
quarrel between us. He is now dead and has left me nothing. I am 
thrown entirely upon my own resources with no profession, and very 
few friends. Worse than all this, I am at length penniless. Indeed no 
circumstances less urgent would have induced me to risk your friend- 
ship by troubling you with my distresses. But I could not help thinking 
that if my situation was stated as you could state it to Carey and 
Lea, they might be led to aid me with a small sum in consideration 
of my Ms. now in their hands. This would relieve my immediate wants, 
and I could then look forward more confidently to better days. At all 
events receive the assurance of my gratitude for what you have already 
done* 

Most respy, yr, obt. St., 

EDGAR ALLAN POE 

Mr. Kennedy was just stepping into a carriage to go to An- 
napolis when he received Poe's note. He remained there for some 



462 A letter in the Kennedy Manuscripts. 

463 This is all " poetic license " on Poe's part, of course. 



364 ISRAFEL 

time and did not reply to Poe until December 22, 1834, in part 
as follows: 

... I requested Carey immediately upon the receipt of your first letter 
to do something for you as speedily as he might find an opportunity, 
and to make some advance on your book. His answer let me know that 
he would go on to publish, but the expectation of any profit from the 
undertaking he considered doubtful not from want of merit in the 
production, but because small books of detached tales, however well 
written, seldom yield a sum sufficient to enable the bookseller to pur- 
chase a copyright. He recommends, however, that I should allow him to 
sell some of the tales to the publishers of the annuals. My reply was 
that I thought you would not object to this if the right to publish the 
same tale was reserved for the volume. He has accordingly sold one of 
the tales to Miss Leslie for the Souvenir, at a dollar a page, I think with 
the reservation above mentioned and has remitted me a draft of 
fifteen dollars which I will hand over to you as soon as you call upon 
me, which I hope you will do as soon as you can make it convenient, 
If the other tales can be sold in the same way, you will get more for 
the work than by an exclusive publication. 

Yours truly, JOHN P. KENNEDY 

This little snatch of correspondence lowers us like a diving 
bell into the depths, where for a little space we can look around 
us in the darkness of a young poet's despair. Both letters are 
characteristic of their writers. Poe's one of restrained despera- 
tion, with the characteristically garbled autobiographical state- 
ments, altered to suit the occasion; Mr. Kennedy's kindly, wise, 
and supremely tactful " My reply was I thought you would 
not object to this " and the " draft of fifteen dollars which I 
will hand over to you as soon as you call upon me which I hope 
you will do as soon as you can make it convenient " how soon, 
and how convenient it was, we may be sure that Mr. Kennedy 
knew only too well. 

Nor did the kind offices of the older man end here. The $15 
must have been eked out to the last penny, but in the middle of 
March, 1835, Poe again wrote Mr. Kennedy asking his influence 
with the Public School Commissioners to enable him to obtain a 
position as a school teacher, "... Have I any hope? ... the 
1 8th is fixed for the decision of the commissioners, and the adver- 
tisement has only this moment caught my eye." Mr. Kennedy's 



BOTTLED FAME 365 



reply written the same day, Sunday, March 15, iSss 46 * was 
famous invitation to dinner. In reply to this Poe dispatched the 
following pathetic note, perhaps the wide-eyed little Virginia car- 
ried it, as she had carried notes of a different kind before: 

DR. SIR, Your kind invitation to dinner today has wounded me to 
the quick. I cannot come and for reasons of the most humiliating 
nature in my personal appearance. You may conceive my deep mortifi- 
cation in making this disclosure to you but it was necessary. If you 
will be my friend so far as to loan me $20, 1 will call on you tomorrow 
otherwise it will be impossible, and I must submit to my fate. 

Sincerely yours, 

E. A. POE 
Sunday 



The little note was the turning point in Poe's literary career. Poe 
must, indeed, have been desperate before his pride, his governing 
motive, could have surrendered so far. Mr. Kennedy was touched 
to the quick. He now fully realized the situation that the letter 
revealed. The curtains in the windows of a proud little home had 
been drawn back for an instant and revealed the illy clad family 
who dwelt there sitting about an empty table. The good man 
bestirred himself, as he would doubtless have done before had he 
known. Poe was provided with clothes, invited to the Kennedy 
house, made much of at the generous board, doubtless Mrs. 
Clemm's basket profited, too and Edgar was even loaned Mr. 
Kennedy's horse " for exercise." The last was indeed the refine- 
ment of courtesy to a Virginian. Once on horseback, Edgar Poe 
felt himself to be a gentleman again. Nor will the sneers of Gris- 
wold a quarter of a century later, at all these items, suffice to 
convince the world that it was merely a beggar who went riding, 
But the greatest service of all was Mr. Kennedy's introduction 
of the young author to the editor of the Southern Literary Mes- 
senger in Richmond, to whom, upon the advice and recommenda- 
tion of his patron, Poe submitted some of his tales. Berenice was 
accepted, and appeared in the March, 1835, number of the Mes- 
senger with a highly laudatory editorial notice. The editor was 



* 4 This note has been correctly dated as of 1835 by Prof. Woodberry, and not 
1833 as given by Prof. Harrison, 



366 



ISRAFEL 



much impressed and followed up Poe's reference to Mr. Kennedy 
with a letter of inquiry. Mr. Kennedy replied to Mr. White: 

Baltimore, Apr. 13, 1835 

DEAR SIR, Poe did right in referring to me. He is very clever with 
his pen classical and scholar-like. He wants experience and direction, 
but I have no doubt he can be made very useful to you. And, poor fel- 
low, he is wry poor. I told him to write something for every number of 
your magazine, and that you might find it to your advantage to give 
him some permanent employ. ... The young fellow is highly imagi- 
native and a little terrific. He is at work upon a tragedy, but I have 
turned him to drudging upon whatever may make money. . . . 

The hint from Mr. Kennedy went home. Berenice was the 
entering wedge, and every number of the Messenger for some- 
time afterward contained a story and some criticism or reviews 
by Poe. John P. Kennedy had not only saved him; he had 
" made " him. Poe never forgot this as long as he lived and, many 
years later, remarked to Thomas Stoddard with an undimmed 
sense of gratitude, " Mr. Kennedy has been, at all times, a true 
friend to me he was the first true friend I ever had I am 
indebted to him for life itself." 

Thomas Wylkes White, editor of the Southern Literary Mes- 
senger, was a native of Virginia, 400 and a member of the numer- 
ous tribe of itinerant printer-publishers who, in the 1830*8, were 
filling the ephemeral editorial chairs of various will-o'-the-wisp 
magazines that glowed faintly here and there all over the United 
States, and for the most part died away painlessly, after giving 
off a faint gaseous light. Mr. White was more able than most, 
however, and a happy combination of circumstances and per- 
sonalities permitted him to continue the Southern Literary Mes- 
senger with unusual success. In 1834, he went to Richmond 
where nine numbers of the Messenger had already appeared 
under the editorship of Mr. James Heath, author of Edge HUI*"* 
There White became a sort of combined printer-business-manager- 
and-editor of the sheet, Mr. Heath continuing for some time 



* 5 The statement that Mr. White was a Northerner, born in Yorktown, Penn- 
sylvania, etc., etc., is incorrect. 

** Edge Hill, a novel then rather widely read, by James Heath. 



BOTTLED FAME 367 

to act in an unpaid advisory capacity. White was a good business 
man, with a pleasant personality, although shrewd, but he lacked 
the background, the literary qualities, and the editorial vision to 
make the magazine a complete success. In 1834, there were only 
a few hundred subscribers. In Poe, Mr. White soon recognized 
the very type of man which his paper most needed, and the cor- 
respondence, stories, reviews and articles, which Poe contributed 
through the Spring of 1835, led up to a suggestion of permanent 
employment on the staff. On June 2, 1835, Poe wrote White a 
long letter on various topics concerning the magazine, in which 
he says: 

. . . You ask me if I would be willing to come to Richmond if you 
should have occasion for my services during the coming winter. I 
reply that nothing would give me greater pleasure. I have been desirous 
for some time past of paying a visit to Richmond, and would be glad 
of any reasonable excuse of so doing. . . . 

Aside from the fact that Richmond was always home to Poe, 
there was a particular, and peculiar personal reason, over and 
above the opportunity offered by White, why he " would be glad 
of any reasonable excuse of paying a visit to Richmond." The 
reason belonged to the realm of the romantic. 467 

Miss Mary Winf ree of Chesterfield, Virginia, a young lady who 
had formerly enjoyed Poe's passing attentions, and who had never 
forgotten him, had come to visit in Baltimore some time before 
Poe's marriage with Virginia. She was, perhaps, the first of the 
several Marys to whom Poe had confided the touching fact that 
she bore his favorite name. At any rate, her interest was sufficient 
to cause her to seek him out. She did not, of course, know that 
Poe was thinking of marrying Virginia, and it is not likely that he 
enlightened her. Miss Winfree was a close friend of Elmira 
Royster (Mrs. Shelton), and, in discussing the past with Poe, 
the interesting and disturbing information came to light that El- 
mira was not altogether happy with her husband, and that she had 
never ceased to love Poe. The deception which her parents had 



467 I am indebted to a Richmond acquaintance who desires to remain anony- 
mous for part of the information dealing with this little known episode. This 
acquaintance has the copy of the Bijou. 



3 68 ISRAFEL 

practiced upon her had, as we have seen, come to light through the 
finding of one of Poe's letters to her from the University, and her 
first romantic attachment flamed up anew. Miss Winfree brought 
with her a little book called the Bijou, one of the ubiquitous parlor 
annuals of the time, to whose pages Mrs. Shelton had contributed 
a story signed with her initials, in which, to those who knew her 
past, the meaning was clear. She was, it appears, languishing for 
a glimpse of her true love, and the pain could not be assuaged. 
Despite the fact that " Hymen (in a double sense) and Time and 
Destiny were now stalking between " him and her Poe seems 
to have determined to see her at least once again, to let her know 
that he still loved her, and to justify the past. How far he intended 
to go, it is impossible to say. Circumstances would doubtless dic- 
tate that, as they did. It was a sentimental and dangerous situa- 
tion that appealed to his romantic heart. Once in Richmond, time 
would provide the opportunity. What was Virginia's status in the 
triangle it is hard to say. 

For a time, however, the move to Richmond had to be deferred. 
Mr. White was not yet ready, and old Mrs. Poe was dying. A few 
checks now and then for $5 and $10 amounts from the Messenger 
served to back the wolf off the front stoop, at least, while the pen 
in the little room on Amity Street went forward. . . . The mail 
was robbed by one William Jones and Poe found himself the loser 
" to a small amount." Poe purchased some especially fine printer's 
ink for Mr. White and took it to the steamboat himself. John 
Marshall, the great Chief Justice, died, Poe remembered him well 
from the old family pew in the Monumental Church. He, too, was 
now added to the names of the past recorded in Shockoe Ceme- 
tery, and a little paragraph from the hand of the boy who had 
known him appeared in the Messenger soon after: 

. . . Our great and lamented countryman, fellow-townsman, neighbor 
and friend for by all these names did a fortuitous conjunction of 
circumstances, including his own kind and prideless heart, entitle us 
to call him. . . . 408 



468 Chief Justice Marshall had been injured in a stage coach accident in the 
Spring of 1835. He went to Philadelphia for medical treatment where he died on 
July 6. Poe was at work on a review of the second edition of Marshall's Life of 



BOTTLED FAME 369 

On May 30, 1835, P e wrote to Mr. White in Richmond al- 
luding to a serious breakdown about that time: 

I have not seen Mr. Kennedy for some days, having been too unwell 
to go abroad ... at the time I wrote the hasty sketch I sent you I 
was so ill as to be hardly able to see the paper on which I wrote, and 
finished in a state of complete exhaustion. . . . 

