|
|
by Theodore F. Wolfe, from his book Literary Haunts and Homes: American Authors, 1898.
A charming travelogue in which Dr. Wolfe recounts his visits to the places of Poe's life in New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Baltimore. Chatty, informed, and poetic, Wolfe's essay includes talks with Poe's neighbors and friends who were still around at the turn of the century, as well as information about houses owned by Poe's family, friends, and associates.
Of the few remaining places which were associated with the strange, sad career of Poe and with the production of the wondrous poems whose harmonies have thrilled the world, the humble little cottage on the Fordham hilltop is pre-eminent in the interest and regard of his many admirers. The pathetic circumstances of his life there, with its miseries and debasements, the fact that it was not merely the last and longest but almost the only home really his own which the time-tossed poet ever knew during his brilliant and erratic course, that there were written stanzas which are known and loved wherever men read, render the lowly dwelling a shrine which attracts many pilgrim feet.
From the haunts of Halleck and the grave of Drake a stroll along the valley of the romantic Bronx brings us to the once quiet village above which steeply rises the acclivity upon whose crest stands the hallowed relic of a unique and dazzling genius. The cottage is pathetically poor, small, and shabby, and rude hands have recently robbed it of the environment of shrub and spray and vine which once imparted grace and picturesque beauty to its walls, leaving them now bleak and bare. A projected widening of the highway which would bisect the structure has necessitated its removal backward into the garden; the noble cherry-tress which were in bloom when Poe came to dwell beneath their shade and whose wide-spreading branches literally embraced the tiny homelet have, save only one decaying remnant, disappeared; the acre of garden and sward which in his time encompassed the cottage has been encroached upon by pretentious "villas" till but the narrowest space remains; the plot where erst the brooding poet planted flowering beds of heliotrope, mignonette, and dahlias has disappeared beneath an ornate dwelling which fairly jostles its humble neighbor. The little cottage itself is a low-eaved, box-shaped, story-and-a-half structure, dating from about 1820, and has been changed since that time only by the addition of a lower kitchen at the back. The gabled end faces the highway, the walls are clad with shingles, a broad veranda shades the entrance and extends along the length of the side, and little square windows, like portholes, peep from the gables into street and garden.
At the right of the narrow vestibule is a low-ceiled parlor of moderate dimensions with two windows opening upon the veranda and a third which in Poe's time looked, between clustering lilacs, away northward over an expanse of lovely landscape. Opening out of this apartment is a diminutive sleeping-room scarce larger than a closet; above, reached from the hall-way by a steep winding stair, is the cheerless attic chamber where Poe kept his scanty library and accomplished his more elaborate literary work. It is lighted by the smallest and quaintest of windows, its sloping roof is so low that one may scarcely stand erect beneath it, and against one end wall is an irregularly shouldered chimney with a deep-throated fireplace. Adjoining is the contracted little closet which was Mrs. Clemm's bedchamber, and these few poor rooms, with an outside kitchen, were all the lowly home afforded. Yet it was the most comfortable and grateful refuge the wayward poet ever knew after unrest and "unmerciful disaster" had started him upon his wanderings.
Some who remember him here testify that the little place had a delightfully cosey and attractive aspect, and was as pleasant a home as the pinching poverty and the besetting infirmities of its unhappy master would permit. Blooming vines rioted upon the porch and overran the roof, the perfume of flowers floated through the windows, birds lived and sang in the boughs above the door. The rooms were scantily set forth with furniture purchased out of the proceeds of Poe's libel suit against the author of "Ben Bolt," but the neatness and taste of the occupants imparted to everything an air of refinement and gentility. A visitor describes for us these inmates as she often saw them here: Mrs. Clemm--the "more than mother" of Poe's quatorzain,--tall, sprightly, and talkative, in worn dress of rusty black; Virginia, wan and wasted, with glossy black hair that mader her pallor seem deathly, and with great brilliant eyes that "shone too brightly to shine long"; the poet, with pale and intellectual face that seldom smiled, with dark clustering hair, with large and lustrous eyes that glowed with feeling, with slender and erect figure neatly--often insufficiently--clad in threadbare garments of sable hue, proud of mien and port, yet displaying, in feature, form, and garb, evidences of pinching want heroically endured in order that his invalid wife might have needed comforts.
