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An amusing account of Stella Lewis, one of Poe's circle of literary friends in New York. He borrowed money from her, ate at her table, and wrote flattering reviews of her mediocre poems.
The proud dweller in the Borough of Manhattan casts only a careless eye upon the neighboring hills of Long Island; he rarely stops to realize that here in the old centres of the abolished City of Brooklyn have occurred some of the principal events of New York history; here some of the men and women most prominent in the social development of the greater community have been born, lived and flourished. This is the site of the first battle in which American troops were drawn up in regular formation to meet their British foes; here lived the exiled Talleyrand; here was, and is, the Plymouth Church of Henry Ward Beecher; here sang and prophesied the poet Walt Whitman. And here too was the home of that typical figure of her time, the poetess Estelle Anna Lewis.
The old Lewis home still stands down a long uninteresting street--a plain house of brick with trim of brown stone, a high stoop, and quaint railings. But there are few who remember that it was here, prior to 1865, that Mrs. Lewis held her own with the literary forces of the day, fighting and intriguing for place and publicity, using the money she had inherited and her sentimental attractions to capture the attentions of the literary world. She was born in Baltimore in April, 1824, the daughter of Dr. John Robinson, of half English, half Spanish or Cuban blood. For her early instruction she was sent to the famous "female academy" of Mrs. Emma Willard at Troy, New York. She left there in 1841 and continued her studies privately until her marriage with the Brooklyn lawyer Silvanus D. Lewis, a man some years her senior, respected but not sufficiently brilliant to shine beside his rather showy young wife. She immediately attempted to take a place in the literary cliques of New York, among the "Female Poets" and "Women Poets" who are enumerated at large in the volumes of Griswold, Reade, and Caroline May--that old world of crinoline and lovelocks, antimacassars and lambrequins, during the fifties and sixties of the last century. A near neighbor of hers--although we are not sure that there was any acquaintance--was Samuel Longfellow, the pastor of a Unitarian church on Clinton Street and brother of the poet whose best work he rivaled at times. Harriet Beecher Stowe also lived in the vicinity, and in lower New York flourished "the most brilliant and beautiful" Eliza Oakes Smith, wife of Seba Smith, the author of "Way Down East."
Fellow authors and callers were Mrs. Sigourney, Anna Cora Mowatt, Phoebe and Alice Cary, and gallant gentlemen like Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, Nathaniel P. Willis, and Edgar A. Poe. In New York their general meeting place was the home of Mrs. Vincenzo Botta, and in Brooklyn they haunted the hospitable threshold still standing at 125 Dean Street, the home of Stella.
Sarah Anna (Rufus Griswold demanded a large sum of money from her husband to suppress the name "Sarah" in his account of her writings) or Anna Estelle or Stella or (as she ended up in Europe) Estelle Delmonte Lewis--how charming she appears in the portrait painted by C. D. Elliott in her fiftieth year, or in the fine engraving by Henry Adlard "after a photograph from life"! Assuredly no flattering likeness, says Edgar Poe, of this fine complexioned woman, in dark ringlets, with large humorous mouth. The eyes are dark and in the painting, at least, show no traces of her Spanish or Cuban blood. She has the look of a forceful personality and a generous hearted woman. Her melancholy temperament has been noted by Poe, who also called her "perhaps the best educated, if not the most accomplished of American authoresses." She was an incessant student and in her moods, "generous, sensitive, impulsive, enthusiastic."
Her earliest writings appeared in "The Family Magazine" and in the various "Garlands" and "Albums" that were current during the 'fifties and 'sixties. At the age of twenty, in 1844, she published her first volume, "Records of the Heart," which contained decidedly mediocre verse which Poe both publicly and privately declared "inexpressibly beautiful."
We leave the reader to judge the merits of this remarkably lauded lyric. It is called "The Forsaken" and these are some of its lines:
It hath been said--for all who die There is a tear; Some pining, bleeding heart to sigh O'er every bier-- ............ When lying on my clayey bed In icy sleep, Who there by pure affection led Will come and weep? Could I but know when I am sleeping Low in the ground, One faithful heart would there be keeping Watch all night round; As if some gem lay shrined beneath That sod's cold gloom, 'Twould mitigate the pangs of death And light the tomb.
Poe wrote her, "We have read this little poem more than twenty times and always with increasing admiration." Her "Child of the Sea" appeared in 1848; "Myths of a Minstrel" in 1852; and an illustrated edition of her "Poems" in 1858.
She begins in the history of Poe with his "Enigma" published in "The Union." It is known that she relieved him with money in 1847 and that he gave critical notice to her poems in 1847 and 1849. Stoddard ("Edgar Allan Poe", 1889) declares that she paid Poe one hundred dollars to review one of her books and that on his neglecting to do so, she very naturally complained of him. He did not deny her charges, but merely remarked that if he reviewed her rubbish it would kill him. Nevertheless he did review it in "The Southern Literary Messenger" and in "Graham's Magazine," sending his notes to Bayard Taylor, requesting that he insert them as his own production. In his letter to T. Fordham (February, 1847) he speaks of her as "a most particular friend of mine who deserves all I have said of her." In November, 1847 he wrote to thank her for repeated kindness and "above all for the comforting and cheering words of your note. Your advice I feel as a command which neither my heart nor my reason would venture to disobey." And yet he writes (June, 1849), "No news of Mrs. L. yet. If she comes here I shall refuse to see her."