On January 12, he again writes White: 

I am glad to say that I have entirely recovered although Dr. 
Buckler, no longer than three weeks ago, assured me that nothing but 
a sea-voyage would save me. . . . 

Evidently this was no ordinary indisposition. Dr. Buckler 
would not have ordered a sea-voyage to a poverty-stricken young 
poet unless he had good cause for alarm. He thought it was the 
only thing that would save his patient. And this illness was only a 
repetition of several that had preceded it in the previous four 
years. Poe had specifically mentioned his ill health in letters to 
John Allan as we have seen. -' 

An understanding and some explanation of Foe's physical and 
mental condition is, from now on, fundamental even to a partial 
understanding of his character. A completely satisfactory under- 
standing of a matter, necessarily nebulous and of a character so 
strangely contradictory and complex, must perhaps forever elude 
our grasp. There are, however, certain indications inherent in the 
symptoms of his condition, and the work which he produced, that 
tend to throw a light upon some of the darker phases of his nature. 
Any study of the man, which obstinately refuses to recognize the 
unpleasant and unfortunate aspects of his nature, or to explain his 
tragedy by assuming and asserting that his misfortunes were due 
merely to persecution, an unappreciative world, and a preverse 
fate, must disregard, ignorantly or deliberately, some o'f the out- 
standing and most incontestable facts of his career. Poe's human 
misfortunes cannot be laid in the main upon the shoulders of 
the epoch and the world in which he moved; they were, for the 
most part, caused by the early break-up of his physical health, 

Washington, in two volumes, 1832. Marshall's death had an important bearing on 
the trend of national events, see note 500, Chapter XVIII, page 412. 



370 ISRAFEL 

due to his unhappy youth and heredity and the stimulants which 
he used to counteract their effects. Paradoxically enough, out of 
the mental state evolved from ill health and one of the stimulants 
he resorted to, flowed much of the creative work of the artist 
which insured his literary success. That there was, in addition to 
this, a third factor, the unique humanity of the man himself, goes 
without saying. Every human being is different from all others. 
The exact and unique flavor of a personality can never be com- 
pletely caught in any literary reconstruction. The hint of the 
peculiar genius of a man, can only be partly reflected in the glass 
of his actions. These are being detailed here, and, from them, the 
reader must largely be left to make his own reconstruction. The 
more physical aspects, however, bear analysis, and it is necessary 
now to attempt some evaluation of them in the interplay of ill 
health and the effects of nostrums. Combining the last two with 
the reflection of the man's self in his actions, at least, a credible 
ghost may be invoked. 

Poe was afflicted with a weak heart. There is, later on, direct 
medical evidence of a doctor and a professional nurse of long 
experience to that effect. In addition to this, the long tragedy 
of his youth had, as we have seen, exhausted him nervously. 
The affect of these two conditions was to subject him to a gen- 
eral feeling of depression due to subnormal vitality, culminating 
frequently in periods of more or less complete prostration or 
threatened collapse. A specious, and apparently easy " remedy " 
for this feeling of debility, induced by a weak heart and ex- 
hausted nerves, was the use of stimulants or sedatives. It seems 
transparently evident that, when a period of collapse overtook him, 
Poe resorted to one of two drugs, either alcohol or opium. There 
is direct evidence, as we have seen, of his use of alcohol in 1826 at 
Charlottesville and in 1830 at West Point, Even a very little was, 
to him, peculiarly disastrous. With the advent of the Baltimore 
period, there are powerful reasons to lead one to believe that, 
from that date on, Poe now resorted, from time to time, to the use 
of opiates. 

In the first place, it must be remembered that in his condition, 
if he were to continue to work, perhaps at times even to survive, 



BOTTLED FAME 371 

drugs were in order. He had tried alcohol and found it more 
or less disastrous. Opium, for Poe, involved a peculiarly seductive 
temptation. It removed him completely from the world of reality 
which he largely disliked; it enormously increased the bounds of 
his imagination; and it coincidentally vastly stimulated his crea- 
tive faculty while soothing his nerves. At the same time its effects 
were so subtle as to escape immediate observation and comment, 
while, at least at first, it did not produce the violent reactions and 
periods of mania which followed his resort to drink. For the time 
being, it seemed to solve all difficulties and to provide a sovereign 
panacea. 

During the stay in Baltimore from 1831 to 1834, there can be 
no moral doubt that Poe was using opium, at least from time to 
time. The indubitable evidence of the fact, lies in the work which 
he produced. The Tales of the Folio Club are replete with opiate 
dreams, and when they fell into the hands of Baudelaire, some 
years later, caused him to shed tears of joy as he recognized the 
very features of his own reveries as it were endowed with life. 
Such stories as Ligeia and Berenice illustrate this directly, espe- 
cially the latter. They provide not only direct references to the 
drug, but the imagery, the irrational associations, and the very 
use of words is characteristic. To those who have no knowledge 
or familiarity with the effects of opium, and they are, of course, 
the majority, the evidence may seem insufficient; to those who 
have, the turning of these pages tells an irrefutable tale. There is 
evidence by witnesses that Poe took opium in Philadelphia. In 
1847, he tried to commit suicide with laudanum. The inference 
is that he had tried the use of opiates before. Rosalie Poe, his 
sister, says that in 1848, at Fordham, he " begged for morphine." 
In June, 1884, Dr. John Carter of Baltimore who had consider- 
able knowledge of Poe from his brother, another physician who 
had treated the poet in Richmond in 1849, wrote to Professor 
Woodberry that, while he had no direct personal evidence, " I may 
state, in a matter of so leading importance, that I incline to the 
view that Poe began the use of drugs in Baltimore, that his 
periods of abstinence from liquor were periods of at least mod- 
erate indulgence in opium, . . ." etc. 



372 ISRAFEL 

During the Baltimore period, Poe is known to have abstained 
almost totally from liquor. Although he was ill and in the greatest 
poverty, as his own letters at that time abundantly attest, he 
nevertheless contrived to produce a large mass of creative work. 
That when so ill, and under such difficult living conditions, he 
could produce at an hitherto unexampled rate, indicates an un- 
usual cause. But when the work itself produced under such con- 
ditions is examined and found to contain, not only direct refer- 
ences to the use of opium, but to be of a type produced by a 
consciousness laboring under the effects of the drug, the chain 
seems complete. Besides this, there were also secondary mani- 
festations of a decided change in his character through the Balti- 
more years which tend to confirm the suspicion. 

In the first place, from 1831 to 1834, Poe remained almost un- 
known. The records of his existence for part of that time are 
amazingly obscure, and, for a considerable portion of the period, 
obsolutely lapse. This means, if anything, that he was largely 
confined to the garret of Mrs. Clemm. Ill health, poverty, and 
pen-driving will not entirely explain the fact that a young soldier 
and a fairly athletic young man of a few years before had sud- 
denly become a complete recluse. He was not ill all the time, but 
at periods, yet he obtained no steady employment for a period of 
almost five years in the prime of youth. Thousands of the young 
men in Baltimore at the same time, despite the severe financial 
stricture, were successfully employed. What was Poe doing? 
Dreaming in Mrs. Clemm's attic, and -the records of those dreams 
are strongly tinged with opium. Alcohol he did not take because 
he did not need it. Mrs. Clemm's influence is of course to be 
reckoned with here. 

Another startling change also overtook him now. From 1832 
to 1847, Mary Devereaux is the only record of a really normally 
passionate love affair that Poe was engaged in. Up until that time, 
all through his youth, his interest in girls and women had been 
varied and constant. These now suddenly cease. Now, one of the 
notorious effects of opium, is the eventual weakening of sexual 
desire. This condition now suddenly seems to present itself. At 
the end of the period in 1835, he had deviated so far from the nor- 



BOTTLED FAME 373 

mal as to be able to marry, apparently both willingly and apathet- 
ically, a thirteen-year-old child. That there were other and more 
profound sexual disturbances in Poe's nature, the Sadistic trend 
of a considerable body of his work indicates. The lessening of 
desire, and the strange conditions of his marriage, are the princi- 
pal matters, however, to be reckoned with. During the latter half 
of his life, his trend from the normal was marked. What had pro- 
duced such an effect upon one who, in boyhood, appears to have 
been somewhat precocious, may well cause one to ponder. In the 
understanding of Poe's character during the latter half of his life, 
the problem is a central one. He was now entering upon a new 
phase. 

For the Baltimore period and the home on Amity Street was 
about to close. One cannot help but wonder about the life that 
went on in the little house with the single dormer window and the 
end chimney. Mrs. Clemm was preoccupied night and day with 
the duties of the household and the dying grandmother, she and 
Edgar gathered about the little dining-room table with the always 
snowy cloth and the spotless china, listening to the childish talk 
of the childish cousin, whose great eyes looked at Edgar only 
half comprehendingly. What did Poe think of it all? the 
ambitious young man with the soaring mind. And what of the 
more intimate and tender episodes? There was something strange 
about that, something infantile with the quality of a day-dream 
come true. Strange and yet alluring. An inscrutable experience 
was having its subtle way. " Ligeia " had become a reality. She 
was beginning to dominate his dreams, and yet was she? There 
was still Elmira. 

On July 7, 1835, Mrs. David Poe died at Amity Street. She 
was seventy-eight years old. Her death could, in the nature of 
things, have been nothing but a relief. Mrs. Clemm could now 
turn all her attention to Edgar and Virginia. The household was 
reduced to the final number to which there was never any natural 
addition and Poe was free to follow his star. 

Under the beat of the steamer's paddles, Baltimore faded for 
the time being into a dream. Richmond was calling with all the 
force of the past and a brighter future. The dream of Poe's life 



374 ISRAFEL 



was coming true he was going " home " with foreign laurels. 
They were not bright yet, but they were visible, and they became 
him well. Mrs. Clemm remained behind in the house on Amity 
Street, awaiting the outcome of a long litigation over her husband's 
will, 469 and to watch over Virginia. It was about midsummer of the 
year 1835. Only fourteen years later the curtain fell. 

*9 This " litigation " if it can be termed that, had to do with Mrs. Clemm's 
and her children's share in the property of Mrs. Catherine Clemm of Mount Pros- 
pect, Maryland. She was, it seems, entitled to one-third the children of the first 
wife of William Clemm made trouble. Poe was exceedingly anxious to obtain this 
legacy, a small amount, to help set up his own house with Mrs. Clemm. See Poe 
to Kennedy, Richmond, January 22, 1836, etc. The matter later called Poe to 
Baltimore from Philadelphia. 



CHAPTER XVII 
The Valley of the Many-Colored Grass 

ABOUT the person of the young man, who reappeared in 
Richmond in the early August days of 1835, there was, 
beyond per adventure, something distinguished: a certain 
knack of tying the black stock; a precise and studied nonchalance 
about the buttoning of the tight, double-breasted waistcoat over 
the impeccable linen carefully mended by " Muddie " that 
was somehow arresting. The large beaver hat, then universally 
worn by all who pretended to the name of gentleman, sat a little 
to the side, tilted a bit backward, accentuating an already promi- 
nent brow, and curling in an arch way over a delicate ear. Under 
the flare of its small brim, drooped a tangle of black-brown hair 
blanching an olive, oval face from which looked, unforgettably, 
two large and haunted grey-blue eyes. The mouth was small, a 
little weak, and slightly twisted by pain. The lips and chin were 
clean shaven, and there was the faintest suggestion about them 
of a whimsical and ironical smile out of a wisp of side-burns. It 
was the countenance of one who regarded his world as a dream 
within a dream. 

