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 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS.
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE, 
 
 From a Daguerreotype taken for Sarah Helen Whitman
 
 EDGAR POE 
 
 AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 BY 
 
 SARAH HELEN WHITMAN. 
 
 SECOND EDITION. 
 
 PROVIDENCE, R.I. : 
 TIBBITTS AND PRESTON. 
 
 1885.
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1884, 
 BY CHARLOTTE F. DAILEY AND MAUD CHACE. 
 
 KLECTROTYPF.D AND PRINTED 
 
 BY RAM), AVliKY, AND COMPANY, 
 
 HOSTON, MASS.
 
 " Wild words wander here and there ; 
 God's great gift of speech abused 
 Makes thy memory confused." 
 
 " We cannot see thy features right : 
 They mix with hollow masks of night." 
 
 TENNYSON. 
 
 " With these keys we may partially unlock the mystery." FOE'S 
 Alar^inalia.
 
 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 
 
 DR. GRISWOLD'S Memoir of EDGAR POE has been 
 extensively read and circulated ; its perverted facts 
 and baseless assumptions have been adopted into 
 every subsequent memoir and notice of the poet, and 
 have been translated into many languages. For ten 
 years this great wrong to the dead has passed unchal- 
 lenged and unrebuked. 
 
 It has been assumed by a recent English critic that 
 " Edgar Poe had no friends." As an index to a more 
 equitable and intelligible theory of the idiosyncrasies 
 of his life, and as an earnest protest against the spirit 
 of Dr. Griswold's unjust memoir, these pages are sub- 
 mitted to his more candid readers and critics by 
 
 ONE OF HIS FRIENDS.
 
 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 IF an introduction were needed to Mrs. Whitman's 
 " Edgar Poe and his Critics," no better words could 
 be found than the following tribute of George William 
 Curtis, originally published in "Harper's Weekly" in 
 1860: 
 
 " In reading the exquisitely tender, subtle, sympa- 
 thetic, and profoundly appreciative sketch of Edgar Poe, 
 which has just been issued under this title, it is impos- 
 sible not to remember the brave woman's arm thrust 
 through the slide to serve as a bolt against the enemy. 
 . . . The author, with an inexpressible grace, reserve, 
 and tender, heroic charity, having a right which no other 
 person has to speak, tells, in a simple, transparent, and 
 quiet strain, what she thinks of his career and genius. 
 ... In the delicate reticence of the book, in its lone 
 of inward music, as if the singer were humming a 
 melody beneath ihu sung she sings, there is a pensive 
 
 9
 
 10 PREFACE. 
 
 and peculiar charm. But it is not a eulogy : it is a 
 criticism which is profound by the force of sympathy, 
 and vigorous by its clear comprehension." 
 
 The life and genius of Edgar Poe have created a 
 special literature of their own. " Edgar Poe and his 
 Critics " was the earliest book to vindicate Poe from 
 the malice of his enemies, and to unveil something 
 of the mystery of his life. It was the tribute of a 
 poet to a poet, and of a woman to the character of 
 a man to whom she was betrothed, and from whom 
 she was strangely separated in the last year of his 
 life. '' Edgar Poe and his Critics " is an essential 
 part of the literature which, in England, France, and 
 America, irradiates the name of Poe. 
 
 Mrs. Whitman's poems, 1 the companion volume to 
 " Edgar Poe and his Critics," contains a striking 
 group of poems relating to Poe, of much biograph- 
 ical value. They are entitled " Remembered Music," 
 " Our Island of Dreams," " The last Flowers," " Song," 
 " Withered Flowers," " The Phantom Voice," " Arc- 
 turus in October," " Resurgemus," " Arcturus in 
 April," " The Portrait," and the " Six Sonnets to 
 
 1 Poems by Sarah Helen Whitman. Providence. Second edi- 
 tion. Tibbitts and Preston.
 
 PREFACE. II 
 
 ," which are rivalled in passionate beauty only 
 
 by Mrs. Browning's " Sonnets from the Portuguese." 
 
 " Edgar Poe and his Critics " has been some time 
 out of print. The present edition is published to 
 meet the demand of friends and admirers of Edgar 
 Poe and of Sarah Helen Whitman. 
 
 W. F. C.
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 THE author of the " Original Memoir " pre- 
 fixed to the volume of Poe's "Illustrated Poems," 
 recently published by Redfield, says, " Of all 
 the poets whose lives have been a puzzle and 
 a mystery to the world, there is not one more 
 difficult to be understood than Edgar Allan 
 Poe." The Rev. George Gilfillan, in his very 
 imaginative portraiture of the poet, admits that 
 the moral anatomists who have met and won- 
 dered over his life, have given up all attempts 
 at dissection and diagnosis, turning away with 
 the solemnly whispered warning to the world, 
 and especially to its more brilliant and gifted 
 intellects, " Beware ! " 
 
 He confesses that a history so strange as that 
 of Edgar Poe should prompt us to new and more 
 searching methods of critical as well as moral 
 analysis. But before such analysis can be insti- 
 tuted, we must have fuller, more dispassionate,
 
 14 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 and more authentic records of the phenomena 
 to be analyzed. The well written but very brief 
 memoir prefixed to the "Illustrated Poems," 
 and the various sketches that have from time 
 to time appeared in the French and English 
 periodicals, are all based on the narrative of Dr. 
 Griswold, a narrative notoriously deficient in 
 the great essentials of candor and authenticity. 
 " It is a rare accomplishment," says one of our 
 most original writers, " to hear a story as it is 
 told, still rarer to remember it as heard, and 
 rarest of all to tell it as it is remembered." 
 
 If Dr. Griswold's " Memoir of Edgar Poe " 
 betrays the want of any or all of these ac- 
 complishments, if its remorseless violations of 
 the trust confided to him are such as to make 
 the unhallowed act of Trelawney towards the 
 enshrouded form of the dead Byron seem guilt- 
 less in comparison, we must, nevertheless, 
 endeavor to remember that the memorialist him- 
 self now claims from us that tender grace of 
 charity that he was unwilling, or unable, to 
 accord to the man \vho trusted him as a friend. 
 
 It is not our purpose at present specially to 
 review Dr. Griswold's numerous misrepresenta- 
 tions and misstatements. Some of the more 
 injurious of these anecdotes were disproved, 
 during the life of Dr. Griswold, in "The New-
 
 EDGAR FOE AND HIS CRITICS. 15 
 
 York Tribune " and other leading journals, 
 without eliciting from him any public statement 
 in explanation or apology. Quite recently we 
 have had, through the columns of "The Home 
 Journal," the refutation of another calumnious 
 story, which for ten years has been going the 
 rounds of the English and American period- 
 icals. 
 
 We have authority for stating that many of 
 the disgraceful anecdotes so industriously col- 
 lected by Dr. Griswold are utterly fabulous, 
 while others are perversions of the truth, more 
 injurious in their effects than unmitigated 
 fiction. But, as we have said, it is not our 
 purpose at present to revert to these. We 
 propose simply to point out some unfounded 
 critical estimates which have obtained currency 
 among readers who have but a partial acquaint- 
 ance with Mr. Foe's more imaginative writings, 
 and to record our own impressions of the char- 
 acter and genius of the poet, as derived from 
 personal observation, and from the testimony 
 of those who knew him. Although he had 
 been connected with some of the leading mag- 
 azines of the day, and had edited for a time, 
 with great ability, several successful periodicals, 
 Mr. Poe's literary reputation at the North had 
 been comparatively limited until his removal to
 
 1 6 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 New York, in the autumn of 1847, when he 
 became personally known to a large circle of 
 authors and literary people, whose interest in 
 his writings was manifestly enhanced by the 
 perplexing anomalies of his character, and by 
 the singular magnetism of his presence. One 
 who knew him at this period of his life says, 
 " Every thing about him distinguished him as 
 a man of mark : his countenance, person, and 
 gait were alike characteristic. His features 
 were regular, and decidedly handsome. His 
 complexion was clear and dark ; the color of 
 his fine eyes seemingly a dark gray, but, on 
 closer inspection, they were seen to be of that 
 neutral violet tint which is so difficult to define. 
 His forehead was, without exception, the finest, 
 in proportion and expression, that we have ever 
 seen. The perceptive organs were not deficient, 
 but seemed pressed out of the way by causality, 
 comparison, and constructiveness. Close to 
 these rose the proud arches of ideality. The 
 coronal region was very imperfect, wanting in 
 reverence and conscientiousness, and presenting 
 a key to many of his literary characteristics. 
 The ideas of right and wrong are as feeble in 
 his chains of thought as in the literature of 
 ancient Greece." We quote this description 
 for its general fidelity. Its estimate of literary
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. I/ 
 
 characteristics, conveyed in the closing sen- 
 tence, we shall revert to in another place. 
 
