It was at Richmond that Poe's mother died, of consumption, in December, 1811. His father had probably died some months before. Poe was adopted by Mr. John Allan, a Scotch tobacco merchant of Richmond, not at all a rich man as has so often been stated. It is of record that he made an assignment for the benefit of creditors in 1822. In 1825, however, just before Poe left home for the University of Virginia, Mr. Allan received an inheritance from his uncle, one of the rich men of the State, which made him well-to-do. In the meantime he had attempted to extend his business to London. The most important result of this was that he took Poe to England and placed him for five years in the Manor House School, Stoke-Newington. Poe's storyWilliam Wilson' is full of reminiscences from this period, and much of his work is colored by it. Probably on some vacation trip to Scotland with his adopted parents he saw that lake among the hills which is the subject of one of his earliest yet most characteristic poems one of those which he says were written before he was twelve years old: THE LAKE In youth's spring it was my lot So lovely was the loneliness Of a wild lake, with black rock bound, And the wind would pass me by My infant spirit would awake To the terror of the lone lake. Yet that terror was not fright- Springing from a darken'd mind. Death was in the poison'd wave And in its gulf a fitting grave For him who thence could solace bring To his dark imagining; Whose wildering thought could even make An Eden of that dim lake. The poem was published in this form in his first volume, when he was eighteen years old, and was retained in every subsequent edition of his poems, in the edition of 1831 being inserted as a part of Tamerlane.' In the successive editions he made less changes in this than in any other of his earliest poems. The memory of a mystic lake of poisoned waves 'with black rock bound' reappears often in others of his works, until it becomes the 'dim lake of Auber'in his greatest poem. The love of loneliness and of night, the tremulous delight in terror, the thought of a darkened mind that seeks for death and finds in it an Eden, all remain characteristic of his later writing. In 1820 the Allans returned to Richmond, and until 1825 Poe was at school there; he distinguished himself in athletics (especially swimming), in declamation, and in French. It was natural enough that his first school-boy love should be for a woman older than himself, but perhaps hardly natural that this should be the mother of one of his schoolmates, and certainly not so that a healthy boy should haunt her grave for months, as is recorded of Poe; for she died in 1824, the first of his many Helens and Lenores. Just before going away to the University he had a somewhat more normal love affair with a girl nearly two years younger than he (he was sixteen himself), a Miss Royster. They became engaged,' at least according to the lady's later account. Poe wrote to her from the University, but the letters were intercepted by her father, and she was soon married to a Mr. Shelton. Perhaps in this simple story is to be found the whole basis of Poe's Tamerlane,' almost certainly written during the following year. The University of Virginia had been opened under Jefferson's patronage in March, 1825. Poe registered as a student there on February 14, 1826, and remained for one year. During this time he obtained distinction in Latin, French, and Italian, and was fairly regular in his attendance, but sometimes (not habitually) drank, and gambled with passionate recklessness. His gambling debts at the end of the year are said to have been about $2000. Mr. Allan refused to pay these debts of honor, withdrew Poe from the University, and set him to work at a desk in his own counting-room. Poe did not submit to this employment long, but ran away, somehow reached Boston, and soon published there (1827) his first volume: Tamerlane and Other Poems, By a Bostonian. (See note 1 on page 36, and note 2 on page 39.) By the time the book was published, Poe, perhaps unable to find any other means of subsistence, had already (May 26, 1827) enlisted in the United States army, under the name of Edgar A. Perry. He served for nearly two years. He seems to have served faithfully; on January 1, 1829, he was promoted for merit to be Sergeant-Major. Early in 1829 Mrs. Allan died. Poe had been recalled to Richmond to see her, but arrived too late. There was, however, a partial reconciliation with Mr. Allan, who obtained a substitute for him in the army, and after some effort secured his nomination to West Point. 6 While waiting for this appointment he had published at Richmond (1829) Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. For this volume he re-wrote, condensed, and for the most part greatly improved the Tamerlane.' (See the notes on pages 37 and 38.) ́Al Aaraaf' is on the whole a less successful production than Tamerlane.' In Tamerlane' he had deplored the triumph of ambition over love, in Al Aaraaf' he seems to be celebrating the claims of beauty as superior to all others, even those of love. The poem, however, has not, as Tamerlane' has, any clear thread of narrative on which to string its ideas and pictures, and even these are entirely vague and almost meaningless. 