The erect figure of the man dressed in a raven-black and metic- 
ulously brushed flare-tail coat, with the roll collar left open, 
contrived to be impressive by just avoiding being dapper. The 
shoulders were thrown back, showing too narrow a chest, and 
vest buttons that gleamed like medals over the stomach. The 
metal tassel of a long, knit, ring-fastened purse dangled from the 
slant vest pocket, anchored there by nothing more than a Mexican 
half dollar of a few " levys," and a nervous brisk gait was ac- 
centuated by the ripple in an ample pair of Nankeen, diapered 
pantaloons, strapped under the boots. Such was Mr. White's bril- 
liant young editor, going calling in Richmond some weeks after 
the last purple blooms had disappeared from the paulownia trees. 



376 ISRAFEL 

Those who passed him in the street felt they had encountered a 
presence, and both men and women remarked and remembered, 
" There goes Edgar Poe." 

For the first few days he probably stopped at Duncan Lodge 
with the Mackenzies. Rosalie was there, happy, unshadowed by 
any future, a fully grown child. Mr. and Mrs. Mackenzie never 
failed to make him welcome, and there was always Jack bluff 
and hearty. Perhaps " Aunt Nancy " dropped over quietly from 
the Allan house to tell him about Pa's last hours, and whisper 
about the will. She, at least, was secure in $300 a year and her 
board and washing. Her revelations could not have been much of 
a surprise to Poe, who would certainly ascertain for himself the 
exact provisions of a certain document. 470 But it must have been 
strange to pass the big house with its drawn curtains; to hear the 
shouts of John Allan's eldest boy in the old garden; to be stopped 
in the streets by the affectionate greeting of the old house-serv- 
ants, and yet to know, beyond doubt, that in all that he was never, 
nevermore, to have any part. How curious, too, when passing the 
store at Ellis & Allan to look in at the door! The very shadows 
and odors were familiar 471 John Allan's desk was there in 
the office, and a trunk with letters but " Pa " was inevitably 
gone. 

The past was not forgotten, however. The strange record of it 
lay there in the old trunk, and in the hearts of those who now 
occupied the big house. Poe's arrival, although she took no notice 
of it, was undoubtedly a source of anxiety to Mrs. Allan. Already 
she was in trouble about the will. Poe knew too much, if he had 
cared to say anything. It would pay to be careful, above all to 
avoid any more scenes. So the big door never swung open to him 
again, and other doors in certain other places were quietly and 



470 Poe would almost certainly acquaint himself with the nature of John 
Allan's will probated in public court. He would take no chances. 

471 After the death of the first Mrs. Allan, John Allan removed a trunk con- 
taining his first wife's correspondence and probably other data to Ellis & Allan. 
In this he put Poe's letters from 1824 on. The trunk fell into the hands of James 
Gait as John Allan's executor and was by him removed to Fluvanna Plantation. 
There the second Mrs. Allan had access to it and removed from it some of Poe's 
letters now in the Valentine Museum Collection. She appears to have destroyed 
others. Only one letter in Frances Allan's handwriting is known to exist. James Gait 
said there were " other letters " that remained in the trunk. Whose, it is not known* 



VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASS 377 

mysteriously closed. Sub rosa, in certain circles the word went 
around. In the end it made a difference, especially when the 
Allan children grew up. At that time they were only cutting their 
teeth. 472 

For the most part, though, the old friends remained true, Jack 
Mackenzie, of course, and Bob Cabell, Rob Stanard especially, 
and the Gaits. Poe was welcome at many homes, for himself alone. 
Many knew enough to take the talk of ingratitude to John Allan 
with the proper grain of salt; card playing at the University had 
been heard of before. It was not a sin which debarred one from 
dances. Even old I. O. U.'s could be overlooked when a charming 
young man in the way of fame was to be forgiven, and invited in 
to add to the conversation. On the whole it was at first rather a 
triumphant return. There were a few discreet smiles, no doubt, at 
the expense of a certain proud lady, not a Virginian, who kept a 
large house. But Frances Valentine's foster-son was not over- 
looked. After Baltimore and poverty it seemed brilliant. There 
was wine at every table, music, pretty girls, and a certain defer- 
ence to " literature." On some occasions all this seems to have gone 
to the head. 

After a short stay at the Mackenzies 3 , Poe took up -lodgings 
with Mrs. Poore, who kept one of those peculiarly genteel 
Southern boarding houses on Bank Street, Capitol Square. The 
weather was fine, Mr. White was more than cordial, and Eliza, 
his daughter, could recite Shakespeare "elegantly." She had 
" remarkable eyes." Elmira was near and not forgotten. A little 
after the arrival of the young poet in Richmond, the Southern 
Literary Messenger found its columns embellished with the fol- 
lowing lines contributed by " Sylvio." 

TO SARAH 

. . . The silvery streamlet gurgling on, 
The mock-bird chirping in the thorn, 
Remind me, love, of thee. 
They seem to whisper thoughts of love, 
As thou didst when the stars above 
Witnessed thy vows to me; 



472 John Allan's last child, a posthumous daughter, survived her two brothers, 
who died young men. 



378 ISRAFEL 

The gentle zephyr floating by, 
In chorus to my pensive sigh, 
Recalls the hours of bliss, 
When from thy ruby lips I drew 
Fragrance as sweet as Hermia's dew, 
And left the first fond kiss. . . . 

As Mrs. A. Barrett Shelton suddenly ran across these yearning 
rhymes in the Messenger, her eyes may possibly have become too 
dimmed to note the exact expression on the face of her husband 
comfortably seated at his breakfast coffee. Many must have known 
who the poet on the Messenger was, " Sylvio " could not have been 
an impenetrable disguise. If so, the enlightening Miss Winfree was 
Elmira's bosom friend. In the meantime Edgar went every morn- 
ing to his desk at the Messenger office, sometimes, too often per^ 
haps, taking a bracer from the decanter on Mrs. Poore's side- 
board, which made him superbly confident a superbness that 
did not altogether recommend itself to Mr. White. 470 Otherwise 
they got along famously. 

The offices of the Southern Literary Messenger were situated at 
the corner of Main and Fifteenth Streets, in a substantial three- 
story brick building with a steeply-pitched slate roof topped by 
a squat brick chimney. Underneath was Archer's shoe shop, the 
Messenger being on the second floor. Poe reached his sanctum by 
an outside stairway from Fifteenth Street and held forth in the 
rear room. It was a neighborhood with which he was uncannily 
familiar, for right next door (one could hear the clerks shouting 
through the walls) were the store and lofts of Ellis & Allan. Poe 
had gone to work that way before! The very slight rise in the 
brick pavement starting up Fifteenth from Main was familiar. 
Even now the click of a cane upon it, and the ring of a boot 
must have made him start. 

In the same office with Poe, sat Mr. White, 474 a stocky, good- 

478 Mr. White, it will be remembered, specifically warned Poe against morning 
drinking. See White to Poe, Richmond, September 29, 1835, printed on page 385. 

474 The author is in possession of abundant material for a literal description 
of the Southern Literary Messenger offices, the vicinity and the personnel. The 
building was removed in 1908, much of the material in it being taken over for 
the Poe Shrine. The description of T. W. White is from a portrait. 




The Southern Literary Messenger Building 
and the offices of Ellis fef Allan to the right 

Two buildings in Richmond, Virginia, intimately connected with POE. Many 
months were passed under both roofs as a clerk in his foster-father's warehouse, 
and as an editor on the Messenger 




! Sunday Evening at the Yarringtons" 



From an old illustration 



VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASS" 379 

natured man with a florid face. Visitors, local literary lights and 
authors, dropped in frequently for a chat or to solicit a favor. 
In front could be heard the Scotch-tinged conversation of the 
foreman, William McFarland, and John Fergusson as they clapped 
the frames on the round, black-faced presses or fluttered their 
hands magically over the square cases of type. Proofs hung 
upon rusty hooks; the mail was heavy, and piled up mainly upon 
Poe's desk. Copies of books for review kept coming in, so the 
young editor was very busy. 

The office was left very much alone to Poe, as Mr. White, once 
the literary capacity of his assistant became apparent, went about 
the state and the neighboring towns soliciting subscriptions. There 
were only 700 subscribers when Poe came. With the combined 
efforts of the young man's brilliant pen and Mr. White's junket- 
ings, they now mounted with a bound. So there was no time left 
to dream. In the little office, where the light filtered blankly 
through the square, dusty panes, someone was always holding 
forth and squirting tobacco about. There were volumes to review; 
McFarland was howling for copy; or the latest edition was to be 
bundled up, addressed by hand, and sent out. Whale-oil lamps 
and printer's ink scented the air. Only on the way home in the 
evening, as the strong sugary smell of Virginia tobacco surged 
out at him from the door of Ellis & Allan, the past, all the lost 
past, rolled down upon Poe overpoweringly in a cloud of sweet 
odor, for he was peculiarly sensitive to perfume. To his dying 
day the scent of orris root made Frances Allan live again, stand- 
ing as she used to in her bedroom, looking into her glass before 
an open bureau drawer. 476 Then he went "home " to dine at Mrs. 
Poore's in Capitol Square. 

Behind it all there was, already, a vast melancholy. If " Mud- 
die " and " Sis " could only come to Richmond! Perhaps a little 
later? Just now his " salary " was only $10 a week. 

One day Poe received an invitation to attend a party at a big 
house " across the river." He went early. 476 Elmira, he heard, was 



475 Poe spoke of this memory-odor as late as 1849. 

476 Mrs. Shelton herself authenticated this incident. 



380 ISRAFEL 

going to be there. The stairs, in this mansion of a memorable 
meeting, curved in a double arc to a landing with a bay window ! 
from which opened a spacious drawing-room. At the end of this, 
in a window niche, Poe took his stand and waited. The gentlemen 
left their hats in the hall; the ladies left their wraps in an ante- 
room off the stairs. Presently Elmira appeared. She was coming 
up the stairway alone and still beautiful. The September sunshine 
caught, with a well-known glint, in her auburn hair. Poe watched 
it while she took off her hat. Then she turned to enter the room, 
but she did not do so. Something stopped her at the thresh- 
old more powerful than a restraining hand. It was an unfor- 
gettable and devouring pair of eyes. 

Mrs. Shelton said, years later, that it seemed to her as if there 
were nothing else in the room. 470 It seemed as if they shed dark- 
ness in the place, the shadows of longing and reproach. For a 
moment they stood and exchanged glances, then her husband 
came. He took in the situation at a glance; almost carried his wife 
away; put on her cloak himself as he led her to the door, and 
drove off furiously down the road. 

Poe had, indeed, lost his " Lenore." He did not see her again 
for more than ten years. Both the Sheltons and Roysters were 
much alarmed. Elmira was, after this, both recalcitrant and ill, 
and her husband intimated that if Poe tried to meet her again, 
there would be a violent reckoning. Nor was this an idle threat, 
for, along the James and farther South, 477 the code duello was at 
that date, and for years to come, by no means a dead letter, as 
many another editor had good cause to know. 

Poe was greatly depressed and, about that time, news came 
from Baltimore that threw him into despair. The Neilson Poes, it 
appears, had taken advantage of his absence to break off the af- 
fair with Virginia and were bringing pressure upon Mrs. Clemm 
to let the young girl come and live with them. It seemed as if 
once more his hopes of a home were to be dashed to the ground 
or at least intolerably deferred. There was something peculiarly 



477 Duelling lingered in Virginia and the Carolinas long after it went out of 
fashion in the North. A notorious case occurred in Charleston, South Carolina, 
just before the Civil War, in which an editor was killed. 



VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASS 381 

repulsive to Poe about a boarding house table. The purely acci- 
dental association of insufferable personalities who sought to 
gorge their appetites and curiosity about the same board, the 
landlady introducing " our poet," the suspicion which followed 
one who desired privacy, the five-year-old conversation, and the 
ignorant gossip, were enough to drive him mad. How could the 
gods afflict him with great dreams and the love of " all the beauty 
that we worship in a star," while seating him at a board where 
any remark above an inanity made all the heavy f easters choke 
or stare? It was a divine jest! Worse than the army mess, for 
there was no escape whatever. So Poe kept longing for the refuge 
of a home. As early as August 20 he remembered that he had 
well-to-do cousins in Georgia, and wrote to William Poe of Au- 
gusta giving a detailed account of the family and his life history, 
and soliciting aid for Mrs. Clemm: 

. . . In conclusion I beg leave to assure you that whatever aid you may 
have it in your power to bestow upon Mrs. Clemm will be given to one 
who well deserves every kindness and attention. Would to God that I 
could at this moment aid her. She is now, while I write, struggling 
without friends, without money, and without health to support herself 
and two children. I sincerely pray God that the words whidi I am writ- 
ing may be the means of inducing you to unite with your brothers and 
friends, and send her that immediate relief which it is utterly out of my 
power to give her just now, and which, unless it reach her soon will, I 
am afraid, reach her too late. Entreating your attention to this subject, 
I remain 

Yours very truly & affectionately 

EDGAR A. POE 

The taking over of a new position or a decided change in one's 
mode of life and residence is, like New Year's, very often the 
occasion for trying to put good resolutions into effect. Upon as- 
suming the new position in Richmond, Poe evidently undertook 
to shake off his dependence on stimulants of any kind, while, at 
the same time, he forced himself at the new work. The combined 
effect was more than he could support; he had evidently tried 
to bolster himself up by drinking, and the result was a col- 
lapse. The letter which he now wrote to Mr. Kennedy is the ex- 
pression of one who finds the terrible drabness of the real world 



382 ISRAFEL 



intolerable as he struggles to abandon a habit. What the real 
reason is, Poe carefully conceals: 

Richmond, Sept. n, 1835 

DR. SIR, I received a letter yesterday from Dr. Miller * 78 in which he 
tells me you are in town (Baltimore). I hasten therefore, to write you, 
and express by letter what I have always found impossible to ex- 
press orally my deep sense of gratitude for your frequent and 
effectual assistance and kindness. Through your influence Mr. White 
has been induced to employ me in assisting him with the Editorial 
duties of his Magazine at a salary of $520 per annum. The situation 
is agreeable to me for many reasons but alas! it appears to me 
that nothing can now give me pleasure or the slightest gratification. 
Excuse me, my Dear Sir, if in this letter you find much incoherency. 
My feelings at this moment are pitiable indeed. I am suffering under 
a depression of spirits such as I have never felt before. I have strug- 
gled in vain against the influence of this melancholy you will believe 
me when I say that I am still miserable in spite of the great improve- 
ment in my circumstances. I say you will believe me, and for this 
simple reason, that a man who is writing for effect does not write thus. 
My heart is open before you if it be worth reading, read it. I am 
wretched, and know not why. Console me for you can. But let it be 
quickly or it will be too late. Write me immediately. Convince me 
that it is worth one's while, that it is necessary to live, and you will 
prove yourself my friend. Persuade me to do what is right. I do not 
mean this I do not mean that you should consider what I now write 
you a jest oh pity me I for I feel that my words are incoherent but 
I will recover myself. You will not fail to see that I am suffering under 
a depression of spirits which will ruin me should it be long continued. 
Write me then, and quickly. Urge me to do what is right. Your words 
will have more weight with me than the words of others for you were 
my friend when no one else was. Fail not as you value your peace of 
mind hereafter, 

E. A. POE 

This terrible letter was evidently written in the access of re- 
morse which followed an application to the bottle, and in a state 
of physical and mental collapse. Poe was, for the first time, com- 
pletely in a vicious circle. Trying to escape from his troubles he 
had delivered himself to another torment. The angel of oblivion, 
which he sought to invoke, now first revealed itself as a demon 

* Remedy Manuscripts. 



VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASS 383 

from which he could not escape. The thought was maddening. Had 
all the slavery in time of starvation, the escape from John Allan, 
the dreams of ambition been in vain? Elmira was gone. Virginia, 
it appeared, and with her the strength of Mrs. Clemm upon which 
he leaned, were about to be snatched from him, too. At Mrs. 
Poore's for the first time, Poe heard unmistakably the faint 
tapping at the window pane of the inexorable beak of the bird 
of despair that later invaded his chamber to perch triumphant 
over the personification of knowledge and art. It was the hand 
of a drowning man who had gone down for the first time, and 
felt the water close over him, that Mr. Kennedy was asked to 
take. There was a postscript almost as long as the letter in which 
Poe discusses the fate of his tales with Carey & Lea and rails 
against a fellow author for stealing (sic) some of his ideas from 
Hans Pfadl. It seems almost at if the man had developed two 
minds, a personal and an editorial self. The manifestations of 
the dual nature and the occasional visits of the demon were to 
continue. A few days later Mr. Kennedy replied: 

Baltimore, Sept. 19, 1835 

MY DEAR POE, I am sorry to see you in such a plight as your 
letter shows you in. It is strange that just at the time when every- 
body is praising you and when Fortune has begun to smile upon your 
hitherto -wretched circumstances you should be invaded by these vil- 
lainous blue devils. It belongs, however, to your age and temper to 
be fhus buffeted, but be assured it only wants a little resolution to 
master the adversary forever, Rise early, live generously, and make 
cheerful acquaintances and I have no doubt you will send these mis- 
givings to the Devil. You will doubtless do well henceforth in litera- 
ture and add to your comforts as well as to your reputation which, it 
gives me great pleasure to tell you, is everywhere rising in popular 
esteem. Oan't you write some farces after the manner of the French 
Vaudevilles? If you can (and I think you can ) you may turn 
them to excellent account by selling them to the managers in New York. 
I wish you would give your thoughts to this suggestion. . . . 

An excellent suggestion, too a few light farces to take his 
mind out of the strange ghoul-haunted hinterland where it too 
often wandered, and the first hint of New York. Mr. Kennedy 
understood suggestion better than he knew. But the "adver- 



3 8 4 ISRAFEL 



sary " was not such a simple one as he imagined. It was much 
" stranger " than he knew and had delivered a knockout in the 
first round. It is doubtful if Poe received Mr. Kennedy's letter in 
Richmond. He had parted with Mr. White and had gone back to 
Baltimore. Matters there had evidently come to a crisis with 
the Poes, Mrs. Clemm and Virginia, and on September 22, iSas, 479 
he was secretly married in St. Paul's Episcopal Church to his lit- 
tle cousin. Mrs. Clemm was the only witness present and the min- 
ister, possibly at the solicitation of Poe himself, who was anxious 
to keep the matter from coming to the ears of his cousin Neilson, 
did not even make an entry in the parish register. Only the record 
of the city license and Mrs. Clemm's word remain. There can be 
little doubt, however, that the clandestine marriage took place. 

Poe arrived in Baltimore somewhere about the twentieth in 
a highly agitated state. He had been dismissed by Mr. White and 
he thought he was going to lose Virginia. The house at Amity 
Street no doubt echoed with his pleadings and explanations. Once 
the clandestine marriage was suggested, Mrs. Clemm saw the way 
out of an immediate imbroglio with her relatives, and doubtless 
acquiesced willingly in an arrangement which she undoubtedly 
had much at heart. Virginia must have been at once terrified by 
the state that Edgar was in, and excited by the thought of being 
married, a step to adult dignity and an event in which, for the 
first time, she found herself indispensable and of genuine impor- 
tance. But her disappointment at having no one but her mother 
present must have been extreme. The entire setting of a ceremony 
so dear to the feminine heart was entirely lacking. Not even a 
veil! One can imagine " some natural tears were shed." Yet worst 
of all, no one was to know afterward. It was a matter that later 
on had to be remedied by an ingenious device. In the meantime 
Edgar was calmed. His hints of suicide made in Mr. Kennedy's 
letter were probably renewed before Virginia and Mrs. Clemm. 480 

* Prof. J. A. Harrison gives the date as September 22, 1834* but Prof. 
Woodberry, 1835. The latter is correct as I have been at some pains to ascertain. 
The correspondence in the appendix from St. Paul's Parish shows no records of 
the marriage. Mrs. Clemm was afterward much " upset " when she was questioned 
about it. 

4 * The reader will recall that Poe frequently threatened suicide in letters to 
John Allan) indirectly at least. 



VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASS 385 

What could they do? The women would be terrified. So it hap- 
pened that the momentous step was taken. Edgar Allan Foe was 
provided with a home; whether he* had also gotten a wife in the full 
sense of the word has been doubted. No one will ever surely know. 
In striving to understand the man, however, the speculation is 
not entirely idle. 

A few days after the very quiet and more than obscure cere- 
mony, Poe must have written to Mr. White asking him to take 
him back on the Messenger and promising to behave, for Mr. 
White replied in a letter which reveals him as a kindly and wise 
friend whose patience had evidently been tried. A full under- 
istanding of the situation can best be arrived at by allowing White 
to speak for himself: 

Richmond Sept. 29, 1835 

DEAR EDGAR, Would that it were in my power to unbosom my* 
self to you in language such as I could on the present occasion, wish 
myself master of. I cannot do it and therefore must be content to 
speak to you in my plain way. 

That you are sincere in all your promises, I firmly believe. But 
Edgar, when you once again tread these streets, I have my fears that 
your resolves would fall through, and that you would sip the juice, 
even till it stole away your senses. Rely on your own strength and you 
are gone! Look to your Maker for help, and you are safe. 

How much I regretted parting with you, is unknown to anyone on 
this earth, except myself. I was attached to you and am still, and 
willingly would I say return, if I did not dread the hour of separation 
very shortly again. 

If you could make yourself contented to take up your quarters in 
my family, or any other private family, where liquor is not used, I 
should think there were hopes of you. But, if you go to a tavern, or 
to any other place where it is used at table, you are not safe. I speak 
from experience. 

You have fine talents, Edgar, and you ought to have them re- 
spected as well as yourself. Learn to respect yourself, and you will 
very soon find that you are respected. Separate yourself from the 
bottle, and bottle companions, forever! 

Tell me if you can and will do so and let me hear that it is your 
fixed purpose never to yield to temptation. 

If you should come to Richmond again, and again be an assistant in 
my office, it must be expressly understood by us that all engagements 
on my part would be dissolved, the moment you get drunk. 



386 ISRAFEL 



No man is safe who drinks before breakfast! No man can do so, and 
attend to business properly. ... 

I am your true Friend 

T. W. WHITE 
E. A. Poe, Esq. 

In the face of this letter, attempts to sweeten the reason for 
the first parting between Poe and White can scarcely be regarded 
as a contribution to biography, however kindly in motive. Mr. 
White addresses Poe almost in the tone of a father. Evidently 
the sight of the vacant chair in the office in Richmond caused the 
good man to yearn over the brilliant and wild young figure that 
had lately occupied it. What the real cause for Poe's " sipping " 
was, Mr. White could have had no idea. That his loss by Poe's 
absence was financial as well as personal is not sufficient to ac- 
count for a ring in the lines that is not metallic. Poe must have 
made the promise, for in a few days he returned to Richmond. 
Mrs. Clemm made arrangements to follow speedily. Her protec- 
tion, as she knew, was urgently needed. The house in Amity 
Street was broken up in October, 1835, and the ghosts of poor 
Henry and Grandmother Poe left to twitter there alone. 