 The engraved portraits of Mr. Poe have very 
 little individuality : that prefixed to the volumes 
 edited by Dr. Griswold suggests, at first view, 
 something of the general contour of his face, 
 but is utterly void of character and expression ; 
 it has no sub-surface. The original painting, 
 now in possession of the New-York Historical 
 Society, has the same cold, automatic look that 
 makes the engraving so valueless as a portrait 
 to those who remember the unmatched glory of 
 his face when roused from its habitually intro- 
 verted and abstracted look by some theme or 
 profound emotion. Perhaps from its peculiarly 
 changeful and translucent character, any ade- 
 quate transmission of its variable and subtle 
 moods was impossible. By writers personally 
 unacquainted with Mr. Poe, this engraving has 
 often been favorably noticed. Mr. Hannay, in 
 a memoir prefixed to the first London edition 
 of Poe's " Poems," calls it an interesting and 
 characteristic portrait, "a fine, thoughtful face, 
 with lineaments of delicacy, such as belong 
 only to genius or high blood, the forehead 
 grand and pale ; the eye dark, and gleaming 
 with sensibility and soul ; a face to inspire men 
 with interest and curiosity."
 
 1 8 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 There is a quiet drawing-room in Street, 
 
 New York, a sort of fragrant and delicious 
 " clover-nook " in the heart of the noisy city, 
 where hung, some three years ago, the original 
 painting from which this engraving is a copy. 
 Happening to meet there at the time a com- 
 pany of authors and poets, among whom were 
 Mary Forest, Alice and Phcebe Gary, the Stod- 
 dards, T. B. Aldrich, and others, we heard one 
 of the party say, in speaking of the portrait, 
 that its aspect was that of a beautiful and deso- 
 late shrine from which the Genius had departed, 
 and that it recalled certain lines to one of the 
 antique marbles, 
 
 " O melancholy eyes ! 
 
 O empty eyes ! from which the soul has gone 
 To see the far-off countries." 
 
 Near this luminous but impassive face, with 
 its sad and soulless eyes, was a portrait of Poe's 
 unrelenting biographist. In a recess opposite 
 
 hung a picture of the fascinating Mrs. , 
 
 whose genius both had so fervently admired, 
 and for whose coveted praise and friendship 
 both had been competitors. Looking at the 
 beautiful portrait of this lady, the face so full 
 of enthusiasm, and dreamy, tropical sunshine, 
 remembering the eloquent words of her praise
 
 EDGAR FOE AND HIS CRITICS. 1 9 
 
 as expressed in the prodigal and passionate ex- 
 aggerations of her verse, one ceases to wonder 
 at the rivalries and enmities enkindled within 
 the hearts of those who admired her genius and 
 her grace, rivalries and enmities which the 
 grave itself could not cancel or appease. 
 
 Of the portrait prefixed to the " Illustrated 
 Poems," recently published by Redfield, Mr. 
 Willis says, "The reader who has the volume 
 in his hand turns back musingly to look upon 
 the features of the poet in whom resided such 
 inspiration. But though well engraved, and 
 useful as recalling his features to those who 
 knew them with the angel shining through, the 
 picture is from a daguerrotype, and gives no 
 idea of the beauty of Edgar Poe. The exquis- 
 itely chiselled features, the habitual but intel- 
 lectual melancholy, the clear pallor of the 
 complexion, and the calm eye like the molten 
 stillness of a slumbering volcano, composed a 
 countenance of which this portrait is but the 
 skeleton. After reading ' The Raven/ ' Ula- 
 lume/ ' Lenore,' and 'Annabel Lee,' the luxu- 
 riast in poetry will better conceive what his 
 face might have been." 
 
 It was soon after his removal to New York 
 that Mr. Poe became acquainted with the 
 editors of "The Mirror," and was employed by
 
 2O EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 them as a writer for that journal. Mr. Willis, 
 in a recent notice of the " Illustrated Poems," 
 has paid an eloquent tribute to his memory, 
 expressed in a spirit of rare kindliness and 
 generosity. 
 
 From March, 1845, to January, 1846, he was 
 associated with Mr. C. F. Briggs in editing 
 "The Broadway Journal." In the autumn of 
 1845 he was often seen at the brilliant literary 
 circles in Waverley Place, where weekly re- 
 unions of noted artists and men of letters, at 
 the house of an accomplished poetess, attracted 
 some of the best intellectual society of the city. 
 At the request of his hostess, Mr. Poe one even- 
 ing electrified the gay company assembled there 
 by the recitation of the weird poem to whose 
 sad, strange burden so many hearts have since 
 echoed. This was a few weeks previous to the 
 publication of "The Raven " in "The American 
 Review." Mrs. Browning, in a private letter 
 written a few weeks after its publication in 
 England, says, "This vivid writing this power 
 which is felt has produced a sensation here in 
 England. Some of my friends are taken by the 
 fear of it, and some by the music. I hear of 
 persons who are haunted by the ' Nevermore ; ' 
 and an acquaintance of mine, who has the mis- 
 fortune of possessing a bust of Pallas, cannot
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 21 
 
 bear to look at it in the twilight. Then there 
 is a tale going the rounds of the newspapers 
 about mesmerism, which is throwing us all into 
 ' most admired disorder,' dreadful doubts as to 
 whether it can be true, as the children say of 
 ghost stories. The certain thing about it is 
 the power of the writer." 
 
 A woman of fine genius, who at this time 
 made his acquaintance, says, in some recently 
 published comments on his writings, " It was in 
 the brilliant circles that assembled in the winter 
 of 1845-46 at the houses of Dr. Dewey, Miss 
 Anna C. Lynch, Mr. Lawson, and others, that 
 we first met Edgar Poe. His manners were, at 
 these re-unions, refined and pleasing, and his 
 style and scope of conversation that of a gentle- 
 man and a scholar. Whatever may have been 
 his previous career, there was nothing in his 
 appearance or manner to indicate his excesses. 
 He delighted in the society of superior women, 
 and had an exquisite perception of all graces of 
 manner, and shades of expression. He was an 
 admiring listener and an unobtrusive observer. 
 We all recollect the interest felt at the time in 
 every thing emanating from his pen, the relief 
 it was from the dulncss of ordinary writers, the 
 certainty of something fresh and suggestive. 
 His critiques were read with avidity ; not that
 
 22 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 he convinced the judgment, but that people felt 
 their ability and their courage. Right or wrong, 
 he was terribly in earnest." Like De Quincey, 
 he never supposed any thing : he always knew. 
 
 The peculiar character of his intellect seemed 
 without a prototype in literature. He had more 
 than De Ouincey's power of analysis, with a 
 constructive unity and completeness of which 
 the great English essayist has given no indica- 
 tion. His pre-eminence in constructive and 
 analytical skill was beginning to be universally 
 admitted, and the fame and prestige of his 
 genius were rapidly increasing. But the dan- 
 gerous censorship he soon after assumed, as 
 the author of a series of sketches, some of 
 which have been since published as the " Lit- 
 erati," exposed him to frequent indignant 
 criticism, while, by his personal errors and in- 
 discretions, he drew upon himself much social 
 censure and espionage, and became the victim 
 of dishonoring accusations, from which honor 
 itself had forbidden him to exculpate himself. 
 
 It has been said, in allusion to the severity 
 of his literary strictures, that a most fitting 
 escutcheon for Mr. Poe might have been found 
 in the crest of Walter Scott's puissant Templar, 
 Bois Guilbert, a raven in full flight, holding in 
 its claws a skull, and bearing the motto, "Gare 
 le Corbeau."
 
 EDGAR FOE AND HIS CRITICS. 2$ 
 
 Mr. Longfellow has very generously said, in 
 a letter to the editor of " The Literary Messen- 
 ger, " " The harshness of his criticism I have 
 always attributed to the irritation of a sensitive 
 nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of 
 wrong." 
 
 A recent and not too lenient critic tells us 
 that " it was his sensitiveness to artistic imper- 
 fections, rather than any malignity of feeling, 
 that made his criticisms so severe, and procured 
 him a host of enemies among persons towards 
 whom he entertained no personal ill will." 
 
 In evidence of the habitual courtesy and 
 good nature noticeable to all who best knew 
 him in domestic and social life, we remember 
 an incident that occurred at one of the soirees 
 to which we have alluded. A lady noted for 
 her great lingual attainments, wishing to apply 
 a wholesome check to the vanity of a young 
 author, proposed inviting him to translate for 
 the company a difficult passage in Greek, of 
 which language she knew him to be profoundly 
 ignorant, although given to a rather pretentious 
 display of Greek quotations in his published 
 writings. Poe's earnest and persistent remon- 
 strance against this piece of mcclianccte alone 
 averted the embarrassing test. 
 
 Sometimes his fair young wife was seen with
 
 24 EDGAR FOE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 him at these weekly assemblages in Waverley 
 Place. She seldom took part in the conversa- 
 tion ; but the memory of her sweet and girlish 
 face, always animated and vivacious, repels the 
 assertion, afterwards so cruelly and recklessly 
 made, that she died a victim to the neglect and 
 unkindness of her husband, "who," as it has 
 been said, "deliberately sought her death that 
 he might embalm her memory in immortal 
 dirges." An article in "Eraser's Magazine," 
 published some two years ago, repeats the as- 
 sertion that Poe was the murderer of his wife, 
 " causing her to die of starvation and a broken 
 heart." Gilfillan, ascribing to him "passions 
 controlled by the presence of art until they 
 resembled sculptured flame," tells us that he 
 caused the death of his wife that he might have 
 a fitting theme for "The Raven." A serious 
 objection to this ingenious theory may, perhaps, 
 be found in the "refractory fact " that the poem 
 was published more than a year before the event 
 which these persons assume it was intended to 
 commemorate. 
 
