Chapter 3

Poe’s devotion to his child-wife was one of the most beautiful
features of his life. Many of his famous poetic productions were
inspired by her beauty and charm. Consumption had marked her for
its victim, and the constant efforts of husband and mother were
to secure for her all the comfort and happiness their slender
means permitted. Virginia died January 30, 1847, when but
twenty-five years of age. A friend of the family pictures the
death-bed scene—mother and husband trying to impart warmth to her
by chafing her hands and her feet, while her pet cat was suffered
to nestle upon her bosom for the sake of added warmth.

These verses from “Annabel Lee,” written by Poe in 1849, the last
year of his life, tell of his sorrow at the loss of his
child-wife:

_I_ was a child and _she_ was a child,
In a kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea.
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her high-born kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

Poe was connected at various times and in various capacities with
the “Southern Literary Messenger” in Richmond, Va.; “Graham’s
Magazine” and the “Gentleman’s Magazine” in Philadelphia; the
“Evening Mirror,” the “Broadway Journal,” and “Godey’s Lady’s
Book” in New York. Everywhere Poe’s life was one of unremitting
toil. No tales and poems were ever produced at a greater cost of
brain and spirit.

Poe’s initial salary with the “Southern Literary Messenger,” to
which he contributed the first drafts of a number of his
best-known tales, was $10 a week! Two years later his salary was
but $600 a year. Even in 1844, when his literary reputation was
established securely, he wrote to a friend expressing his
pleasure because a magazine to which he was to contribute had
agreed to pay him $20 monthly for two pages of criticism.

Those were discouraging times in American literature, but Poe
never lost faith. He was finally to triumph wherever pre-eminent
talents win admirers. His genius has had no better description
than in this stanza from William Winter’s poem, read at the
dedication exercises of the Actors’ Monument to Poe, May 4, 1885,
in New York:

He was the voice of beauty and of woe,
Passion and mystery and the dread unknown;
Pure as the mountains of perpetual snow,
Cold as the icy winds that round them moan,
Dark as the caves wherein earth’s thunders groan,
Wild as the tempests of the upper sky,
Sweet as the faint, far-off celestial tone of angel whispers,
fluttering from on high,
And tender as love’s tear when youth and beauty die.

In the two and a half score years that have elapsed since Poe’s
death he has come fully into his own. For a while Griswold’s
malignant misrepresentations colored the public estimate of Poe
as man and as writer. But, thanks to J. H. Ingram, W. F. Gill,
Eugene Didier, Sarah Helen Whitman and others these scandals have
been dispelled and Poe is seen as he actually was—not as a man
without failings, it is true, but as the finest and most original
genius in American letters. As the years go on his fame
increases. His works have been translated into many foreign
languages. His is a household name in France and England—in fact,
the latter nation has often uttered the reproach that Poe’s own
country has been slow to appreciate him. But that reproach, if it
ever was warranted, certainly is untrue.

W. H. R.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

By James Russell Lowell

The situation of American literature is anomalous. It has no
centre, or, if it have, it is like that of the sphere of Hermes.
It is divided into many systems, each revolving round its several
suns, and often presenting to the rest only the faint glimmer of
a milk-and-water way. Our capital city, unlike London or Paris,
is not a great central heart from which life and vigor radiate to
the extremities, but resembles more an isolated umbilicus stuck
down as near as may be to the centre of the land, and seeming
rather to tell a legend of former usefulness than to serve any
present need. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, each has its
literature almost more distinct than those of the different
dialects of Germany; and the Young Queen of the West has also one
of her own, of which some articulate rumor barely has reached us
dwellers by the Atlantic.

Perhaps there is no task more difficult than the just criticism
of contemporary literature. It is even more grateful to give
praise where it is needed than where it is deserved, and
friendship so often seduces the iron stylus of justice into a
vague flourish, that she writes what seems rather like an epitaph
than a criticism. Yet if praise be given as an alms, we could not
drop so poisonous a one into any man’s hat. The critic’s ink may
suffer equally from too large an infusion of nutgalls or of
sugar. But it is easier to be generous than to be just, and we
might readily put faith in that fabulous direction to the hiding
place of truth, did we judge from the amount of water which we
usually find mixed with it.