Upon his return to Richmond, Poe was welcomed back by Mr. 
White, who was doubtless reassured by hearing that his aunt and 
cousin were about to come from Baltimore to provide the domestic 
influence which the good man had so strongly advised. Mrs. 
Clemm and Virginia followed a short time afterward, and the 
newly married couple and mother-in-law took up their abode at 
a Mrs. Yarrington's boarding house, also overlooking Capitol 
Square, in the same neighborhood as Mrs. Poore's. 

Mrs. Yarrington's was on the southeast corner of Bank and 
Eleventh Streets, a two-story brick house with large green shut- 
ters of a type then common in Richmond. The Poes occupied a 
front room above the parlor, the windows of which gave a pleas- 
ant view of the garden-like Capitol Grounds. The exact nature 
of the domestic arrangements is not known. Nothing was said 
about the marriage at all. Poe's friends were simply informed 
that his aunt and little cousin, who were dependent upon him, 
had come to live with him, Virginia did not impress those who 



VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASS 387 

saw her as being a woman. Her actions were rather those of a 
merry schoolgirl, which, after all, was no more than could be ex- 
pected of a child of thirteen. She was rather small for her age, 
"plump, pretty, but not especially so, with sweet and gentle 
manners and the simplicity of a child." 

Rosalie, or " Rose Poe," as she was more generally known, 
was now twenty-five years old, but only about Virginia's age 
mentally. She was, it appears, somewhat of an annoyance to 
Edgar, who was then called " Buddie " by his family circle. Rose 
would follow him about with a patient, lamb-like admiration that 
was, at times, embarrassing. The games of childhood still occu- 
pied her attention, and she and Virginia played like two little 
girls together at the Mackenzies', screaming in a swing under the 
trees at the Hermitage or skipping rope together in the yard. A 
brief glimpse at this kindergarten eclogue of Poe's early married 
life has been preserved by Mrs. William Mackenzie, who remem- 
bered that one afternoon " Buddie " came up to the Hermitage 
to fetch home Virginia who met him with such " abandon " that 
Mrs. Mackenzie's Victorian sensibilities were shocked. 

The sad truth seems to be that Virginia very closely resembled 
Rosalie. She, too, never fully developed. When she was twenty-six 
it was noticed by competent persons 481 that she did not appear 
to be over fifteen. Her mind developed more normally than her 
cousin's, but her body was never wholly mature. It was the re- 
verse in the case of Rose. 

In Richmond, even in 1835, ft was remarked that the other- 
wise childish prettiness of Virginia was marred by a chalky-white 
complexion, a pastiness that later became waxen. Such a detail 
would be unimportant if it were not for the fact that she de- 
veloped tuberculosis a few years later, and finally died of it. 
Virginia had been raised in the same house where Henry Poe 
died of the disease; a certain strain in the Poe family seems to 
have been predisposed to it, and the frequent short commons at 
Mrs. Clemm's was certainly a contributing factor. The affliction, 
the appearance, and some of the more ethereal and abnormal 

481 Elizabeth Oakes Smith and others of the literati in New York in the late 
'405. When hi Philadelphia, in 1842, a friend took her to be only fourteen. 



3 88 ISRAFEL 



characteristics of the little child-wife have been transferred into 
literature. 

For Poe the " delicacy " which the advancing stages of the 
dread, but then fashionable and romantic, disease, conferred on 
his wife the strange, chalky pallor tinged with a faint febrile 
rouge, the large, haunted liquid eyes gradually acquired a pecul- 
iar fascination. From the wide and later on terror-stricken depths 
of those eyes, looked forth the spirit of one who had been robbed 
of life, a mind which had outgrown its body, simple, and yet wise 
enough to sense its own tragedy. Her whole being slowly became 
morbidly ethereal. The plumpness remained to the last, 482 yet 
somehow it suffered a subtle earth-change as if Death himself 
were amorous. To the man who was irretrievably linked to her, 
she became part and parcel of his own tragedy. His capacity for 
love, perhaps even his potentiality for sensuousness, was meta- 
morphosed into a patient and tragic sympathy the truly mag- 
nificent and loyal sorrow of one who beheld in his bed, in his 
garden, and at his table a constant and pathetic reminder of the 
omnipotence of the conqueror worm. On the whole, aside from his 
great art, his abiding tenderness for Virginia must remain as his 
greatest claim for a hold on the average human heart. She was the 
key that completely unlocked for him the house of shadows. She 
is the prototype of his heroines. 

Virginia became his "Ligeia," his "Eulalie," "Eleonora," the 
sister in the House of Usher, perhaps even his " Annabel Lee," 
" Berenice," for instance. 

Berenice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my paternal 
halls. Yet differently we grew, I, ill of health and buried in gloom, 
she, agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy. . . . Oh, gorgeous 
yet fantastic beauty! Oh sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim. . . . 
And then then all is mystery and terror, and a tale which should not 
be told. Disease a fatal disease, fell like the simoon upon her frame; 
and even while I gazed upon her, the spirit of change swept over her, 
pervading her mind, her habits, and her character, and in a manner the 
most subtle and terrible, disturbing even the identity of her per- 
son. . . . 



482 See the picture of Virginia made after her death at Fordham in 1847, 
in Volume II. 



VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASS 389 

So they all were, always subtly different from Virginia, and yet 
always the same; dying, corpse-like ladies usually related to their 
lovers, with the pale suggestion of incest just around the corner 
of the family tomb. It was a page, many pages, from his own 
experience. 

It seems strange that this should have been so, but it must be 
remembered that Virginia Clemm in her actual appearance and 
life history approached the ideal of the desired feminine type of 
the time. Delicate, consumptive, given to fainting, and languidly 
lying upon invalid couches; saying incredibly refined and senti- 
mental things, and listening to denatured artificial rhapsodies, 
they wasted away in their wailing lovers' arms, leaving them 
stricken with sorrow or touched by madness to haunt the lonely 
grave, forever inconsolable. 

Poe, as it happened, had married a little girl who, as time 
passed, approximated the fashionable ideal of the romantic Vic- 
torian heroine more nearly than any other whom he might have 
chosen. The real story of her tragedy is like an excerpt from a 
novel of the day. That Poe etherealized and enormously improved 
it, there can be no doubt. His particular etherealizations were not 
sentimental mockeries, because behind them lay the grim spiritual 
reality of a human tragedy that was horribly, pitiably true. That 
he sometimes sought to escape from it into die more robust world 
of reality, only proves that he was human after all. 

In Richmond, Poe began in leisure hours to teach Virginia to 
chatter a little French and to play the harp. She sang in a sweet, 
high, girlish voice, trilling, as the fashion then was, like a bird. 
Mrs. Clemm did the work. But with the unwonted plenty and 
comparative peace at Mrs. Yarrington's she began to recover her 
health. The basket for a few months was temporarily forgotten, 
nor was she by any means oblivious, then or later, to tie necessity 
of providing a background of respectability for Edgar. Now for 
a little time, however, she was able to sit in the parlor with the 
stuffed birds, rocking, in her white cap, her white starched cuffs, 
and her widow's weeds, while she sewed for the two over whom 
her grandly simple heart yearned maternally chatting with the 
other boarders, or Mrs. Mackenzie supported like a real 'lady 



3QO ISRAFEL 

by a professional man, and entirely, impeccably genteel. On Sun- 
days, Poe read by the parlor lamp while she sat opposite him, her 
hands unwontedly idle. 

Through the week, Poe on his part was busy for the time 
being completely absorbed by his work at his desk in the office 
of the Southern Literary Messenger. The young man was actually 
becoming a force, if not a figure, in contemporary national jour- 
nalism and literature. During the year 1835 he published in the 
Southern Literary Messenger thirty-seven reviews of American 
and foreign books and periodicals, nine tales, four poems, and ex- 
cerpts from his drama of Politian*** In addition to this there were 
critical notes and notices, a general editorial supervision of the 
contents of the magazine, and an active correspondence. 

His work had already fallen inevitably into the two main cate- 
gories in which it continued, from then on, to manifest itself; i.e., 
the critical, and the creative. For the time being, due to the fact 
that his editorial duties gave him no leisure time, the creative 
faculty slumbered. Most of the tales and several of the poems 
were drawn from the reservoir of manuscript which Baltimore 
and the past had provided. The poems were minor affairs such 
as To Sarah, To Mary, The Hymn (from Morelld) or excerpts 
from Politian. One or two new stories of minor importance were 
produced, but, for the most part, they were drawn from the al- 
ready prepared Tales of the Folio Club. The bulk of the work, 
however, was critical. It was in the pages of the Messenger that 
Poe first appeared in the American arena as the greatest literary 
gladiator of his time. American critics up until that era had form- 
erly conducted their mock combats with blunt or, at best, lead 
weapons. Poe now appeared in their midst with a bright sword 
that bit deep and drew blood. He began to be feared, hated, and 
admired. He was, despite peculiar personal reservations, a Hu- 
manist. 

The texts which the young man in Richmond reviewed in 
1835-36 the world has for the most part comfortably contrived 
"to forget, a fact which has pulled the same damp blanket of 
oblivion over the work of their only able critic. Yet this fact, natu- 

483 The bibliography is taken from Harrison, and is probably incomplete. 



VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASS 391 

rally enough, did not then detract from its contemporary import- 
ance. The books, periodicals, speeches, and poems which Poe 
passed upon in the 18303, constituted his education in the current 
literature of the day and a soft bone on which to cut his eye-teeth. 
For the most part, with the single exception of Carlyle, time has 
confirmed his judgments. 

His aptitude for the work was deeply rooted in the intricate 
folds of his nature. In the first place, he had a genuine respect 
for real literature that endowed him at times with a sixth sense 
as to the acid effect of time. His background, from a constant and 
early reading of foreign periodicals, 484 was genuinely cosmopolitan 
instead of local. Great critics of the English reviews, particu- 
larly Macaulay, were his models. His artistic idealism and his 
materialistic philosophy gave him a hatred of cant; and his youth- 
ful experience with a provincial aristocracy in a small Southern 
town made him dislike snobs even from New England. Poe 
had a genuine love for literature; it was his great passion; he was 
in earnest about it. He could not therefore abide dilettantes, and 
it was insufferable to him that the prize for which he had starved 
and worked should be dropped even ephemerally into the hands 
of those whose sole art consisted in the clever manipulation of 
little feeble "puffing." The sappy sentimentalism of the time, 
although it did not fail to leave its mark on him, was nevertheless, 
the great god Sham against which he mainly tilted. As a great 
lyricist in prose and poetry he could not abide a mock emotion, 
and he was unerring in smelling it out. Mixed with all this was a 
tendency to the pedantic that became more marked, as the neces- 
sity for confirming the belief in his own logical mental processes 
began to require a secret assurance, and above, and finally domi- 
nating all, was an ego that felt itself exalted because it was able 
to abase. It was an almost insane desire for fame, the last infirm- 
ity of noble minds. 

Out of such an exalted head the critic on the Messenger was 
suddenly born. Mr. White received protests. From time to time he 
and others remonstrated. Libel suits might follow enemies 
would be, in fact, were made even New York began to take 

*s* This familiarity extended back at least as far as 1824. 