 We might cite the testimony alike of friends 
 and enemies to Poe's unvarying kindness tow- 
 ards his young wife and cousin, if other testi- 
 mony were needed than that of the tender love 
 still cherished for his memory by one whose
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 2$ 
 
 life was made doubly desolate by his death, 
 the sister of his father, and the mother of his 
 Virginia. 
 
 It is well known to those acquainted with 
 the parties, that the young wife of Edgar Poe 
 died of lingering consumption, which manifested 
 itself even in her girlhood. All who have had 
 opportunities for observation in the matter have 
 noticed her husband's tender devotion to her 
 during her prolonged illnesses. Even Dr. Gris- 
 wold speaks of having visited him during a pe- 
 riod of illness caused by protracted anxiety, and 
 watching by the side of his sick wife. It is 
 true, that, notwithstanding her vivacity and 
 cheerfulness at the time we have alluded to, 
 her health was even then rapidly sinking ; and 
 it was for her dear sake, and for the recovery of 
 that peace which had been so fatally perilled 
 amid the irritations and anxieties of his New- 
 York life, that Poe left the city, and removed to 
 the little Dutch cottage in Fordham, where he 
 passed the three remaining years of his life. It 
 was to this quiet haven, in the beautiful spring 
 of 1846, when the fruit-trees were all in bloom 
 and the grass in its freshest verdure, that he 
 brought his Virginia to die. Here he watched 
 her failing breath in loneliness and privation 
 through many solitary moons, until, on a deso-
 
 26 EDGAR FOE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 late, dreary day of the ensuing winter, he saw 
 her remains borne from beneath its lowly roof 
 to a neighboring cemetery. It was towards the 
 close of the year following her death, his " most 
 immemorial year," that he wrote the strange 
 threnody of " Ulalume." This poem, perhaps 
 the most original and weirdly suggestive of all 
 his poems, resembles at first sight some of Tur- 
 ner's landscapes, being apparently " without 
 form and void, and having darkness on the face 
 of it." It is, nevertheless, in its basis, although 
 not in the precise correspondence of time, sim- 
 ply historical. Such was the poet's lonely mid- 
 night walk ; such, amid the desolate memories 
 and sceneries of the hour, was the new-born 
 hope enkindled within his heart at sight of the 
 morning star 
 
 " Astarte's bediamonded crescent" 
 
 coming up as the beautiful harbinger of love 
 and happiness yet awaiting him in the untried 
 future ; and such the sudden transition of feel- 
 ing, the boding dread, that supervened on dis- 
 covering that which had at first been unnoted, 
 that it shone, as if in mockery or in warning, 
 directly over the sepulchre of the lost " Ula- 
 lume." A writer in "The London Critic," after 
 quoting the opening stanzas of " Ulalame,"
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 2/ 
 
 says, "These to many will appear only words. 
 But what wondrous words ! What a spell they 
 wield ! What a withered unity there is in them ! 
 The instant they are uttered, a misty picture, 
 with a tarn dark as a murderer's eye below, 
 and the thin yellow leaves of October fluttering 
 above, exponents of a misery which scorns the 
 name of sorrow, is hung up in the chambers 
 of your soul forever." 
 
 An English writer, now living in Paris, the 
 author of some valuable contributions to our 
 American periodicals, passed several weeks at 
 the little cottage in Fordham in the early au- 
 tumn of 1847, and described to us, with a truly 
 English appreciativeness, its unrivalled neat- 
 ness, and the quaint simplicity of its interior and 
 surroundings. It was at the time bordered by 
 a flower-garden, whose clumps of rare dahlias 
 and brilliant beds of fall flowers showed, in the 
 careful culture bestowed upon them, the fine 
 floral taste of the inmates. 
 
 An American writer who visited the cottage 
 during the summer of the same year, described 
 it as half buried in fruit-trees, and having a 
 thick grove of pines in its immediate neighbor- 
 hood. The proximity of the railroad, and the 
 increasing population of the little village, have 
 since wrought great changes in the place.
 
 28 EDGAR FOE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 Round an old cherry-tree, near the door, was a 
 broad bank of greenest turf. The neighboring 
 beds of mignonette and heliotrope, and the 
 pleasant shade above, made this a favorite seat. 
 Rising at four o'clock in the morning for a walk 
 to the magnificent Aqueduct bridge over Har- 
 lem River, our informant found the poet, with 
 his mother, standing on the turf beneath the 
 cherry-tree, eagerly watching the movements of 
 two beautiful birds that seemed contemplating 
 a settlement in its branches. He had some 
 rare tropical birds in cages, which he cherished 
 and petted with assiduous care. Our English 
 friend described him as giving to his birds and 
 his flowers a delighted attention that seemed 
 quite inconsistent with the gloomy and gro- 
 tesque character of his writings. A favorite 
 cat, too, enjoyed his friendly patronage; and 
 often, when he was engaged in composition, it 
 seated itself on his shoulder, purring as in com- 
 placent approval of the work proceeding under 
 its supervision. 
 
 During Mr. Foe's residence at Fordham, a 
 walk to High Bridge was one of his favorite and 
 habitual recreations. The water of the Aque- 
 duct is conveyed across the river on a range of 
 lofty granite arches, which rise to the height 
 of a hundred and forty-five feet above high-
 
 EDGAR FOE AND HIS CRITICS. 29 
 
 water level. On the top a turfed and grassy 
 road, used only by foot-passengers, and flanked 
 on either side by a low parapet of granite, 
 makes one of the finest promenades imaginable. 
 The winding river, and the high, rocky shores 
 at the western extremity of the bridge, are seen 
 to great advantage from this lofty avenue. In 
 the last melancholy years of his life "the 
 lonesome latter years" Poe was accustomed 
 to walk there at all times of the day and night, 
 often pacing the then solitary pathway for hours 
 without meeting a human being. A little to 
 the east of the cottage rises a ledge of rocky 
 ground, partly covered with pines and cedars, 
 commanding a fine view of the surrounding 
 country, and of the picturesque college of St. 
 John's, which had at that time in its neighbor- 
 hood an avenue of venerable old trees. This 
 rocky ledge was also one of the poet's favorite 
 resorts. Here through the long summer days, 
 and through solitary, star-lit nights, he loved to 
 sit, dreaming his gorgeous waking dreams, or 
 pondering the deep problems of " The Uni- 
 verse," that grand "prose poem" to which 
 he devoted the last and maturest energies of his 
 wonderful intellect. The abstracted enthusi- 
 asm with which he pursued his great quest into 
 the cosmogony of the universe is an earnest of
 
 3O EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 the passionate intellectual sincerity which we 
 shall presently take occasion to illustrate. 
 
 Wanting in that supreme central force or 
 faculty of the mind whose function is a God- 
 conscious and God-adoring faith, Edgar Poe 
 sought earnestly and conscientiously for such 
 solutions of the great problems of thought as 
 were alone attainable to an intellect hurled from 
 its balance by the abnormal preponderance of 
 the analytical and imaginative faculties. It was 
 to this very disproportion that we are indebted 
 for some of those marvellous intellectual crea- 
 tions, which, as we shall hope to prove, had an 
 important significance, and an especial adapta- 
 tion to the time. 
 
 A very intolerant article on Mr. Poe has 
 recently been republished in this country from 
 "The Edinburgh Review" for April, 1858, in 
 which the most injurious anecdotes of Dr. Gris- 
 wold's memoir have been patiently copied and 
 italicised, and their enormities enhanced by the 
 gratuitous suppositions and assumptions of the 
 writer. 
 
 As an instance of the inconsequent reasoning 
 in which the reviewer sometimes indulges, we 
 quote a single passage from the article in ques- 
 tion. " It is," says "The Edinburgh " critic, "a 
 curious example of Poe's superficial acquaintance
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 3! 
 
 with the literature of other lands, that, in reca- 
 pitulating the titles of a mysterious library of 
 books in 'The House of Usher,' he quotes, among 
 a list of cabalistical volumes, Cresset's 'Vert- 
 vert,' evidently in complete ignorance of what Jie is 
 talking about. Cresset ' s ' Vcrtvcrt ' is the antip- 
 odes of Poc s 'Raven] though the comic interest 
 of the former and the tragic interest of the 
 latter turn alike on the reiteration of bird- 
 language." 
 
 The process of reasoning by which Mr. Poe's 
 "superficial acquaintance with the literature of 
 other lands " is deducible from the fact that 
 "Cresset's 'Vertvert' is the antipodes of Poe's 
 ' Raven,' " may be very apparent to the learned 
 reviewer, but is certainly not quite clear to the 
 common reader. 
 
 We are not aware that any of the works cited 
 in this catalogue bear a resemblance to "The 
 Raven." Mr. Poe must certainly be acquitted 
 of intending to suggest such a resemblance, 
 since "The Raven " was at the time unwritten. 
 " The Edinburgh " critic, after admitting that 
 Poe's "Raven" belongs to "that rare and re- 
 markable class of productions that suffice, singly, 
 to make a reputation," assumes, oddly enough, 
 that "the originality apparent in Mr. Poe's writ- 
 ings is due rather to the deformity of his moral
 
 32 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 character than to the vigor or freshness of his 
 intellect," and, finding himself " profoundly 
 impressed by Poe's wonderful solutions of the 
 most difficult problems," suspects that "it is, 
 after all, an easy thing for man to solve the 
 riddles which he himself has fabricated." 
 