Save in furniture and hangings, the apartments are unchanged since Poe passed here the fevered years which brought to him so much of suffering and gave to us such treasure of marvellous verse, and as we linger within the haunted rooms it seems easy to recall the presences and events they have known. This little parlor was Poe's sitting-room; its floor was then covered with checked matting, small bookshelves holding presentation volumes hung against this side wall, the plaster cast of a raven perched above yonder door; between these front windows a writing-table was placed, and above it an engraving of "The Lost Lenore"; four chairs and a little stand were disposed about the room and completed its meagre furnishing. In this room the poet received as guests Willis, "Stella" Lewis, Mrs. Osgood, Margaret Fuller, Ann S. Stephens, and other litterateurs, and at his table here much of his critical work was done. On the veranda just without these windows he paced during the silent hours of many a night as he planned and elaborated his "Eureka" with its speculative theory of the problem of the universe. For some weeks before her death the poor straw pallet of his wife--once the artless "Eleanora" of his fancy--stood against the wall by yonder back window, where Mrs. Gove found her, in chill mid-winter, with "no bedclothing but a snow-white counterpane and sheets She lay wrapped in her husband's great coat with a large tortoise-shell cat in her bosom. The cat and the coat were the sufferer's only means of warmth, except as her husband held her hands and her mother her feet." A little later her coffin rested here upon the poet's writing-table while a few of his literary friends, with his neighbors and the "Mary" of his first betrothal, assembled in the funeral of one "doubly dead in that she died so young."
In the seclusion of the dismal chamber overhead Poe accomplished some of his best work, composing while he "walked the floor with on hand behind his back and biting the nails of the other hand until the blood came," as one visitor informs the writer. A round table was before the fireplace, his chair--still existing in the neighborhood--beside it, and in this spot, while enduring poignant mental distress as well as physical ills and exhaustion, he perfected the chiming "Bells" and wrote the soaring and nebulous rhapsody of "Eureka," the weird, despairing requiem of "Ulalume" and some of his famous fiction. Here, too, with the cat that had been her pet purring upon his shoulder, he wrote his last lyric, the musical dirge for his dead wife, "Annabel Lee." In this room he was sometimes imprisoned during "bad spells," when the mother would gather form his wastebasket manuscripts which his critical taste had rejected and endeavor to sell it in order to procure needed food,--going from office to office, as Willis said, tearfully pleading his illness and destitution.
A rocky ledge which crowns the cliff at the bottom of the garden was in Poe's time darkly shaded by sighing pines and commanded a superb prospect extending from the picturesque Palisades eastward across the Sound to a far horizon of shadowy hills on Long Island. The seclusion of this spot accorded well with the brooding moods of the poet, whose spirit haunted the dim borderlands of the unreal, and here, while the pines murmured to him of mystery, he sat apart in long summer days and still, starlit nights wrestling with sorrow, linking fancies that became deathless poems, or pondering his solution of the eternal secrets of life and nature. This hallowed spot is now partially overbuilt by a stable, the pines are replaced by fruit-trees, the outlook--obstructed by buildings and foliage--is narrowed to the beautiful vale of the Bronx.
The present writer has had the acquaintance of several of Poe's neighbors and visitors here, a few of whom yet survive. One of these remembers seeing the poet for the first time as he stood upon a branch of the great cherry-tree whose stump, now a jagged ruin, stands by the road-side paling; he was tossing twigs of the ripe fruit to his wife, who, arrayed in white, sat upon a bank of turf beneath the tree and was laughing and calling up to him when suddenly the snowy breast of her gown was crimsoned by a profuse haemoptysis, and the poet, springing to the ground, bore her fainting form into the cottage. Another, who lived not far away, saw the notice of Poe's death in a newspaper, and, going to the cottage to apprise Mrs. Clemm, found her preparing to accompany the poet to his wedding in Richmond; seeing the paper in the neighbor's hand, Mrs. Clemm instantly divined the sad truth, and exclaimed, "Eddie is dead! They've killed my boy! Had I been there to nurse him in his spell he would not have died!" These and other neighbors, who were cognizant of the abject poverty which prevailed at the little cottage and of its baneful cause, supplied food for the family and delicacies for the dying Virginia. When Poe made the fateful journey to the South from which he never returned, leaving Mrs. Clemm destitute and the rent many months in arrear, they cared for her, and it was their contributions that enabled her to go to Baltimore after his life's tragic close. Some of his household effects have been preserved by these friends, and in a near-by farmhouse we may see his clock, which still marks the hours, his rocking-chair, and his Bible,--a plain leather-bound, octavo volume without inscription or record.