392 ISRAFEL 



notice. But the subscription list bounded from three, well up into 
four figures; esteemed contemporaries watched and reprinted. 
The audience became large, very large. The salary if it did not 
leap, at least wriggled to $15 a week and a few extras, While Vir- 
ginia and Rose skipped rope at the Hermitage, the pen at the 
Messenger went back again and again into the ink and the acid. 
At last, it was making an immediate and an effective noise. 

For some time after his return from Baltimore, Poe must have 
kept his promise to Mr. White. Years later, J. W. Fergusson, one 
of the printers, remarked, " There never was a more perfect gen- 
tleman than Mr. Poe when he was sober," (but at other times,) 
" he would just as soon lie down in the gutter as anywhere else." 
The " other times " must have come later, and perhaps cast some 
light on the reasons for Poe's finally parting with Mr. White. 
Through the Winter of 1835-36, indeed till some time late in 
1836, there could not have been many lapses, if any at all. The 
proof lies in the crowded columns of the Messenger. 

Poe found most of his social relaxation with the Mackenzies at 
the Hermitage, at the Sullys', and with Dr. Robert G. Cabell. 
His boyhood friend, Bob Stanard, " Helen's " son, he regarded 
with a peculiar affection which was heartily returned. But there 
were some rents in the social pavilion which let in a stinging 
rain. Two of his old schoolmates refused to attend with him a 
party given by the mother-in-law of General Scott,' 1 * 6 and some of 
the old hostility from the University and from friends of the 
Allans troubled him. Troubled him more, perhaps, than will ever 
be known. Part of his spare time was spent at Sanxey's book- 
store or with Eliza White, who was rather a beauty and bookishly 
inclined. She was the daughter of his employer, so both inclina- 
tion and interest dictated that he should be attentive. A great 
deal of nonsense was afterward talked about this, based largely 
on the fact that the lady was never married. Poe was undoubtedly 
intimate with her, and she was present, years later, as an old 
friend, at the death-bed of Virginia at Fordham. The effort to 
throw a romantic atmosphere about every woman with whom the 
poet came in contact on an intimate basis is, of course, nonsense. 

4 A Mrs. Mayo with some pretense to " literary " fame. 



VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASS 393 

Of the house and the domestic circle at Mrs. Yarrington's, we 
know very little. Certain it is, though, that both Poe and Mrs. 
Clemm longed for their own home and continued to work for it. 
One of the cousins, George Poe, of Mobile, Alabama, was now in 
turn appealed to about the beginning of the new year. The glimpse 
is rather intimate: 

DEAR SIR, I take the liberty of addressing you in behalf of a mu- 
tual relative, Mrs. William Clemm, late of Baltimore and at her 
earnest solicitation. . . . 

Having lately established myself in Richmond, and undertaken the 
Editorship of the Southern Literary Messenger, and my circumstances 
having thus become better than formerly, I have ventured to offer my 
Aunt a home. She is now therefore in Richmond, with her daughter 
Virginia, and is, for the present boarding at the house of a Mrs. Yar- 
rington. My salary is only, at present, about $800 per ann: and the 
charge per week for our board (Mrs. Clemm's, her daughter's and my 
own), is $9. 1 am thus particular in stating my precise situation that 
you may be the better enabled to judge in regard to the propriety of 
granting the request I am now about to make for Mrs. Clemm. 

It is now ascertained that if Mrs. Clemm could obtain the means of 
opening, herself, a boarding-house in this city, she could support herself 
and daughter comfortably with something to spare. But a small capital 
would be necessary for an undertaking of this nature, and many of the 
widows of our first people are engaged in it and find it profitable. I am 
willing to advance, for my own part, $100, and I believe that William 
and R. Poe will advance $100. If then you would so far aid her in her 
design as to loan her, yourself, $100, she will have sufficient to com- 
mence with. I will be responsible for the repayment of the sum, in a 
year from this date, if you can make it convenient to comply with her 
request. ... I feel deeply for the distresses of Mrs. Clemm, and I am 
sure you will feel interested in relieving them. 

(Signature cut off) 
P. S. I am the son of David Poe, Jr., Mrs. Clemm's brother. 

On the receipt of such letters as these several of the relatives 
did respond the reason for keeping the first marriage secret now 
becomes clear. Once married, Poe would be appealing on behalf 
of himself. With the marriage a secret he could, with good grace, 
as a relative supporting his aunt and cousin out of the kindness 
of his heart, ask the rest of the family to chip in. It was, perhaps, 
a justifiable subterfuge. Mrs. Clemm certainly needed help. 



394 



ISRAFEL 



That she and Poe connived, there can be no doubt. Things on the 
whole were looking up for Edgar. A few days after the letter to 
George Poe he wrote to Kennedy: 

Richmond, Jan. 22, 1836 

DEAR SIR, Although I have never yet acknowledged the receipt of 
your letter of advice some months ago, it was not without great influ- 
ence on me. I have since then, fought the enemy manfully, and am now, 
in every respect, comfortable and happy. I know you will be pleased 
to hear this. My health is better than for years past, my mind is fully 
occupied, my pecuniary difficulties have vanished. I have a fair prospect 
of success in a word all is right. I shall never forget to whom all 
this hapiness is in a great degree to be attributed. I know that without 
your timely aid I should have sunk under my trials. Mr. White is very 
liberal and beside my salary of $520, pays me liberally for extra work, 
so that I have nearly $800. Next year that is at the commencement of 
the second volume, I am to get $1000. Besides this, I receive from 
publishers, nearly all new publications. My friends in Richmond have re- 
ceived me with open arms, and my reputation is extending espe- 
cially in the South. Contrast all this with those circumstances of ab- 
solute despair in which you found me, and you will see how great reason 
I have to be grateful to God and to yourself. . . 

Yours very truly 

EDGAR A. POE 
J. P. Kennedy 

During the Spring of 1836 Poe conducted, among others, a 
heavy correspondence with Beverley Tucker of Williamsburg, 
Virginia, a critic who admired his work but was careful in his 
praise. Some comments which Tucker made to White in a letter 
about Poe, caused the young author some uneasiness as to the 
effect they might have on his employer. Poe consequently wrote 
explaining the situation to Tucker who immediately responded by 
writing White a reassuring letter containing some additional good 
advice meant for Poe. The manuscript of The Tales of the Folio 
Club which still remained with Carey & Lea in Philadelphia had 
not been published by them. In February, 1836, the manuscript 
was returned by them to Poe with one story missing. Most of 
those stories had appeared in the Messenger. 

Poe now wrote to J. K. Paulding in New York City, asking him 



VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASS 395 

to submit the volume to Harpers, which he did. The book was 
refused, and on March 3, 1836, Mr. Paulding wrote to White: 

... I regret this decision of the Harpers, though I have not opposed 
it, because I do not wish to lead them into any measure that might be 
accompanied by a loss, and felt as I would feel for myself in a similar 
case. . . . 

Exactly two weeks later Paulding wrote to Poe saying he was 
returning the manuscript in a box of books that Haynes was send- 
ing for review. Poe, it appears, had requested Paulding to submit 
it to another publisher but he was unable to do so. In this letter, 
he suggests to Poe, " I think it would be worth your while, if 
other engagements permit, to undertake a Tale in a couple of 
volumes, for that is the magical number." Out of this suggestion 
grew Arthur Gordon Pym, which shortly afterward began to ap- 
pear serially in the Messenger. It was the only notable piece of 
creative writing which occupied Poe in Richmond. An effort was 
now made to get the Tales published in England through Sanders 
& Ortley of New York. Poe's friend, Edward W. Johnson of the 
College of South Carolina performed the good offices of a go- 
between, and the New York publishers were ready to send the 
book to England in the Fall of 1836, when Poe asked to have it 
returned for further revision. He was not satisfied to let it go to 
England as it stood. Nothing further came of the matter. In the 
meanwhile, Poe was married a second time to Virginia. This time 
the ceremony was public. It took place at Mrs. Yarrington's 
house, in Richmond, on May 16, 1836. 

The reasons for a second ceremony, although complex, are not 
at all mysterious. As we have seen, the chief reason for the clan- 
destine marriage in September, 1835, had been the opposition to 
it on the part of the Poe connection. Since then Poe and Mrs. 
Clemm had been receiving contributions " to help Mrs. Clemm," 
Edgar acting as the nephew who had charitably assumed the chief 
responsibility of maintaining his Aunt Maria and Cousin Virginia. 
No mention was made of her being his wife. The cousin Poes 
would by no means have contributed toward setting up a house 
for a young man already on his own salary so that he could live 



396 ISRAFEL 



with a full cousin who was in their judgment too young to marry. 
It would never do now suddenly to throw off the mask and reveal 
the fact that the relatives had simply been fooled. Family com- 
plications would follow, when it was important to keep on good 
terms. The easiest solution, therefore, was simply to have a new 
ceremony. By the removal from Baltimore the influence of Neil- 
son Poe had been dodged, and Poe now had the argument that he 
was already supporting his aunt and cousin. In addition to this, 
the revelation in Richmond that he was already married to a little 
girl when she was only thirteen would have been extremely un- 
comfortable, and the statement might have been met with doubt. 
There is also the very likely possibility that Poe and Virginia had 
not been living together as man and wife, but that there had been 
an understanding at the time of the first marriage that he was to 
wait till Virginia was mature. Both Virginia and Mrs. Clemm un- 
doubtedly desired the social distinction of even a simple public 
ceremony. The other affair without ring, cake, or guests could 
scarcely have seemed a marriage to them at all. Now, with Edgar's 
unexpected " affluence," a regular marriage was possible. By a 
second marriage all of these difficulties were solved and an endless 
round of explanations avoided. But the extreme youth of the bride 
was still a source of embarrassment and was carefully concealed. 
The marriage bond, which was signed in the Hustings Court of 
the City of Richmond on May 16, 1836, shows that oath was 
made before Charles Howard, the Clerk of Court, by Thomas W, 
Cleland as witness that " Virginia E. Clemm is of the full age of 
twenty-one years." She was, as a matter of fact, thirteen years, 
nine months and one day old. 486 The discrepancy is glaring. Cle- 
land, who was a friend and fellow boarder of Poe, is known to 
have been a pious Presbyterian and he would scarcely have taken 
oath to what he did not believe to be true. Despite the extremely 
youthful appearance of the bride, he must have been assured of her 
age by Poe, Mrs. Clemm, and, of course, Virginia. She, poor child, 
was probably eager enough for a " real wedding " to say anything 
" Muddie " and " Buddy " suggested. 