 There is a prevalent impression among critics 
 and readers who have never felt the magnetism 
 of Poe's weird imagination, nor come into full 
 rapport with his genius, that his intellectual 
 creations were always the result of deliberate 
 effort and artistic skill ; that they were not 
 genuine outgrowths of the inward life, but 
 arbitrary creations of the will and the intellect. 
 
 This opinion, founded in part upon the sub- 
 tlety and refinement of his analytical faculty, 
 has been seemingly guaranteed by some of his 
 own statements in regard to his methods of 
 composition. A writer in " The North Ameri- 
 can " characterizes his poetry as "word-manoeu- 
 vring;" and one of his critics, sitting at the 
 time in "Harper's" "Easy Chair," says, "Such 
 curious and beautiful performances as Poe's 
 ' Raven ' and ' Sleigh-bells ' are not poems : they 
 are simply ingenious experiments upon the 
 sound of words." Were this grand lyric of 
 "The Bells" simply a lyric of "sleigh-bells," as 
 the " Easy Chair " pleasantly calls it, when were
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 33 
 
 sleigh-bells ever heard to ring so merrily before? 
 Listen ! 
 
 " How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, 
 
 In the icy air of night ! 
 While the stars that oversprinkle 
 All the heavens, seem to twinkle 
 
 With a crystalline delight; 
 Keeping time, time, time, 
 In a sort of Runic rhyme, 
 To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells 
 From the bells, bells, bells, bells, 
 
 Bells, bells, bells, 
 From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells." 
 
 It cannot, indeed, be denied that the mere artis- 
 tic treatment of this poem is truly marvellous. 
 The metallic ring and resonance, the vibration 
 and reverberation of the rhythm, are such that 
 one of its admirers says, "We can never read 
 it without pausing after every verse to let the 
 peals of sound die away on the ' bosom of the 
 palpitating air,' that \ve may commence the suc- 
 ceeding stanza in silence." Another, who ap- 
 preciates its ideal truth of conception not less 
 than its high rhythmical art, says, " I was aston- 
 ished one night, in watching a conflagration, 
 and repeating, amid the clash and clang of the 
 alarm-bells, the third stanza of the poem, to 
 find how marvellously the movement of the 
 verse timed with the peals of sound, and how
 
 34 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 truly the poem reproduced the sense of danger 
 which the sound of the bells, and the glare and 
 mad ascension of the flames, and the pallor of 
 the moonlight, conveyed. All the poetry of a 
 conflagration is in that stanza, both in sound 
 and sense ; and Dante himself could not have 
 rendered it more truly." 
 
 So many faculties were brought into play in 
 the expression of Poe's poetical compositions, 
 that readers in whom the critical intellect pre- 
 vails over the imaginative, often acknowledge 
 the refined art, the tact, the subtlety, the fault- 
 less method, while the potent magnetism of his 
 genius utterly escapes them. There are per- 
 sons whom nature has made non-conductors to 
 this sort of electricity. 
 
 The critic of "The North American" to 
 whose strictures we have alluded, charges him 
 with overlooking moral and spiritual ideas, and 
 calls his works "rich and elaborate pieces of 
 art," wanting in "the vis vitca which alone can 
 make of words living things." Bayne, on the 
 other hand, in his fine essay on " Tennyson and 
 his Teachers," alludes to the "Haunted Palace" 
 of "the great American poet," and contrasts 
 its wonderfully spiritual, subjective, and ideal 
 character with the rich and accurate detail of 
 Tennyson's "Palace of Art." He classes the
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 35 
 
 American poet with those who have scattered 
 imaginative spells, rather than finished elaborate, 
 imaginative pictures. A greater mistake in 
 literary criticism could not well be made than 
 that which is evinced in the frequent applica- 
 tion of the word "sensuous" to the singularly 
 ideal and subjective character of Foe's imagina- 
 tive creations. We do not, of course, intend 
 to include among these his stories of a purely 
 inventive or grotesque character. 
 
 It is not to be questioned that Poe was a 
 consummate master of language ; that he had 
 sounded all the secrets of rhythm ; that he un- 
 derstood and availed himself of all its resources, 
 the balance and poise of syllables, the alterna- 
 tions of emphasis and cadence, of vowel-sounds 
 and consonants, and all the metrical sweetness 
 of "phrase and metaphrase." Yet this con- 
 summate art was in him united with a rare 
 simplicity. He was the most genuine of enthu- 
 siasts, as we think we shall presently show. 
 His genius would follow no leadings but those 
 of his own imperial intellect. With all his vast 
 mental resources, he could never write an occa- 
 sional poem, or adapt himself to the taste of a 
 popular audience. His graver narratives and 
 fantasies are often related with an earnest 
 simplicity, solemnity, and apparent fidelity, at-
 
 36 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 tributable not so much to a deliberate artistic 
 purpose, as to that power of vivid and intense 
 conception that made his dreams realities, and 
 his life a dream. 
 
 The strange fascination the unmatched 
 charm of his conversation consisted in its 
 genuineness. Even Dr. Griswold, who has 
 studiously represented him as cold, passionless, 
 perfidious, admits that his conversation was at 
 times almost "supra-mortal it its eloquence;" 
 that "his large and variably expressive eyes 
 looked repose or shot fiery tumult into theirs 
 who listened, while his own face glowed, or 
 was changeless in pallor, as his imagination 
 quickened his blood, or drew it back frozen to 
 his heart." 
 
 These traits are not the possible accompani- 
 ments of attributes which Dr. Griswold has else- 
 where ascribed to him. As a conversationist 
 we do not remember his equal. We have heard 
 the veteran Landor (called by high authority 
 the best talker in England) discuss with scath- 
 ing sarcasm the popular writers of the day, 
 convey his political animosities by fierce invec- 
 tives on the " pretentious coxcomb Albert " 
 and " the cunning knave Napoleon," or de- 
 scribe, in words of strange depth and tender- 
 ness, the peerless charm of goodness, and the
 
 EDGAR FOE AND II IS CRITICS. 3/ 
 
 na'ive, social graces in the beautiful mistress of 
 Gore House, " the most gorgeous Lady Bless- 
 ington." We have heard the Howadji talk of 
 the gardens of Damascus till the air seemed 
 purpled and perfumed with its roses. We have 
 listened to the trenchant and vivid talk of the 
 Autocrat ; to the brilliant and exhaustless collo- 
 quial resources of John Neal and Margaret 
 Fuller. We have heard the racy talk of Orestes 
 Brownson in the old days of his freedom and 
 power, have listened to the serene wisdom of 
 Alcott, and treasured up memorable sentences 
 from the golden lips of Emerson. Unlike the 
 conversational power evinced by any of these, 
 was the earnest, opulent, unpremeditated speech 
 of Edgar Poe. 
 
 Like his writings, it presented a combination 
 of qualities rarely met with in the same person, 
 a cool, decisive judgment, a wholly unconven- 
 tional courtesy and sincere grace of manner, 
 and an imperious enthusiasm, which brought all 
 hearers within the circle of its influence. 
 
 J. M. Daniel, Esq., United-States Minister at 
 Turin, who knew Poe well during the last years 
 of his life, says of him, " His conversation was 
 the very best we have ever listened to. We 
 have never heard any so suggestive of thought, 
 or any from which one gained so much. On
 
 38 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 literary subjects it was the essence of correct 
 and profound criticism divested of all formal 
 pedantries and introductory ideas, the kernel 
 clear of the shell. He was not a brilliant talker 
 in the common, after-dinner sense of the word ; 
 he was not a maker of fine points, or a frequent 
 sayer of funny things. What he said was 
 prompted entirely by the moment, and seemed 
 uttered for the pleasure of uttering it. In his 
 animated moods he talked with an abstracted 
 earnestness, as if he were dictating to an 
 amanuensis ; and, if he spoke of individuals, his 
 ideas ran upon their moral and intellectual 
 qualities, rather than upon the idiosyncrasies of 
 their active, visible phenomena, or the peculiari- 
 ties of their manner." 
 
 We have said that the charm of his conversa- 
 tion consisted in its genuineness, its wonderful 
 directness, and sincerity. We believe, too, that, 
 in the artistic utterance of poetic emotion, he 
 was at all times passionately genuine. His 
 proud reserve, his profound melancholy, his un- 
 worldliness may we not say his inicartJilincss 
 of nature, made his character one very diffi- 
 cult of comprehension to the casual observer. 
 The complexity of his intellect, its incalculable 
 resources, and his masterly control of those re- 
 sources when brought into requisition for the
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 39 
 
 illustration of some favorite theme or cherished 
 creation, led to the current belief that its action 
 was purely arbitrary, that he could write with- 
 out emotion or earnestness at the deliberate 
 diction of the will. A certain class of his 
 writings undeniably exhibits the faculties of 
 ingenuity and invention in a prominent and dis- 
 tinctive light. But it must not be forgotten 
 that there was another phase of his mind, one 
 not less distinctive and characteristic of his 
 genius, which manifested itself in creations of 
 a totally different order and expression. It can 
 hardly have escaped the notice of the most care- 
 less reader that certain ideas exercised over him 
 the power of fascination. They return again 
 and again in his stories and poems, and seem 
 like the utterances of a mind possessed with 
 thoughts, emotions, and images of which the 
 will and the understanding take little cogni- 
 zance. In the delineation of these, his language 
 often acquires a power and pregnancy eluding 
 all attempts at analysis. It is then, that, by a 
 few miraculous words, he evokes emotional 
 states, or commands pictorial effects, which live 
 forever in the memory, and form a part of its 
 eternal inheritance. No analysis can dissect, 
 no criticism can disenchant, them. 
 