'Al Åaraaf' seems to show the influence of Shelley, as 'Tamerlane' (in the first form of which there occurs, unquoted, 'A sound of revelry by night') shows that of Byron. 'Al Aaraaf' also suffers from the fact that Poe never took the time to re-write it as he did 'Tamerlane.' There is in it, however, one supremely beautiful Burst of Melody' (as Professor Trent has entitled it in his Selections from Poe), the song to Ligeia. There are also in the volume of 1829 two exquisite lyrics, both entitled 'To,' and an early form of the poem 'A Dream within a Dream. When we remember that Poe was barely twenty when this volume was published, and that Keats was twenty-two when his first volume (not containing any of his greatest work except the 'Sonnet on Chapman's Homer') appeared, we feel that Lowell was almost justified in writing to Poe (May 8, 1843) Your early poems display a maturity which astonished me, and I recollect no individual (and I believe I have read all the poetry that ever was written) whose early poems were anything like as good.' 6 Poe entered West Point July 1, 1830. His work there was at first fairly good. He ranked third in French and seventeenth in mathematics, in a class of eighty-seven. Late in this year Mr. Allan married again, and Poe seems to have felt that he had no more to expect from him in the way of support or inheritance. In January of 1831 he deliberately neglected all duties at the academy for two weeks, was court-marshalled, and dismissed. When in doubt, publish a volume of poems,' seems, says some one, to have been the rule of Poe's life. After his dismissal from West Point, he went to New York and brought out his third volume, entitled simply Poems. This volume contained (and Poe was still only twenty-two years old) what is, perhaps, his most beautiful lyric, the first 'To Helen,' and the poems 'Israfel,' The City in the Sea,' 'The Sleeper,' Lenore' in its earliest form, and The Valley of Unrest.' His fellow cadets at West Point, to whom he dedicated the volume, and through whose subscriptions he had been enabled to publish it, were naturally disappointed at receiving such poems as these, instead of the satirical verses on their professors which they had expected. For the next two years practically nothing is known of Poe's life. We find him in Baltimore in 1833, living with his father's sister, Mrs. Clemm. He had written six Tales of the Folio Club, and one of these, The Manuscript found in a Bottle,' won him a prize of one hundred dollars and the friendship of John P. Kennedy. The second prize of fifty dollars, offered for the best poem submitted, would have been awarded to Poe's 'Coliseum,' except that the judges felt unwilling to give both prizes to one competitor. This success gave Poe a practical start in literature, or rather journalism, and Mr. Kennedy secured for him a position on The Southern Literary Messenger, published at Richmond. Meanwhile there had come to Poe the one genuine, deep, and lasting love of his lifetime, that for his child-cousin, Virginia Clemm. A license for marriage was obtained on September 22, 1834, when Virginia was barely twelve years old. There seems to have been no marriage at this time. In any case, after Poe moved to Richmond a new license was obtained, in May, 1836, and the marriage took place, while Virginia was still only in her fourteenth year. 6 Poe showed great ability as an editor and journalistic writer. He made the magazine famous, and greatly increased its circulation. But he was irregular in his habits and not to be depended upon. He had not learned to master the tendency against which he later struggled at least for many months and even years of his life so successfully. No man is safe,' his employer wrote to him, that drinks before breakfast.' He lost his position in January, 1837, went to New York, where he published in 1838 the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and then to Philadelphia, where he lived for the next six years. During these years he did a great amount of literary hack-work, and did it well, and also wrote some of his best stories and criticism. His Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque were published, in two volumes, at the end of 1839 (dated 1840). He was editor for a while of the Gentleman's Magazine and later of Graham's Magazine, two of the most important periodicals of the time. It has repeatedly been assumed that he lost his positions on both these magazines through incapacity caused by drinking, but the weight of evidence seems to disprove this. Mrs. Clemm stated positively, speaking of the period from 1837 to 1841, that 'for years I know he did not taste even a glass of wine' (Harrison's Life of Poe, p. 161), and this testimony is so strongly confirmed by others who knew him well during this time, that we may perhaps accept fully his own statement of the matter as made in a letter of 1841: At no period of my life was I ever what men call intemperate, I never was in the habit of intoxication." But, for a period, while I resided in Richmond and edited the Messenger, I certainly did give way, at long intervals, to the temptation held out on all sides by the spirit of Southern conviviality. My sensitive temperament could not stand an excitement which was an every-day matter to my companions, - in short it sometimes happened that I was completely intoxicated. For some days after