486 For a discussion of Virginia's date of birth see Woodbcrry, 1909, vol. I, 
page 137. 



VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASS 397 

On the day of the marriage, Jane Foster, 467 a friend of Mrs. 
Yarrington, who lived outside of Richmond, came to visit her 
friends in town. She found Mrs. Yarrington and Mrs. Clemm busy 
baking a wedding cake and was informed that a marriage was 
to be performed at the house that day. Jane watched the cake 
while the two older women concerned themselves about the other 
simple preparations. Late in the afternoon, the Virginia "eve- 
ning," the guests began to arrive. Mr. White and his daughter 
Eliza, Mr. and Mrs. Cleland, William McFarland and John Fer- 
gusson, the printers on the Messenger, Mrs. Yarrington, Mrs. 
Clemm, and Jane Foster constituted the little party. The marriage 
was performed in the boarding house parlor by the Reverend 
Amasa Converse, a Presbyterian divine, at that time the editor 
of the Southern ReUgiom Telegraph. Virginia was dressed in a 
traveling dress and a white hat with a veil, Poe was, as usual, 
in a black suit and the omnipresent black stock. Jane Foster, 
who was herself scarcely more than a child, remembered the very 
youthful appearance of Virginia. The nupital scene was reflected 
in a looking glass on the parlor wall, and little Miss Foster was 
surprised to note that the mirror did not show Virginia to be any 
older when she passed out than when she walked in. Marriage, 
she was sure in her naive way, would magically remedy the con- 
trast between the little bride and the mature bridegroom, for Poe 
was twenty-seven. The Reverend Amasa Converse remarked that 
the bride had a pleasing air, but did seem young. Mrs. Clemm he 
noted as " being polished, dignified, and agreeable in her bear- 
ing " and that she gave Virginia away " freely ." In the parlor 
after the ceremony Mrs. Clemm was in her element when her 
fellow boarders were called in while the happy event was an- 
nounced, and wine and cake were served. It was doubtless then 
that the Reverend Amasa noted that the widow was " agreeable in 
her bearing." 

487 Afterward Mrs. Stocking. The account of the wedding given here is taken 
from various documentary sources and from an account given personally to the 
author in Richmond in July, 1925, by a niece of Mrs. Jane Stocking (Miss 
Foster) who was fond of relating the details of the occasion to members of her 
family. Mrs. Stocking was a close friend of Mrs. Yarrington, who was a planter's 
daughter and risked the anger of her family by " marrying beneath her." In order 
to help her husband " to get along faster " she had started a boarding house. 



39 8 ISRAFEL 

After the humble felicitations, a hack was called to the door, 
and Virginia and Edgar drove off together on their honeymoon. 
One catches a glimpse of the waving hands of the boarders, the 
fat stack of the little, wood-burning locomotive throwing sparks 
on Virginia's traveling dress on the short journey to Petersburg, 
and a round of entertainments at various friends' houses in the 
quiet little town basking in the sunlight and perfume of a Vir- 
ginia May. The pautownia trees were in bloom. 

The Poes spent their honeymoon at the house of Mr. Hiram 
H. Haines of the Petersburg, Virginia, Constellation, Democratic 
in its journalistic policy, we solemnly learn. There were also visits 
to the house of Edwin V. Sparhawk, another journalistic friend, 
and Dr. William M. Robinson entertained them at a party and 
noted that Poe's conversation was brilliant. Poe no doubt noticed, 
although he enjoyed it, that the conversation of the others was 
somewhat bucolic. He was already longing for more cultivated 
fields in which to converse largely. 

Before the end of May, the young editor and his child wife 
returned to Richmond. The Stanards, the Sullys, and young Dr, 
Ambler called, the latter, doubtless recalling two little boys who 
once swam together in Shockoe Creek twenty years before. Mr. 
White promised the young husband a raise in salary. He was to 
receive " $20 after November." 

It was now Summer, and the hot valley of the James took 
on the glittering green of June woodlands and the pied hues of 
many-colored grass. The calmest hours that Poe was ever to 
know in manhood were swiftly passing, a brief respite between 
poverties and tragedies, the memory of this time he has preserved 
in the tropical idyl of Eleonora: 



She whom I loved in youth, and of whom I now pen calmly and 
distinctly these remembrances, was the sole daughter of the only sister 
of my mother long departed. Eleonora was the name of my cousin. We 
had always dwelled together, beneath a tropical sun, in the Valley of 
the Many-Colored Grass. No unguided footstep ever came upon that 
vale; for it lay far away among a range of giant hills. . . . Thus it 
was that we lived all alone, knowing nothing of the world without the 
valley, I, and my cousin, and her mother. 



VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASS 399 

" Knowing nothing of the world . . ." unfortunately it was 
true. Now they were married, Poe was making every effort to 
have his own home where the illusion of the secluded valley might 
be continued. Only a few weeks after the return from the honey- 
moon he wrote Kennedy, again unfolding his domestic and finan- 
cial circumstances to the faithful friend in Baltimore. 

Richmond, Va., Jan. 7, 1836 

DEAR SIR, Having got into a little temporary difficulty I venture 
to ask you, once more, for aid, rather than apply to any of my new 
friends in Richmond. Mr. White, having purchased a new house at 
$10,000., made propositions to my aunt to rent it to her (sic), and to 
board himself and family with her. This plan was highly advantageous 
to us, and, having accepted it, all arrangements were made and I ob- 
tained credit for some furniture, etc., to the amount of $200, above 
what little money I had. But upon examination of the premises pur- 
chased, it appears that the house will barely be large enough for one 
family, and the scheme is laid aside, leaving me now in debt, (to a 
small amount), without those means of discharging it upon which I 
had depended. 

In this dilemma I would be greatly indebted to you for the loan of 
$100. for six months. . . . 

"But upon examination of the premises purchased" one 
cannot help but smile a little, and yet want to cry too with Mrs. 
Clemm and Virginia over the disappointment about the " prem- 
ises " so carefully examined after the purchase had been made! 
One wonders Mr. White would scarcely buy a house before 
he had looked at it. "This plan," says Poe, "was highly advan- 
tageous to us" Then he continues to Kennedy: 

. . . Have you heard anything farther in relation to Mrs. Clemm's 
estate? 

Our Messenger is thriving beyond all expectations, and I myself have 
every prospect of success. It is our design to issue, as soon as possible, 
a number of the Magazine consisting entirely of articles from our most 
distinguished literati. . . . Could you not do me so great a favor as to 
send me a scrap, however small, from your portfolio? Your name is of 
the greatest influence in that region where we direct our greatest efforts 
-in the South. 

Any little reminiscence, tale, jeu d'esprit, historical anecdote, 



400 ISRAFEL 



anything, in short, with your name, will answer all our purposes. I pre- 
sume you have heard of my marriage. 

With sincere respect & esteem 
Yours truly, 

EDGAR A. POE 

" Our Messenger " may have been thriving, but Mrs. Clemm 
and Virginia shared only in the glory. The grand scheme of the 
$10,000 boarding house having been abandoned, perforce, the 
little family moved from Mrs. Yarrington's on Capitol Square to 
"a cheap tenement on Seventh Street," 488 where they sublet 
rooms. Mrs. Clemm went back to her dressmaking; there were 
generally a few boarders at the table. Virginia was a little more 
silent now, the honeymoon was over, some of the patches of 
many-colored grass were probably becoming a little parched, 
even for her, life had a few surprises. She was trying as hard as 
she could to grow up 

Nearly twenty years after this time there were persons living on 
Main Street who remembered almost daily to have seen about the Old 
Market, in business hours, a tall, dignified looking woman, with a 
market basket on one arm, while on the other hung a little girl with 
a round ever-smiling face, who was addressed as "Mrs. Poe! " She, 
too, carried a basket. 488 

Mrs. Yarrington's parlor mirror had been right after all. The 
marriage had worked no magic for Virginia. 

Poe was now seldom to be found at home. " Graceful, and with 
dark, curling hair and magnificent eyes, wearing a Byron collar 
and looking every inch a ' poet/ " he preferred the recitations of 
Eliza White doing " Lady Macbeth " in the house that was too 
small for two families, the lurid remarks of journalistic brethren 
at the office, the excitement of a correspondence with J. Q. Adams 
or Mrs. Sigourney, supper at the Sullys', or an evening at the 
Court House Tavern. There were many places he could go, and 
every place he went he was offered wine. Sometimes he took it. 
Then he was very ill and went home, to spend several days in 

48 Mrs. Susan Archer Weiss, Home Life of Poe, A few facts regarding Rich- 
mond occurrences of which Mrs. Weiss was reliably informed are culled here from 
an otherwise inaccurate biography. 



VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASS 401 

bed. " Dear Eddie's health was so bad, no, he could not get down 
to the office to-day," was Mrs. Clemm's version. And she loved him 
so much that at last she came to believe it, although she knew it 
was not true. 

Towards the end of 1836 the days in bed became more fre- 
quent. Mr. White it appears became annoyed and then alarmed. 
Yet he was loath to force a parting. His young editor had be- 
come invaluable. There was a good deal of idle gossip about it 
a ll ? about Poe, the Allans, Elmira, Eliza White, Virginia, and 
Mrs. Clemm. " There was a general prejudice against her on ac- 
count of her having made or consented to the match between her 
little daughter and a man of Poe's age and dissipated habits." 488 

As usual, the gossips with the unerring instinct of their race, 
had aimed the barb for the heart. For back of it all, then and 
forever afterward, remaining even after Israfel was removed 
from the scene, was the grand simple heart, the strong arms, and 
the maternal bosom of Maria Clemm. If there be anything at all 
in the tradition of the test of sacrifice and abnegation, she loved 
him better than all the other women who crossed his path. She 
it was who never doubted or faltered in her belief in the immortal 
part of the man; who, after the mortal had been removed, con- 
tinued nobly to cherish the memory of his genius. She washed 
for him, worked for him, begged for him, nursed him and com- 
forted him. Before her simple " Eddie, Oh God, my dear Eddie I " 
all the mud of Mrs. Ellet, the vitriol of Griswold, and the 
sugar of Helen Whitman is dried up and blown away while 
Mrs. Clemm's cry remains to keen in our ears. Small persons, 
who called upon her later when smug society and the legacy of 
fame had driven her half crazy, saw nothing in her but an old 
bereaved woman with a broad face, roughened hands, and an 
ignorant manner of speech. 489 Pharisees like Stoddard departed 
making long the fringes of their phylacteries laughing, and 
thanking God they were not like that. Thackeray, who knew 
nothing at all of one Virginian, drew large genteel audiences in 



48* See R. H. Stoddard's account of Mrs. Clemm, after Poe's death. Lippin* 
cott's Magazine, January, 1889, page 112. One of the most self-complacent articles 
ever written. 



402 ISRAFEL 



Richmond, and exchanged aristocratic repartee with ladies in 
Charleston and departed. Charles Dickens returned to the 
States on his second tour. In a certain obscure Episcopal Church 
Home in Baltimore, erected on the same spot where a great poet 
had died only a few years before, the author of Bleak House 
called on a tearful old woman whose last days were being pro- 
longed by Christian charity. It was " Muddie," whose reward for 
exorcising the demons down under the sea, was the contempt of 
mankind and a saintlike face. Mr. Dickens left behind a present 
of money pressed into a rheumatic old hand. Only he and Lowell 
were fully aware who it was that had made the croaks of the 
raven in Barnaby Rudge audible to the entire world. 

By December, 1836, Richmond and the South no longer offered 
a broad enough field for a rising young author and editor who 
desired to try sinking his plowshare into more fertile literary soil. 
During the year, Poe's tremendous critical fertility had con- 
tinued. 

No less than eighty-three reviews, six poems, four essays, and 
three stories had appeared in the Messenger* besides there was 
correspondence which its editorial duties necessitated and the writ- 
ing of the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym that Poe hoped to sell 
to Harpers after publishing it in the Messenger in serial form. The 
reviews ranged through almost the entire gamut of contemporary 
literature from Recollections of S. T. Coleridge 40 to Mrs. Sig- 
ourney's Letters to Young Ladies. The poems were mostly old 
ones revived, some of them changed into masterpieces. To Helen 
had appeared in March, Irene, or The Sleeper in May, and 
Israjcl now wonderfully perfected in August. Besides this, there 
had been the lovely sonnet, Zante, and some additional scenes 
from Politian. Poe's study of poetical criticism was having a 
memorable effect upon his own early work. His poems were now 
pruned and grafted to last through the winter of time. The stories, 
Metzengerstein, The Homo-Camelopard and the like, were still 



400 Letters, Conversation, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, New York, 
published by Harper & Brothers, No. 28 Cliff Street, 1856. Another Harper book 
reviewed by Poe who was anxious to publish Arthur Gordon Pym through Harpers. 
Poe was much in debt to this book for many ideas he later developed. Poe's critical 
debt to Coleridge cannot be too strongly stressed. 



VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASS 403 

drawn from the old reserve supply, but the essays were new. Chief 
of these was Maelzell's Chess-Player in which he exposed the 
method by which a dummy chessman, that had gone the rounds 
of American cities winning games with living opponents, was 
operated. It is possible that Poe's interest in this automaton was 
early aroused by an article in the Baltimore North American to 
which Henry Poe had contributed in 1827. Many persons had been 
more mystified than amused by the maneuvers of the automatic 
man, and the expos6 9 although only partly correct, created quite a 
little furor. It was the first of Poe's work in which he emerged as 
the unerring, abstract reasoner, and foreshadowed the method he 
followed later in his detective stories such as the Murders in the 
Rue Morgue, a method which has been embalmed in the triumphs 
of " Sherlock Holmes." 

Pinakidia, another type of contribution, were selections from 
the author's notebook, selections which throw an interesting side- 
light on his literary and journalistic pilferings, nearly always from 
secondary sources. By a mistake, obviously made in the compos- 
ing room, they were printed in the Messenger as " original " in- 
stead of the opposite. 

Like so many other literary and curious persons of his epoch, 
Poe kept a commonplace book. Into it went from time to time 
cullings from a thousand books, magazines and newspapers, copies 
of which came under his editorial eye. Nor was he by any 
means blind to the dusty shelves and remote alcoves of libraries 
public and private. He made the most of, and he improved such 
opportunities for browsing as Pinakidia and the later Marginalia 
show. These grains of gold sifted out of dust and refuse were 
not so valuable in themselves, but they provided an inexhaustible 
source upon which he drew for items of curious knowledge, for 
a parade of learning, and for quotations that temporarily lulled 
or alarmed even the learned. Above all, here was the store of am- 
munition for charges of plagiarism which he loved to ram home. 
From his careful gleaning over wide fields, there was scarcely 
any figure in poetry, or any idea, which Poe could not show had 
been used before. Often the charge was true; always it was plau- 
sible. In the great shallow lakes of American crudity, the well of 



404 ISRAFEL 



erudition of the young Richmond critic seemed deep even 

profound. 

But there was something more to it than that. This habit of 
clipping and noting exercised a valuable curiosity. Out of a dead 
book or a banal news-sheet, Poe developed the habit of culling 
the one living incident, the pertinent fact, or the picturesque 
scene. He remembered it, and when the time came the shot was 
there, carefully greased and labelled, in the right locker. It was 
later always delivered with telling effect, and in a direction that 
associated it with the living thought of his time. That the French 
of obscure titles, the original sources, or the precise wording of 
quotations were sometimes garbled, is of importance only in the 
cemetery of the scholastic mind, for, by the living use of such 
matter, Poe frequently conferred upon it the only gleam of vital- 
ity which it ever possessed. Even in 1836, he stood out boldly 
and alone as the only arresting critic of contemporary literature 
in the United States. 

His rise to that position had been meteoric. It was the Southern 
Literary Messenger which had conferred upon him the opportu- 
nity to claim the title. In less than two years that obscure maga- 
zine claimed the attention of the nation on an equal footing 
with The New Englander and the Knickerbocker, and was even 
beginning to disturb the complacent local religion of the North 
American Review, to which, heretofore, nothing south of the 
Delaware had been audible. 

In the late Fall of the previous year (1835), Theodore S. Fay, 
a young author who had many friends in the literary circles of 
New York and among the editors of the Knickerbocker journals, 
published a novel called Norman Leslie. It was greeted by a 
howl of metropolitan acclaim that found the usual servile echo 
in the provinces. The book was unusually poor, and the rever- 
berations in the canyon of criticism were more than usually 
grand. In December, 1835, Poe reviewed Norman Leslie in the 
columns of the Messenger. Both the book, and, by implication, the 
author, were reduced to the light powder of which they were 
actually composed, but in a manner so trenchant, so vividly 
interesting and unanswerable, that the public in general be- 



VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASS 405 

came interested, subscribed in numbers, and eagerly hoped for 
more. 

The New York papers, at first, maintained a discreet and digni- 
fied silence, but the cat was out of the bag and scratching so hard 
that the pose of dignified silence became too painful to maintain. 
On April 9, 1836, the New York Mirror with a display of no less 
than four scornfully pointing, printed hands drew attention to a 
column on another page in which Poe was satirized in his own 
style for his methods of criticism, his minute analyses, and his 
accusations of plagiarism. The notice itself accused him of striv- 
ing for notoriety " by the loudness of abuse," hinting that he was 
actuated by jealousy because he " knows by experience what it 
is to write a successless novel." This doubtless referred to some 
rumor of the collected tales which Harpers had refused. 

In the April number of the Messenger Poe replied. The state- 
ment about "a successless novel" not being true, was easily 
refuted, and the young editor took the occasion to make his views 
on the necessity for a broad attitude in criticism clear: 

. * . We are becoming boisterous and arrogant in the pride of a too 
speedily assumed literary freedom. We throw off with the most pre- 
sumptuous and unmeaning hauteur all deference whatever to foreign 
opinion we forgot, 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 applica- 
tion, 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 in the gross paradox of liking a stupid book the 
better because sure enough, its stupidity is American. 

Poe's view that the world, by which he unconsciously meant 
the world of European culture, was the only background which 
provided the correct perspective in which to judge one's own work 
or that of others, was, of course, by no means new. It has been 



406 ISRAFEL 



consciously or unconsciously adopted by many of the greatest 
writers of other periods, and it jibed with the private opinions 
of many readers at the time. But in some quarters it was essen- 
tially uncomfortable. In such a " world vista " as Poe proposed 
what would become of America's literary Holy Land, New Eng- 
land? Besides this, the new prophet had arisen on the wrong side of 
Jordan. In certain quarters the stone heaps were prepared. The 
New York Commercial Advertiser pronounced him anathema. 
W. G. Clark of the Philadelphia Gazette pounced on him and the 
war was even carried south of the James. For the most part, 
though, the South rallied around him. For it, the position of the 
Jordan was reversed. But Poe understood that, and how little 
it meant. He had raised the view halloo under the palace windows 
and he longed to follow the quarry whither it fled northward. 

Once dip your pen in acid and it becomes difficult to convince 
even a friend that a compliment is not meant for an innuendo. 
Poe's reputation for critical savageness has been over-strained. 
A letter by Poe to a complaining contemporary in September, 
i836, 401 provides an answer to those who complain of his severity 
which an examination of the columns of the Messenger also re- 
futes. For the most part, indeed almost without exception, time 
has confirmed the justness of his criticism. Sartor Resartus alone 
survives. Nor would it be reasonable to expect Edgar Allan Poe 
to be in sympathy with the style of Thomas Carlyle. It is doubt- 
ful if Poe ever descended into those turgid and strangely agitated 
depths. Yet here was the only " world book " that met his view. 

It was the " world view," however, that moved Poe northward 
in 1837. Ten years before, he had written from Fortress Monroe 
to John Allan, " Richmond and the United States were too nar- 
row a sphere and the world shall be my theater." 402 This fine am- 
bition had never died. Poe knew the South too well to put any 
value on its acclaim. He was not deceived because three, or even 

41)1 Poe to the Richmond Courier and Dally Compiler, Richmond, September 
a, 1836, . . . "But this charge of indiscriminate 'cutting and slashing* has never 
been adduced except in four instances, while the rigid justice and impartiality 
of our Journal had been lauded even ad nauseam . . ." etc. The letter is detailed 
and convincing. 

4 a Valentine Museum Collection, letter No. 7, Poe to John Allan, December 
22, 2828. 



VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASS 407 

five thousand persons 49S there had subscribed to the Messenger. 
That was mainly because out of an honest literary opinion he had 
happened to criticize the North. There were probably not five 
hundred souls all told, anywhere, who knew what he was really 
talking about. South of the Potomac, literature was " cherished " 
as the decent avocation of a gentleman who might otherwise have 
to work with his hands. Haynes and Simms met the same situa- 
tion in South Carolina a little later and lost. What could one 
do in a section which gave its praise easily and so took it with a 
private grain of salt, where every crowing plantation Chanti- 
cleer or twittering Jenny Wren was acclaimed as a poet; a 
province that talked of "Southern Literature" and preferred 
foreign books, a locality whose estimate of style was theatri- 
cally forensic? 24<J One could live there comfortably and become, 
possibly, an obscurely honored local bard, the schoolboy's aver- 
sion and the old maid's pride. Horrible thought! Every day that 
he had spent in England, every page of the foreign reviews in the 
loft of Ellis & Allan, every contact with the great, wide, oblivious 
world cried out against it. " The world shall be my theater! " and 
the world won. In January, 1837, the following notice appeared in 
the Southern Literary Messenger: 

Mr. Foe's attention being called in another direction, he will decline, 
with the present number, the Editorial duties on the Messenger. His 
Editorial Notices for this month end with Professor Anthon's Cicero 
494 what follows is from another hand. With the best wishes to the 
Magazine, and to its few foes as well as many friends, he is now de- 
sirous of bidding all parties a peaceable farewell. 

Mr. Poe's urge for exit, however, was not purely literary. En- 
counters with the glass toward the end of 1836 had evidently 
been at least occasional, consequently his health was again 
" bad." Despite his increased salary, now over $1000 a year, he 
had, it seems, involved himself in debt, Mrs. Clemm's boarding 

498 Prof. J. A. Harrison, Life and Letters, vol. I, p. 125, gives the increase of 
subscribers on the Messenger as from seven hundred to five thousand. Prof. Wood- 
berry is more conservative and puts the last figure at thirty-five hundred. The 
last is correct. Poe gave the larger. 

494 p oe was expecting to go to New York, where Prof. Anthon lived, and had 
therefore probably picked his book for iavorable notice. 



408 ISRAFEL 

house venture was evidently not a paying one. Increasing fame 
had also added a certain arrogance that even his friends depre- 
cated. Mr. White had been patient, but probably annoyed by 
irregularities; and no one enjoys being patronized. They parted 
friends, however. The young editor's copy on hand was to be ex- 
hausted rapidly, as the pages of the Messenger show, but Poe was 
to continue some contributions. He was particularly anxious to 
finish the serials of Arthur Gordon Pym. 

About the middle of January, 1857, we find Poe in bed winding 
up his correspondence and making his last acceptances for the 
Messenger^ articles which did not please Mr. White. 195 There is a 
tradition that Poe asked to be reinstated but it is a doubtful 
one that would naturally be cherished by a magazine. During his 
regime it had increased its circulation from 500 to 3500 copies, 103 
Poe had developed, by valuable experience, some well-defined 
ideas about the possibilities of a truly national publication. He 
was the first journalist to conceive of a magazine on a huge 
modern scale. That was the great idea he hoped to put into opera- 
tion. He saw clearly, even then, that it would have to be done 
from Philadelphia or New York. 

What little furniture they had was probably sold. " Muddie " 
and Virginia accompanied him. The little wife had matured con- 
siderably. There is a brief silence, and then we find them in New 
York. In Richmond he left behind him a few virulent enemies and 
a large number of friends. The great experiment had begun. 

4 5 See the correspondence between White and Poe in January, 1837.