 As specimens of the class we have indicated,
 
 4O EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 read " Ligeia," " Morella," "Eleanora." Ob- 
 serve in them the prevailing and dominant 
 thoughts of his inner life, ideas of "fate and 
 metaphysical aid," of psychical and spiritual 
 agencies, energies, and potencies. See in them 
 intimations of mysterious phenomena, which, 
 at the time when these fancies were indited, 
 were regarded as fables and dreams, but which 
 have since (in their phenomenal aspect simply) 
 been recognized as matters of popular experi- 
 ence and scientific research. 
 
 In " Ligeia," the sad and stately symmetry 
 of the sentences, their rhythmical cadence, the 
 Moresque sumptuousness of imagery with which 
 the story is invested, and the weird metemp- 
 sychosis which it records, produce an effect on 
 the reader altogether peculiar in character, and, 
 as we think, quite inexplicable without a refer- 
 ence to the supernatural inspiration which seems 
 to pervade them. In the moods of mind and 
 phases of passion which this story represents, 
 we have no labored artistic effects. We look 
 into the haunted chambers of the poet's own 
 mind, and see, as through a veil, the strange 
 experiences of his inner life ; while in the dusk 
 magnificence of his imagery we have the true 
 heraldic blazonry of an imagination royally 
 dowered and descended. In this, as in all that
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 4! 
 
 class of stories we have named, the author's 
 mind seems struggling desperately and vainly 
 with the awful mystery of death. 
 
 In "Morella," as in " Ligeia," the parties are 
 occupied with the same mystic philosophies, 
 engrossed in the same recondite questions of 
 "life and death and spiritual unity," questions 
 of " that identity which at death is or is not 
 lost forever." Each commemorates a psychical 
 attraction which transcends the dissolution of 
 the mortal body, and oversweeps the grave ; the 
 passionate soul of the departed transfusing 
 itself through the organism of another, to man- 
 ifest its deathless love. Who does not remem- 
 ber, as a strain of yEonian melody, the story 
 of " Eleanora " ? Who does not lapse into a 
 dream as he remembers the "River of Silence" 
 and "The Valley of the Many-Colored Grass " ? 
 
 In this story, the purport, though less apparent 
 to the general reader, and differently interpreted 
 by a writer in "The North American Review," 
 is still the same as in the preceding. Read the 
 closing sentences, so eloquent with a tender and 
 mysterious meaning, which record, after the 
 death of the beloved Eleanora, the appearance, 
 "from a far, far distant and unknown land," of 
 the seraph Ermengarde. Observe, too, in these 
 closing lines, the indication, so often manifest
 
 42 EDGAR FOE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 in Poc's poems and stories, of a lingering pity 
 and sorrow for the dead, an ever-recurring 
 pang of remorse, in the fear of having grieved 
 them by some involuntary wrong of desertion 
 or forgetfulness. 
 
 This haunting remembrance, this sad, re- 
 morseful pity for the departed, is everywhere 
 a distinguishing feature in his prose and poetry. 
 
 The existence of such a feeling as a prevalent 
 mood of his mind, of which we have abundant 
 evidence, is altogether incompatible with that 
 cold sensualism with which he has been so igno- 
 rantly charged. So far from being selfish or 
 heartless, his devotional fidelity to the memory 
 of those he loved w r ould by the world be regard- 
 ed as fanatical. A characteristic incident of his 
 boyhood will illustrate the passionate fidelity 
 which we have ascribed to him. While at the 
 academy in Richmond, which he entered in his 
 twelfth year, he one day accompanied a school- 
 mate to his home, where he saw for the first 
 
 time Mrs. H S , the mother of his 
 
 young friend. This lady, on entering the 
 room, took his hand, and spoke some gentle 
 and gracious words of welcome, which so pene- 
 trated the sensitive heart of the orphan-boy as 
 to deprive him of the power of speech, and for 
 a time almost of consciousness itself. He re-
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 43 
 
 turned home in a dream, with but one thought, 
 one hope in life, to hear again the sweet and 
 gracious words that had made the desolate world 
 so beautiful to him, and filled his lonely heart 
 with the oppression of a new joy. This lady 
 afterwards became the confidante of all his boy- 
 ish sorrows, and hers was the one redeeming 
 influence that saved and guided him in the 
 earlier days of his turbulent and passionate 
 youth. After the visitation of strange and 
 peculiar sorrows, she died ; and for months after 
 her decease it was his habit to visit nightly the 
 cemetery where the object of his boyish idolatry 
 lay entombed. The thought of her sleeping 
 there in her loneliness filled his heart with a 
 profound, incommunicable sorrow. When the 
 nights were very dreary and cold, when the 
 autumnal rains fell, and the winds wailed mourn- 
 fully over the graves, he lingered longest, and 
 came away most regretfully. 
 
 It was the image of this lady, long and ten- 
 derly and sorrowfully cherished, that suggested 
 the stanzas, "To Helen," published among the 
 poems written in his youth, which Russell 
 Lowell says have in them a grace and symme- 
 try of outline such as few poets ever attain, and 
 which are valuable as displaying "what can 
 only be expressed by the contradictory phrase
 
 44 EDGAR FOE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 As the lines do not appear in the latest edi- 
 tions of his poems, we give them here : 
 
 " 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, 
 To 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 ! " 
 
 In a letter now before us, written within a 
 twelvemonth of his death, Edgar Poe speaks 
 of the love which inspired these verses as " the 
 one, idolatrous, and purely ideal love " of his 
 passionate boyhood. 
 
 In one of the numbers of "Russell's Maga- 
 zine," there is a transcript of the first published 
 version of the exquisite poem entitled " Le- 
 nore," commencing 
 
 " Ah, broken is the golden bowl ! the spirit flown forever. 
 Let the bell toll : a saintly soul floats on the Stygian 
 River."
 
 EDGAR FOE AND ffSS CRITICS. 45 
 
 It is remarkable, that, in this earlier version, 
 instead of LENORE, we have the name of HELEN. 
 The lines were afterwards greatly altered, and 
 improved in structure and expression ; and the 
 name of Lenore was introduced, apparently for 
 its adaptation to rhythmical effect. Whatever 
 may be the meaning that underlies this strange 
 funeral anthem, it will always be admired for 
 the triumphant music of its sorrow, and for its 
 sombre pomp of words. We may trust that the 
 " Sabbath Song " did indeed 
 
 " Go up to God so solemnly the dead could feel no wrong." 
 
 The ideas which haunted the brain of the 
 young poet during his watch in the lonely 
 churchyard, the shapeless fears and phantasms 
 
 " Flapping from out their Condor wings 
 Invisible woe," 
 
 were the same which overwhelmed De Quincey 
 at the burial of his sweet sister and playmate, 
 as described by him in the " Suspiria cle Pro- 
 fundis," ideas of terror and indescribable awe 
 at the thought of that mysterious waking sleep, 
 that powerless and dim vitality, in which " the 
 dead " are presumed, according to our popular 
 theology, to await " the general resurrection at 
 the last day." What wonder that the phantoms
 
 46 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 of " Shadow " and " Silence," once evoked there, 
 could never be exorcised ! What wonder that 
 " the fable which the Demon told in the shadow 
 of the tomb " haunted him forever ! 
 
 "Now, there are strange tales in the volumes 
 of the Magi, in the iron-bound, melancholy vol- 
 umes of the Magi, glorious histories of the 
 heaven, and of the earth, and of the mighty 
 sea, and of the genii that overruled the sea 
 and the earth and the lofty heaven ; there was 
 much lore, too, in the sayings of the Sybils. 
 And holy, holy things were heard of old by the 
 dim leaves that trembled around Dodona. But, 
 as AllaJi livctJi, tJiat fable wJiicli the Demon told 
 vie as lie sat by my side in tJie shadow of the 
 tomb, I hold to be the most wonderful of all ! 
 And as the Demon made an end of his story, he 
 fell back within the cavity of the tomb, and 
 laugJicd. And I conld not langJi luitJi the De- 
 mon, and he cnrscd me because I could not langJi. 
 And the lynx which dwelleth forever in the 
 tomb came out, and sat at the feet of the De- 
 mon, and looked him steadily in the face." 
 
 These solitary churchyard vigils, with all 
 their associated memories, present a key to 
 much that seems strange and abnormal in the 
 poet's after-life. Questions which no human 
 tongue could answer, no human knowledge sat-
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 47 
 
 isfy or silence, then found an utterance in the 
 vast and desolate chambers of his imagination ; 
 and their mournful echoes are heard again and 
 again in the magic cadences of his verse. In 
 the "Colloquy of Monos and Una" he has im- 
 agined all the phases of sentient life in the 
 grave ; and in the " Bridal Ballad " are stanzas, 
 which, as read by the author, were full of a wild, 
 sad pathos not easily forgotten. We will in- 
 stance only two of the stanzas, although their 
 rhythmical effect is injured by their separation 
 from those which precede and accompany them. 
 