each excess I was invariably confined to bed. But it is now quite four years since I have abandoned every kind of alcoholic drink- four years, with the exception of a single deviation. . . . A few facts seem now to be clearly established after the years of controversy over this disagreeable question. It is certain that Poe was not, as has so often been stated, an abandoned or habitual drunkard. It is also certain that the effect of even small quantities of alcohol was, in his case, especially severe; that he was to some extent the victim of a hereditary tendency (There is one thing,' his cousin William Poe wrote to him, I am anxious to caution you against, and which has been a great enemy to our family a too free use of the bottle '); and that the surroundings of his early life and the habits of the University and of West Point in those times did much to strengthen this tendency. It is also certain, and this has not been sufficiently recognized, that for many years Poe struggled manfully against this tendency, and succeeded, in spite of occasional relapses, and in the midst of all kinds of difficulties, discouragements, anxiety, poverty, and physical weakness, in doing an amount of work, and of highly intellectual work, that would have been impossible for a man so weak as he has usually been repre sented. Two strong motives governed his life, so far as it could be governed his devotion to his beautiful child-wife and to her mother, whom he calls his more than mother' in the beautiful sonnet which is the simple expression of his genuine feeling for her; and his passionate desire for literary fame, which, at its worst, showed itself in petty envy and carping criticism of his contemporaries, but which, at its best, became a noble devotion to the ideal of beauty. Every point in Poe's life and character has been the subject of controversy and con flicting statements, except one, the genuineness, simplicity, and, until his wife's death, constancy, of his devotion to the two women who made his home. 'I shall never forget,' wrote the owner of Graham's Magazine, within a year after Poe's death, when the attacks upon him were bitterest, how solicitous of their happiness he was. . . . His whole efforts seemed to be to procure the comfort and welfare of his home. Except for their happiness, and the natural ambition of having a magazine of his own, I never heard him deplore the want of wealth. . . . His love for his wife was a sort of rapturous worship of the spirit of beauty, which he felt was fading before his eyes. I have seen him hovering around her when she was ill, with all the fond fear and tender anxiety of a mother for her first-born, - her slightest cough causing in him a shudder, a breast chill, that was visible. I rode out one summer evening with them, and the remembrance of his watchful eyes, eagerly bent upon the slightest change of hue in that loved face, haunts me yet as the memory of a sad strain.' Virginia is described as of wonderful delicate loveliness, like that of Ligeia. She was a beautiful singer. In 1842, while singing for her husband, she broke a blood vessel in her throat, and this resulted in serious hemorrhages, which afterward recurred often, and sometimes brought her almost to the point of death. It was to Poe as if she had died many times, as often, even, as he has expressed in his poetry that one theme which he calls the highest of all, the death of a beautiful woman. Early in 1844 the little family moved to New York, Poe still hoping to found there a magazine of his own. For some time he worked on the staff of the Evening Mirror, under N. P. Willis, whose description of his faithfulness, industry, and courtesy must not be overlooked by any one trying to estimate his character during these years. 1845 was the year that gave Poe his national reputation. The Raven' appeared in the Evening Mirror on January 29, and was immediately copied by newspapers throughout the country, just as the first of Lowell's Biglow Papers was to be, a little more than a year later. His Tales were published by Wiley and Putnam, and had considerable success. He became associate-editor of the Broadway Journal, in which he republished, in their final perfected form, many of his earlier poems. And finally, all the poems which he wished to preserve were collected and published, toward the end of the year, in a volume entitled The Raven and Other Poems. Meantime, Poe was involved in many bitter controversies, through his severe criticism of his contemporaries. The Broadway Journal, of which he had finally obtained exclusive control in October, 1845, failed to prove a financial success, and involved him in considerable debt; its publication had to be discontinued at the end of the year. Early in 1846 Poe moved, with his family, to the cottage at Fordham, in what is now the Borough of the Bronx, New York City. Here the little family lived through a year of wretchedness. Poe's strength, both of body and of character, was seriously impaired. Virginia's illness became more and more serious, until she died on January 30, 1847. Poe was seriously ill for a long time, but gradually recovered. It was at the end of this 'most immemorial year' that he wrote his Ulalume.' In the year and a half that followed, all Poe's weaknesses were accentuated; and a new weakness, which is comprehensible, but