It was his neighbors, too, who mostly made up the little funeral cortege which attended the sorrowing poet one bitter winter's day when, wrapped in the coat that had covered his dying wife, he followed her mortal part to its sepulture. She was laid in the vault of the family of his landlord in the Dutch Reformed church-yard on the Kingsbridge Road some furlongs westward from the cottage, and to this spot, through rain and cold, he often came to beseech her guardianship and to keep midnight vigil above her grave. For many years her body mouldered here, and then the scant remains were removed to Baltimore to mingle with the ashes of the poet; the vault itself has since been demolished, and the pilgrim of to-day finds an unmarked and unbroken slope of sward on the spot where the beautiful "Annabel Lee" was erst "shut up in a sepulchre."
As seen in its present position, the cottage stands a few feet eastward from its original site. A further displacement now awaits it: an attempt to preserve it in its proper place having failed, it is proposed to remove it to a small arbored green called the Poe Park, which has been recently laid out upon the opposite side of the highway. A bronze statue of Poe has been designed to face the cottage in its new position, and here, overlooking the spot where it sheltered the deathless poet, that lowly dwelling is to be preserved and cherished as one of the choicest treasures of the great metropolis.
"Here lived the soul enchanted By melody of song; Here dwelt the spirit haunted By a demonic throng; Here sang the lips elated, Here grief and death were sated; Here loved and here unmated Was he, so frail, so strong."
Philadelphia
In Philadelphia, en route to the sunny land of the poet's boyhood, the Poe pilgrim finds little to requite his search. The edifice in Dock Street, near the Exchange, in which Poe was employed as editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine after his first removal from New York, has disappeared; and the more lofty and pretentious building by Third and Chestnut Streets, where he subsequently edited Graham's and more than septupled its circulation, has been rebuilt and for many years used for other business. A mercantile structure long ago displaced the tenement in Arch Street which was his first place of abode in the Quaker City, where he completed the "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque" and pirated the text of Captain Brown's treatise on Conchology.
The neighborhood of Twenty-fifth Street and Fairmount Avenue has greatly changed since the time of his residence there, and the site of his poor little habitation--the plank "lean-to" of three rooms, with a upper chamber whose ceiling was so low that it almost touched his wife's head as she lay in the narrow couch after her first hemorrhage--is occupied now by one of a row of brick tenements. A single dwelling, much changed and enlarged but still used as a habitation, is almost the only relic Philadelphia retains of Poe's residence there. It is now a spacious, three-storied, brick domicile standing in North Seventh Street just above Spring Garden, separated by a contracted passage from an old stone church. The neighborhood was almost suburban in Poe's time, near-by trees harbored field song-birds, and the poet had a garden of bright flowers in the space which has since been built upon in augmenting the little house he knew. In winter these flowers ornamented the rooms, and when Poe removed to New York, in the spring of 1844, many of them were presented to his friend Thomas C. Clarke, who was to have been his coparcener in the long-projected Stylus. This home was the scene of much of the poet's pathetically tender care of his sick wife to which his visitors testified. One occasional caller affirms that the slightly and cheaply furnished little dwelling was so neatly kept by Mrs. Clemm, and had such an air of taste and culture, that it seemed altogether a suitable home for a man of genius. To Poe here came such visitors as Dr. Griswold, Captain Mayne Reid, and the older Booth, and messages of friendly greeting and praise from Willis, Irving, Lowell, Dickens, and others like them. Here, too, is has been said, the poet wrote "The Raven" but Dr. Matthew Woods, of the same city, will maintain in his next book that Henry B. Hirst and not Poe was the poet of those deathless stanzas. Dr. Woods has erected in his residence, upon another Philadelphia street, the mantelpieces which were removed from this humble home of Poe at the time of its renovation and enlargement.