 " And my lord he loves me well ; 
 
 But when first he breathed his vow 
 The words rang as a knell, 
 And the voice seemed his who fell 
 In the battle down the dell, 
 
 And who is happy now. 
 
 Would God I could awaken ! 
 
 For I dream I know not how; 
 And my soul is sorely shaken, 
 Lest an evil step be taken, 
 Lest tlie dead, who is forsaken, 
 
 May not be happy now.'" 1 
 
 The thought which informs so many of his 
 tales and poems betrays its sad sincerity even 
 in his critical writings, as, for instance, in a
 
 48 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 notice of " Undine" in the "Marginalia." Yet 
 it has been said of him that " he had no touch 
 of human feeling or of human pity ; " that " he 
 loved no one but himself;" that "he was an 
 abnormal and monstrous creation," "possessed 
 by legions of devils." The most injurious 
 epithets have been heaped upon his name, and 
 the most improbable and calumnious stories 
 recorded as veritable histories. Ten years have 
 passed since his death ; and while the popular 
 interest in his writings and the popular estimate 
 of his genius increase from year to year, these 
 acknowledged calumnies are still going the 
 round of the foreign periodicals, and are still 
 being republished at home. 
 
 We believe, that, with the exception of Mr. 
 Willis's generous tributes to his memory, some 
 candid and friendly articles by the editor of " The 
 Literary Messenger," and an eloquent and vig- 
 orous article in " Russell's Magazine " by Mr. 
 J. Wood Davidson of Columbia, S.C. (who has 
 appreciated his genius and his sorrow more 
 justly, perhaps, than any of his American crit- 
 ics), this great and acknowledged wrong to the 
 dead has been permitted to pass without public 
 rebuke or protest. 
 
 In the memoir prefixed to the "Illustrated 
 Poems," it is said of him that "his religion was
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 49 
 
 a worship of the beautiful," which is emphati- 
 cally true, and that " he knew no beauty but 
 that which is purely senuous," which is as em- 
 phatically untrue. We appeal from this last 
 assertion to Mr. Poe's own exposition of his 
 poetic theory. He recognizes the elements of 
 poetic emotion, the emotion of the beautiful, 
 " in all noble thoughts, in all Jioly impulses, in 
 all chivalrous, generous, and self-sacrificing 
 deeds." His "aesthetic religion," which has 
 been so strangely misapprehended, was simply 
 a recognition of the divine and inseparable har- 
 monies of the supremely Beautiful and the 
 supremely Good. 
 
 The author of the very able and systematic 
 critique in "The North American Review" 
 (which is, nevertheless, essentially false in all 
 its estimates of intellectual and moral charac- 
 ter) tells us that he " repudiated moral uses in 
 his prose fictions, as in his poetry, and that, if 
 moral or spiritual truths are found in them, they 
 must have got there accidentally, without the 
 author's permission or knowledge." This is 
 very unjust. To prove its injustice, we have 
 only once more to quote the author's own words. 
 " Taste" the sense of the beautiful, "holds intimate 
 relations zvith the intellect and the moral sense : 
 from the moral sense it is separated by so faint
 
 5O EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 a difference that Aristotle has not hesitated 
 to place some of its operations among the vir- 
 tues themselves." Again: "The poetic sense 
 is strictly and simply the human aspiration for 
 supernal beauty. It is no mere appreciation 
 of the beauty before us, but a wild effort to 
 reach the beauty above, a prescience of that 
 loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, apper- 
 tain to Eternity alone." 
 
 The current strictures on Poe's sinful worship 
 of beauty remind us of the satirist Shoppe in 
 Jean Paul's " Titan," who says, " In one respect 
 we Germans are far in advance of the Greeks 
 and Italians. We never seek the beautiful 
 without looking for collateral advantages : our 
 caryatides must uphold pulpits, and our angels 
 bear baptismal fonts." 
 
 We are ready to admit, with the severe critic 
 of " The North American," that a very large pro- 
 portion of Poe's stories are filled with monstrous 
 and appalling images ; that many of them op- 
 press the reader like frightful incubi, from whose 
 influence he vainly tries to escape. Ruskin 
 tells us, in his treatise on the grotesque, that 
 it is the trembling of the human soul in the 
 presence of death which most of all disturbs 
 the images on the intellectual mirror, investing 
 them with the grotesque ghastliness of fitful
 
 EDGAR FOE AND HIS CRITICS. 5 I 
 
 dreams. " If the mind be not healthful and 
 serene, the wider the scope of its glance and 
 the grander the truths of which it obtains an 
 insight, the more fantastic and fearful are these 
 distorted images." 
 
 Yet, as out of mighty and terrific discords 
 noblest harmonies are sometimes evolved, so 
 through the purgatorial ministries of awe and 
 terror, and through the haunting Nemesis of 
 doubt, Poe's restless and unappeased soul was 
 urged on to the fulfilment of its appointed work ; 
 groping out blindly towards the light, and mark- 
 ing the approach of great spiritual truths by the 
 very depth of the shadow it projected against 
 them. 
 
 It would seem that the true point of view 
 from which his genius should be regarded has 
 yet to be sought. We are not of those who 
 believe that any order of genius is revealed to 
 us in vain, nor do we believe that the age would 
 have gained any thing if the author of "The 
 Raven " had proved another Wordsworth or an- 
 other Longfellow. These far-wandering comets, 
 not less than "the regular, calm stars," obey 
 a law, and follow a pathway, that has been 
 marked out for them by infinite wisdom and 
 essential love. That the genius of Toe had 
 its peculiar mission and significance in relation
 
 52 EDGAR POE AND HIS CTITICS. 
 
 to the age, we cannot doubt. Every man of 
 electric temperament and prophetic genius rep- 
 resents, or rather anticipates, with more or less 
 of consciousness and direct volition, those latent 
 ideas which are about to unfold themselves in 
 humanity. It is thus that Mtiller accounts for 
 the origin of the Greek Mythus, the simple 
 invention of which he pronounces to be impos- 
 sible if by invention is meant a free and delib- 
 erate treatment of something known to be 
 untrue. He regards the originators of the Greek 
 Mythus merely as the more passive recipients 
 and skilful exponents who first gave form and 
 expression to those spiritual ideas which were 
 tending to organic development at that particu- 
 lar stage of the world's progress, " the foci in 
 which the scattered rays of spiritual conscious- 
 ness were concentrating themselves, to be radi- 
 ated forth with new intensity." When Foe's 
 genius began to unfold itself, the age was mov- 
 ing feverously and restlessly through processes 
 of transition and development, which seemed 
 about to unsettle all things, yet gave no clear 
 indication of whither they were leading us. 
 
 In our own country, Mr. Emerson's assertion 
 of the transcendental side of the ever-recurring 
 question between idealism and materialism 
 marked the re-action of intellectual and spiritual
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 53 
 
 tendencies against the materialism and literalism 
 of the churches. Through him the fine idealism 
 of the German mystics penetrated our literature 
 and spiritualized our philosophies. His novel 
 statements of truth had in them a strange force 
 and directness, startling the sleepers like the 
 naive cadences of a child's voice heard amid 
 the falsetto tones of the conventicle or the 
 theatre. What a sovran grace of sincerity in 
 his chapter on Experience ! What noble ethics 
 in his statement of spiritual laws. Yet if we 
 turn to the pages of Emerson, and look for the 
 evidences of his belief in the soul's individual 
 immortality, we shall find that the words he has 
 uttered on the subject express for the most 
 part either a purely Oriental indifference, or an 
 aimless and anxious questioning. In his lecture 
 to the divinity students of Cambridge, protest- 
 ing against the formalism and famine of the 
 churches, he told them that the faith of the 
 Puritans was dying out, and none arising in its 
 stead ; that the eye of youth was not lighted by 
 the hope of other worlds ; that literature had 
 become frivolous, and science cold. In his lec- 
 ture on "The Times," he says, "We drift like 
 white sail across the wide ocean, now bright on 
 the wave, now darkling in the trough of the sea. 
 But from what port did we sail ? Who knows ?
 
 54 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 Or to what port are we bound ? Who knows ? 
 There is no one to tell us, but such poor, weath- 
 er-tossed mariners as ourselves, whom we speak 
 as we pass, or who have hoisted some signal 
 from afar, or floated to us some letter in a bot- 
 tle. But what know they more than we ? " In 
 another of his essays he says, " I cannot tell if 
 these wonderful qualities which now house to- 
 gether in this mortal frame shall ever re-assem- 
 ble in equal activity in a similar frame ; but this 
 one thing I know, that the law which clothes 
 us with humanity remains new. We are im- 
 mortal with the immortality of this law." 
 
 These expressions indicate the pervading 
 scepticism of the time. Coming as they do 
 from a man who had been educated as a clergy- 
 man, a man for whose large culture and liberal 
 faith in humanity the pulpits of the existing 
 church seemed to offer no sufficient platform, 
 they have an emphasis which no added word 
 could heighten. 
 