not pleasant to contemplate, was added, in his abject appeal for the sympathy and sometimes for the hand of one woman after another. Yet his intellect and genius shone out at intervals almost more brightly than before. During this time he wrote 'Eureka' and 'The Bells,' the strange and wonderful lyric 'For Annie,' and Annabel Lee'—the last certainly a reminiscence of his child-wife Virginia. He became engaged to Sarah Helen Whitman, a poetess of extreme romantic temperament, his first meeting with whom is described in the second To Helen ;' but the engagement was broken through the efforts of her friends. Her loyal defence of Poe against his critics after his death is to be remembered. Poe was in Richmond in 1848, and again in 1849, hoping to get help there for the establishment of the new magazine which he was still planning; he found there the Mrs. Shelton who, as Miss Royster, had been his first love, and who was now a widow. He became engaged to her, his friends in Richmond raised a fund to help him start anew in life, and he left Richmond on Sep tember 30, to return to New York and settle up his affairs. It will never be known what happened on the following days, but he was found, October 3, in the back room of a saloon in Baltimore which was being used as a polling place. It has been suggested that he was drugged by an electioneering gang and made to serve as a repeater; and also that he had been drugged by robbers, for his money was gone. He was taken to a hospital, and died there, four days later, on Sunday, October 7, without having recovered consciousness. The attending physician testified that he was not under the influence of liquor, but this does not seem to be important, though it may refute the repeated statement that his death was caused by delirium tremens. Poe's character has often been judged harshly, but the case is one rather for human pity than for harsh judgment. His life was a tragedy, and in part a tragedy of hereditary fate, against which his human will struggled as best it could. He should be judged with the same charity which his New England contemporaries showed in their many beautiful tributes to Burns, whose life and character have points of resemblance with Poe's, though Burns's poetry is so much more human and less strange. In many ways Poe is unique among the chief American poets: in his life, for he is the only one who lived in extreme poverty and loneliness; the only one of weak character and illrepute; the only one (except Lanier) who died young. He is unique in his hatred of commonplace and of convention, in his intense devotion to poetry, in his love of mere music in verse, in his power to express emotion and his inability to express character, in his comparative blindness to Nature (except that strange unreal region of Nature which he creates for himself out of place, out of time'), in his exaltation of love, in his strange visionary conceptions of death. He is the only American who has been intensely a poet, and the only American poet (as Hawthorne is our only prose writer) who can justly be said, in any strict and narrow use of the word, to have had genius. RALPH WALDO EMERSON THE story of Emerson's life, so far as its external events are related to his poetry, can be told briefly. He was the last of nine successive generations of ministers. Thomas Emerson emigrated from England to Ipswich, Mass., about 1635. At about the same time, Emerson's first American ancestor in another line, Peter Bulkeley (see the beginning of 'Hamatreya '), settled in Concord as the first minister of that parish. Emerson's grandfather, William Emerson, was minister in Concord at the beginning of the Revolution, and on April 19, 1775, urged the minute-men to stand their ground near his parsonage, the 'Old Manse.' In 1776 he left Concord to join the troops at Ticonderoga, but caught a fever on his way there, and died in the same year. Emerson's father was minister of the First Church, Boston, which had already become Unitarian. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, May 25, 1803. His father died when he was eight years old, and the family was left in comparative poverty. Yet his mother, with devoted help from her sons, succeeded in obtaining an education for all of them. His eldest brother, William, graduated at Harvard in 1818, and studied for two years in Germany. Ralph Waldo graduated at Harvard in 1821, and his younger brothers, Edward and Charles, in 1824 and 1828. Ralph was prepared for Harvard at the Boston Latin School, where, in his eleventh year, he made a brief verse translation from Virgil's Eclogues, which has been preserved and published. He entered college in 1817, with the appointment of President's Freshman,' receiving free lodging for the work of carrying official messages; and he saved three-fourths of the cost of his board by waiting at table in the college Commons, and in the last years of his course earned something by tutoring. He did not especially distinguish himself in his studies, being generally thought the least brilliant of the brothers, but he was well liked by both teachers and students, and was elected class poet at the end of his course, as Lowell was later. He was only eighteen when he graduated, but immediately began work as a school-teacher, and when his older brother, William, went to |