"She was often," we learn, "found sitting in Mrs. Clemm's kitchen at the Fordham Cottage, waiting to see the man of genius who had rushed out to escape her to the fields or forest or the grounds of the Catholic School in the vicinity." According to Mrs. Clemm, "She says she knows Eddy [Poe] does not like her."
Mrs. Clemm was capable also of writing to Griswold (September, 1849), "I understand from Mrs. Lewis you have received the package Mr. Poe left at her house for you. I wish you to publish it exactly as he has written it. If you do so, I will promise you a favorable review of your books as they appear--you know the influence I have with Mr. Poe."
On June 29, 1849, having completed his arrangement for his southern lecture tour, Poe journeyed to Brooklyn in company with Mrs. Clemm to pass the night at the house of Stella on Dean Street. "He seemed very sad," Stella wrote, "and retired early. On leaving the next morning he took my hand in his and looking in my face said, 'Dear Stella, my much beloved friend,--you truly understand and appreciate me. I have a presentiment that I shall never see you again. I must leave today for Richmond. If I never return, write my life. You can and will do me justice."
"I will," she exclaimed--"And we parted to meet no more in this life. That promise I have not yet felt equal to fulfill."
In summing up the qualities of Stella, Poe wrote: "All critical opinion must agree in assigning her a high, if not the highest rank among the poetesses of her land. Her artistic ability is unusual; her command of language great; her range of incident wide; her invention generally vigorous; her fancy exuberant; and his imagination--that primary and most indispensable of all poetic requisites--richer perhaps than any of her female contemporaries."
Poe regarded her with "all a brother's affection" and indeed seems to have had very solid reasons for gratitude to her both on his own account and in recognition of her kindness toward Mrs. Clemm. It is a disputed question whether or not the first public reading of his "The Raven" was given as he stood before the old mantelpiece of 125 Dean Street. Stella says in a letter: "My girlish poem "The Forsaken" made us acquainted. He had seen it floating the rounds of the press, and wrote to tell me how much he liked it. 'It is inexpressibly beautiful,' he said. 'and I should like to know the young author.' After the first call he frequently dined with us and passed the evening in playing whist or in reading to me his last poem."
In 1865 Stella left Brooklyn, after a disagreement with her husband which some have described as a divorce. She traveled to Greece and Lesbos and stood on the rock of Leucas, the site of the suicide of Sappho who became the heroine of her most conspicuous work, the tragedy of "Sappho," dedicated to her friend the Italian tragedienne, Adelaide Ristori, and translated into Greek and performed in Athens. It is a poetical drama filled with lyrical passages of a mediocre order, of ceaseless half impassioned apostrophes, and heavy with undigested learning and meticulous details.
Stella was proud of the speech that her heroine delivers on the rock of Leucas before taking the fatal plunge. In the copy I possess of her work, she has carefully underscored these lines:
"Horror! O horror of the world of horrors! The flames of Tartarus flashed in mine eye! Demoniac visions, writhing souls stretched out On lakes of fire with crimson eyeballs stared Me blind, and rent my ears with horrid shrieks. When reason reels how vast's imagination, How wonderful the worlds it conjures up, It rolls the ocean from his coral bed, And bares the flaming heart of hell beneath.'
There was also another tragedy in five acts--"The King's Strategem" or "The Pearl of Poland" which "The Westminster Review" designated as more fitted for the study than the stage. Its plot turns upon the loves of Christine "the Pearl" and Milo. The king has the hero assassinated in order to steal his bride but she is saved from her intended fate and retribution falls, as it should, upon the royal villain. Psychologists and others curious in the matter of ghosts will be interested in the description she gives of Milo leaving his grave:
"I stood right on the border of the grave And looked down in the coffin, which was lidless, And saw with my two eyes wide open, sire-- Wide open--and clear of vision as they're now-- The fine dust stir, then rise like ashes when A softly breathing zephyr blows into them:-- Right in the spot where, sire, once beat the heart-- The noble, youthful, palpitating heart-- The bosom heaved--the eyes into their sockets leaped, Flashing like stars amid the crepuscule-- The lips did smile--the hair put on its hues-- And Milo rose--and stood up in the grave!"
But Stella no longer belongs to Brooklyn; the stream of her visitors that came across the Fulton and Catherine Street ferries, jangled up on the old horsecar routes to Hoyt Street, and aroused the interest of the neighbors with their black bombazines and broadcloths, their quaint bonnets and heavy beaver hats, now come no more to taste her tea and sherry wine and listen to her poets. She is now a part of the great literary worlds of Rome, Paris, and London; the great Adelaide Ristori takes her for a friend; she is intimate with George Sand and Alexander Dumas, fils; the exquisite Lamartine declares that her "Sonnets to Adhemar"--"the lawyer"--entitle her to the appellation of "The Female Petrarch."
Today we stand outside her old home in Dean Street and gaze in meditation on the steps worn down by so many famous callers; we stare up at the window and our curiosity arouses the interest of the people in the house who watch our strange behavior. Down the block is a riot of trolley cars and trucks and the street boys pitch ball around our heads. Brooklyn flourishes here, now that Poe is gone and Stella has retired among the great.