 The negation of Carlyle, and the boundless 
 affirmation of Emerson, served but to stimulate 
 without satisfying the intellect. The liberal 
 ethics of Fourier, with his elaborate social econo- 
 mies, and systems of petrified harmony, were 
 leading his disciples through forlorn enterprises 
 to hopeless failures. A "divine dissatisfaction "
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 55 
 
 was everywhere apparent. De Quincey saw 
 something fearful and portentous in the vast 
 accessions to man's physical resources that 
 marked the time, unaccompanied by any im- 
 provement in psychical and spiritual knowledge. 
 Goethe had made his great dramatic poem an 
 expression of the soul's craving for a knowl- 
 edge of spiritual existences : 
 
 " O giebt es geister in der luft 
 Die zwischen Erd' und Himmel weben, 
 So steiget nieder aus den golden duft, 
 Und furht mich weg zu neuem bunten leben." 
 
 Wordsworth, in his finest imaginative poem, 
 " Laodamia," represents and half reproves this 
 longing ; Byron iterates it with a proud and 
 passionate vehemence in "Manfred;" Shelley's 
 sad heart of unbelief, finding refuge in a despair 
 too deep for aspiration, stands apart, as Eliza- 
 beth Browning has so finely sculptured him, 
 
 " In his white ideal 
 All statue-blind ; " 
 
 while Keats lies sleeping, like his own " En- 
 dymion," lost in dreams of the "dead past." 
 Then, sadder, and lonelier, and more unbeliev- 
 ing than any of these, Edgar Poe came to sound 
 the very depths of the abyss. The unrest and 
 faithlessness of the aire culminated in him.
 
 56 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 Nothing so solitary, nothing so hopeless, noth- 
 ing so desolate, as his spirit in its darker moods, 
 has been instanced in the literary history of the 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 It has been said that his theory, as expressed 
 in " Eureka," of the universal diffusion of Deity 
 in and through all things, is identical with the 
 Brahmin ical faith as expressed in the Bagvat 
 Gita. But those who will patiently follow the 
 vast reaches of his thought in this sublime poem 
 of "The Universe" will find that he arrives at 
 a form of unbelief far more appalling than that 
 expressed in the gloomy pantheism of India, 
 since it assumes that the central, creative soul 
 is alternately not diffused only, but merged and 
 lost, in the universe, and the universe in it, "a 
 new universe swelling into existence, or sub- 
 siding into nothingness, at every throb of the 
 heart divine." The creative energy, therefore, 
 " noiu exists solely in the diffused matter and 
 spirit of the existing universe." The author 
 assumes, moreover, that each individual soul 
 retains in its youth a dim consciousness of vast 
 dooms and destinies far distant in the bygone 
 time, and infinitely awful, from which inherent 
 consciousness the conventional "world-reason " 
 at last awakens it as from a dream. " It says 
 you live, and the time was when you lived not.
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. $? 
 
 You have been created. An Intelligence exists 
 greater than your own, and it is only through 
 this Intelligence that you live at all." "These 
 things," he says, "we struggle to comprehend, 
 and cannot, cannot, because, being untrue, they 
 are of necessity incomprehensible. 
 
 " No thinking man lives who at some lumi- 
 nous point of his life has not felt himself lost 
 amid the surges of futile efforts at understand- 
 ing or believing that any thing exists greater 
 tJian his oivn sonl. The intense, overwhelming 
 dissatisfaction and rebellion at the thought, 
 together with the omniprevalent aspirations at 
 perfection, are but the spiritual, coincident with 
 the material, struggles towards the original 
 unity. The material and spiritual God now 
 exists solely in the diffused matter and spirit 
 of the universe, and the regathering of this 
 diffused matter and spirit will be but the recon- 
 stitution of the purely spiritual and individual 
 God." 
 
 In a copy of the original edition of " Eureka," 
 purchased at the recent sale of Dr. Griswold's 
 library, the following note was found inscribed, 
 in the handwriting of the author, on the half- 
 blank page at the end of the volume. It is 
 singularly ingenious and characteristic.
 
 58 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 ''Note. The pain of the consideration that we shall 
 lose our individual identity, ceases at once when we fur- 
 ther reflect that the process, as above described, is neither 
 more nor less than that of the absorption, by each indi- 
 vidual intelligence, of all other intelligences (that is, of 
 the universe) into its own. That God may be all in all, 
 each must become God." 
 
 This proud self-assertion betrays a mysterious 
 isolation from the "heart divine," which fills 
 us with sadness and awe. 
 
 We confess to a half-faith in the old supersti- 
 tion of the significance of anagrams, when we 
 find, in the transposed letters of Edgar Poe's 
 name, the words " a God-peer ; " words which, 
 taken in connection with his daring speculations, 
 seem to have in them a mocking and malign 
 import "which is not man's nor angel's." 
 
 Yet, while the author of " Eureka," like Lu- 
 cretius, 
 
 "dropped his plummet down the broad, 
 
 Deep universe, and found no God," 
 
 his works are, as if unconsciously, filled with an 
 overwhelming sense of the power and majesty 
 of Deity : they are even dark with reverential 
 awe. His proud intellectual assumption of the 
 supremacy of the individual soul zvns but an 
 expression of its imperious longings for immor- 
 tality, and its recoil from the haunting phantasms
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 59 
 
 of death and annihilation ; while the theme of 
 all his more imaginative writings is, as we have 
 said, a love that survives the dissolution of the 
 mortal body, and oversweeps the grave. His 
 mental and temperamental idiosyncrasies fitted 
 him to come readily into rapport with psychical 
 and spiritual influences. Many of his strange 
 narratives had a degree of truth in them which 
 he was unwilling to avow. In one of this class 
 he makes the narrator say, " I cannot even now 
 regard these experiences as a dream, yet it is 
 difficult to say how otherwise they should be 
 termed. Let us suppose only tJiat the soul of man 
 to-day is on the brink of stupendous psychical dis- 
 covetics" 
 
 Dante tells us that 
 
 " Minds dreaming near the dawn 
 Are of the truth presageful." 
 
 Edgar Poe's dreams were assuredly often pre- 
 sageful and significant ; and while he but dimly 
 apprehended, through the higher reason, the 
 truths which they foreshadowed, he riveted 
 public attention upon them by the strange fas- 
 cination of his style, the fine analytical temper 
 of his intellect, and, above all, by the weird 
 splendors of his imagination ; compelling men 
 to read, and to accredit as possible truths, his
 
 60 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 marvellous conceptions. He often spoke of the 
 imageries and incidents of his inner life as more 
 vivid and veritable than those of his outer ex- 
 perience. We find in some pencilled notes 
 appended to a manuscript copy of one of his 
 later poems, the words, " All that I have here 
 expressed was actually present to me. Re- 
 member the mental condition which gave rise 
 to ' Ligeia,' recall the passage of which I 
 spoke, and observe the coincidence." With all 
 the fine alchemy of his subtle intellect, he 
 sought to analyze the character and conditions 
 of this introverted life. " I regard these vis- 
 ions," he says, "even as they arise, with an awe 
 which in some measure moderates or tranquil- 
 lizes the ecstasy : I so regard them through a 
 conviction that this ecstasy in itself is of 
 a character supernal to the human nature, is a 
 glimpse of the spirit 's outer world." He had 
 that constitutional determination to reverie, 
 which, according to De Quincey, alone enables 
 a man to dream magnificently, and which, as 
 we have said, made his dreams realities, and his 
 life a dream. His mind was indeed a " Haunted 
 Palace," echoing to the footfalls of angels and 
 demons. " No man," he says, "has recorded, 
 no man has dared to record, the wonders of his 
 inner life."
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 6 1 
 
 Is there, then, no significance in this " super- 
 natural soliciting" ? Is there no evidence of a 
 wise purpose, an epochal fitness, in the appear- 
 ance, at this precise era, of a mind so rarely 
 gifted, and accessible, from peculiarities of psy- 
 chical and physical organization, to the subtle 
 vibrations of an ethereal medium conveying but 
 feeble impressions to the senses of ordinary 
 persons; a mind which, "following darkness 
 like a dream," wandered forever with insatiate 
 curiosity on the confines of that 
 
 " Wild, weird clime, that lieth sublime 
 Out of space, out of time, 
 By each spot the most unholy, 
 In each nook most melancholy," 
 
 seeking to solve the problem of that phantasmal 
 shadow-land, which, through a class of phe- 
 nomena unprecedented in the world's history, 
 was about to attest itself as an actual plane of 
 conscious and progressive life, the mode and 
 measure of whose relations with our own are 
 already recognized as legitimate objects of 
 scientific research by the most candid and com- 
 petent thinkers of our time ? We assume, that, 
 in the abnormal manifestations of a genius so 
 imperative and so controlling, this epochal sig- 
 nificance is most strikingly apparent. Jean
 
 62 EDGAR FOE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 Paul says truly that "there is more poetic fitness, 
 more method, a more intelligible purpose, in the 
 biographies which God Almighty writes, than 
 in all the inventions of poets and novelists." 
 
 The peculiarities of Edgar Poe's organization 
 and temperament doubtless exposed him to 
 peculiar infirmities. We need not discuss them 
 here. They have been already too elaborately 
 and painfully illustrated elsewhere to need fur- 
 ther comment. How fearfully he expiated them, 
 only those who best knew and loved him can 
 ever know. We are told that ideas of right and 
 wrong are wholly ignored by him ; that " no 
 recognitions of conscience or remorse are to be 
 found on his pages." If not there, where, then, 
 shall we look for them ? In " William Wilson," 
 in "The Man of the Crowd," and in "The Tell- 
 Tale Heart," the retributions of conscience are 
 portrayed with a terrible fidelity. In yet another 
 of his stories, which we will not name, the fear- 
 ful fatality of crime, the dreadful fascination 
 consequent on the indulgence of a perverse will, 
 is portrayed with a relentless and awful reality. 
 May none ever read it who do not need the 
 fearful lesson which it brands on the memory 
 in characters of fire ! In the relation of this 
 remarkable story, we recognize the power of a 
 genius like that which sustains us in traversing
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 63 
 
 the lowest depths of Dante's " Inferno." The 
 rapid descent in crime which it delineates, and 
 which becomes at last involuntary, reminds us 
 of the subterranean staircase by which Vathek 
 and Nouronihar reached the Hall of Eblis, 
 where, as they descended, they felt their steps 
 frightfully accelerated, till they seemed falling 
 from a precipice. 
 
 Poe's private letters to his friends offer abun- 
 dant evidence that he was not insensible to the 
 keenest pangs of remorse. Again and again 
 did he say to the demon that tracked his path, 
 "Anathema Maranatha !" but again and again 
 did it return to torture and subdue. He saw 
 the handwriting on the wall, but had no power 
 to avert the impending doom. 
 
 In relation to this, the fatal temptation of his 
 life, he says, in a letter written within a year of 
 his death, " The agonies which I have lately 
 endured have passed my soul through fire : 
 henceforth I am strong. This those who love 
 me shall know, as well as those who have so 
 relentlessly sought to ruin me. ... I have abso- 
 lutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I 
 sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been 
 in the pursuit of pleasure that I have perilled 
 life and reputation and reason : it has been in 
 the desperate attempt to escape from torturing
 
 64 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 memories, memories of wrong and injustice 
 and imputed dishonor, from a sense of insup- 
 portable loneliness, and a dread of some strange 
 impending doom." We believe these state- 
 ments to have been sincerely uttered ; and we 
 would record here the testimony of a gentleman, 
 who having for years known him intimately, 
 and having been near him in his states of utter 
 mental desolation and insanity, assured us that 
 he had never heard from his lips a word that 
 would have disgraced his heart or brought 
 reproach upon his honor. 
 
 Could we believe that any plea we may have 
 urged in extenuation of Edgar Poe's infirmities 
 and errors would make the fatal path he trod 
 less abhorrent to others, such would never 
 have been proffered. No human sympathy, no 
 human charity, could avert the penalties of that 
 erring life. One clear glance into its mournful 
 corridors, its "halls of tragedy and chambers 
 of retribution," would appall the boldest heart. 
 
 Theodore Parker has nobly said that "every 
 man of genius has to hew out for himself, from 
 the hard marbles of life, the white statue of 
 tranquillity." Those who have best succeeded 
 in this sublime work will best know how to 
 look with pity and reverent awe upon the mel- 
 ancholy torso which alone remains to us of
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 65 
 
 Edgar Poe's misguided efforts to achieve that 
 beautiful and august statue of peace. 
 
 THOSE who are curious in tracing the effects 
 of country and lineage in the mental and con- 
 stitutional peculiarities of men of genius, may 
 be interested in such facts as we have been 
 enabled to gather in relation to the ancestry of 
 the poet. The awakening interest in genea- 
 logical researches will make them acceptable to 
 many readers ; and in their possible influence 
 on a character so anomalous as that of Edgar 
 Poe, they are certainly worthy of note. 
 
 John Poe, the great-grandfather of Edgar 
 Poe, left Ireland for America about the middle 
 of the last century. He was of the old Norman 
 family of Le Poer, a name conspicuous in Irish 
 annals. Sir Roger le Poer went to Ireland, as 
 marshal to Prince John, in the reign of Henry 
 II., and became there the founder of a race 
 connected with some of the most romantic 
 and chivalrous incidents of Irish history. The 
 heroic daring of Arnold le Poer, seneschal of 
 Kilkenny Castle, who interposed, at the ulti- 
 mate sacrifice of his liberty and his life, to save 
 a noble lady from an ecclesiastical trial for 
 witchcraft, the first ever instituted in the king-
 
 66 EDGAR FOE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 dom, was chronicled by Geralclus Cambrensis, 
 and has been commemorated by recent his- 
 torians. 
 
 A transcript of the story, as told by Geraldus, 
 may be found in " Ennemoser's Magic " and in 
 " White's History of Sorcery." The bitter 
 feuds and troubled fortunes of the Anglo-Nor- 
 man settlers in Ireland are well illustrated in a 
 recent genealogical history of the Geralclines by 
 the Marquis of Kildare, noticed in " The Edin- 
 burgh Quarterly" for October, 1858. The dis- 
 astrous civil war of 1327, in which all the great 
 barons of the country were involved, was occa- 
 sioned by a personal feud between Arnold le 
 Poer and Maurice of Desmond, the former hav- 
 ing offended the dignity of the Desmond by 
 calling him a rhymer. 
 
 The characteristics of the Le Poers were 
 marked and distinctive. They were improvi- 
 dent, adventurous, and recklessly brave. They 
 were deeply involved in the Irish troubles of 
 1641 ; and when Cromwell invaded Ireland, he 
 pursued them with a special and relentless ani- 
 mosity. Their families were dispersed, their 
 estates ravaged, and their lands forfeited. Of 
 the three leading branches of the family at the 
 time of Cromwell's invasion, Kilmaedon, Don 
 Isle, and Curraghmore, the last only escaped
 
 EDGAR FOE AND HIS CRITICS. 6/ 
 
 his vengeance. The present representative of 
 Curraghmore is the Marquis of Waterford. 
 Cromwell's siege of the sea-girt castle and for- 
 tress of Don Isle, which was heroically de- 
 fended by a female descendant of Nicholas le 
 Poer, baron of Don Isle, is, as represented by 
 Sir Bernard Burke in his " Romance of the 
 Aristocracy," full of legendary interest. The 
 beautiful domain of Powerscourt took its name 
 from the Le Poers, and was for centuries in the 
 possession of the family. Lady Blessington, 
 through her father, Edmund Power, claimed 
 descent from the same old Norman family. The 
 fact is not mentioned in Madden's memoir of 
 the countess, but is stated in a notice of her 
 death published in " The London Illustrated 
 News" for June 9, 1849. The family of the 
 Le Poers, like that of the Geraldines and other 
 Anglo-Norman settlers in Ireland, passed from 
 Italy into the north of France, and from France 
 through England and Wales into Ireland, where, 
 from their isolated position and other causes, 
 they retained for a long period their hereditary 
 traits with far less modification from intermar- 
 riage and consociation with other races than 
 did their English compeers. Meantime the 
 name underwent various changes in accent and 
 orthography. A few branches of the family
 
 68 EDGAR FOE AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 still bore in Ireland the old Italian name of De 
 la Poe. 
 
 John Poe, the great-grandfather of Edgar 
 Poe, married a daughter of Admiral McBride, 
 distinguished for his naval achievements, and 
 connected with some of the most illustrious fami- 
 lies of England. From genealogical records 
 transmitted by him to his son David Poe, the 
 grandfather of the poet, who was but two years 
 of age when his parents left Ireland, it appears 
 that different modes of spelling the name were 
 adopted by different members of the same family. 
 David Poe was accustomed to speak of the 
 Chevalier Le Poer, a friend of the Marquis de 
 Grammont, as having been of his father's family. 
 The grandfather of Edgar Poe was an officer in 
 the Maryland line during the war of the Revo- 
 lution, and, as Dr. Griswold has told us, the 
 intimate friend of Lafayette. He married a 
 lady of Pennsylvania by the name of Cairnes, 
 who is still remembered as having been a woman 
 of singular beauty. The father of Edgar Poe, 
 while a law-student in the office of William 
 Gwynn, Esq., of Baltimore, married, at the age 
 of eighteen, Elizabeth Arnold, a young English 
 actress, who was herself but a child. He first 
 saw her at Norfolk, where he was sent on profes- 
 sional business ; and in a few months they were
 
 EDGAR POE AND HIS CRITICS. 69 
 
 married. Indignant at so imprudent a union, his 
 parents refused their countenance to the mar- 
 riage ; and it was only after the birth of a child 
 that he was forgiven, and received back into the 
 paternal mansion. During the period of his 
 estrangement from his family he had joined his 
 wife in a theatrical engagement. Edgar Poe 
 was the offspring of this romantic and improvi- 
 dent union. 
 
 HAVING recorded our earnest protest against 
 the misapprehension of his critics and the mis- 
 statements of his biographists, we leave the 
 subject for the present, in the belief that a 
 more impartial memoir of the poet will yet be 
 given to the world, and the story of his sad, 
 strange life, when contemplated from a new 
 point of view, be found like the shield of 
 bronze whose color was so long contested by 
 the knights of fable to present at least a 
 silver lining.
 
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