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1857-03-11Mar 11, 1857 | Editorial on the Dred Scott case

Annabel Lee (first publication) | Edgar Allan Poe

Death of Edgar Allan Poe

Death of Edgar A. Poe.

Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it. The poet was known, personally or by reputation, in all this country; he had readers in England, and in several of the states of Continental Europe; but he had few or no friends; and the regrets for his death will be suggested principally by the consideration that in him literary art has lost one of its most brilliant but erratic stars.

The family of Mr. Poe—we learn from Griswold’s “Poets and Poetry of America,” from which a considerably portion of the facts in this notice are derived—was one of the oldest and most respectable in Baltimore. David Poe, his paternal grandfather, was a Quartermaster-General in the Maryland line during the Revolution, and the intimate friend of Lafayette, who, during his last visit to the United States, called personally upon the General’s widow, and tendered her acknowledgements for the services rendered to him by her husband. His great-grandfather, John Poe, married in England, Jane, a daughter of Admiral James McBride, noted in British naval history, and claiming kindred with some of the most illustrious English families. His father and mother,—both of whom were in some way connected with the theater, and lives as precariously as their more gifted and eminent son—died within a few weeks of each other, of consumption, leaving him an orphan, at two years of age. Mr. John Allan, a wealthy gentleman of Richmond, Virginia, took a fancy to him, and persuaded his grandfather to suffer him to adopt him. He was brought up in Mr. Allan’s family; and as that gentleman had no other children, he was regarded as his son and heir. In 1816 he accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Allan to Great Britain, visited every portion of it, and afterward passed four or five years in a school kept at Stoke Newington, near London, by Rev. Dr. Bransby. He returned to America in 1822, and in 1823 went to the Jefferson University, at Charlottesville, in Virginia, where he led a very dissipated life, the manners of the college being at that time extremely dissolute. He took the first honors, however, and went home greatly in debt. Mr. Allan refused to pay some of his debts of honor, and he hastily quitted the country on a Quixotic expedition to join the Greeks, then struggling for liberty. He did not reach his original destination, however, but made his way to St. Petersburg, in Russia, where he became involved in difficulties, from which he was extricated by the late Mr. Henry Middleton, the American Minister at that capital. He returned home in 1829, and immediately afterward entered the Military Academy at West-Point. In about eighteen months from that time, Mr. Allan, who had lost his first wife while Mr. Poe was in Russia, married again. He was sixty-five years of age, and the lady was young; Poe quarreled with her, and the veteran husband, taking the part of his wife, addressed him an angry letter, which was answered in the same spirit. He died soon after, leaving an infant son the heir to his property, and bequeathed Poe nothing.

The army, in the opinion of the young cadet, was not a place for a poor man; so he left West-Point abruptly, and determined to maintain himself by authorship. He printed, in 1827, a small volume of poems, most of which were written in early youth. Some of these poems are quoted in a reviewal by Margaret Fuller, in The Tribune in 1846, and are justly regarded as among the most wonderful exhibitions of the precocious development of genius. They illustrated the character of his abilities, and justified his anticipations of success. For a considerable time, however, though he wrote readily and brilliantly, his contributions to the journals attracted little attention, and his hopes of gaining a livelihood by the profession of literature were nearly ended at length in sickness, poverty and despair. But in 1831, the proprietor of a weekly gazette, in Baltimore, offered two premiums, one for the best story in prose, and the other for the best poem.—In due time Poe sent in two articles, and he waited anxiously for the decision. One of the Committee was the accomplished author of “Horse Shoe Robinson,” John P. Kennedy, and his associates were scarcely less eminent than he for wit and critical sagacity. Such matters are usually disposed of in a very off-hand way: Committees to award literary prizes drink to the payer’s health, in good wines, over the unexamined MSS., which they submit to the discretion of publishers, with permission to use their names in such a way as to promote the publishers’ advantage. So it would have been in this case, but that one of the Committee, taking up a little book, in such exquisite calligraphy as to seem like one of the finest issues of the press of Putnam, was tempted to read several pages, and being interested, he summoned the attention of the company to the half-dozen compositions in the volume. It was unanimously decided that the prizes should be paid to the first of geniuses who had written legibly. Not another MS. was unfolded. Immediately the ‘confidential envelop’ was opened, and the successful competitor was found to bear the scarcely known name of Poe.

The next day the publisher called to see Mr. Kennedy, and gave him an account of the author that excited his curiosity and sympathy, and caused him to request that he should be brought to his office. Accordingly he was introduced: the prize money had not yet been paid, and he was in the costume in which he had answered the advertisement of his good fortune. Thin, and pale even to ghastliness, his whole appearance indicated sickness and the utmost destitution. A tattered frock-coat concealed the absence of a shirt, and the ruins of boots disclosed more than the want of stockings. But the eyes of the young man were luminous with intelligence and feeling, and his voice, and conversation, and manners, all won upon the lawyer’s regard. Poe told his history, and his ambition, and it was determined that he should not want means for a suitable appearance in society, nor opportunity for a just display of his abilities in literature. Mr. Kennedy accompanied him to a clothing store, and purchased for him a respectable suit, with changes of linen, and sent him to a bath, from which he returned with the suddenly-regained bearing of a gentleman.

The late Mr. Thomas W. White had then recently established The Southern Literary Messenger, at Richmond, and upon the warm recommendation of Mr. Kennedy, Poe was engaged, at a small salary—we believe of $500 a year—to be its editor. He entered upon his duties with letters full of expressions of the warmest gratitude to his friends in Baltimore, who in five or six weeks were astonished to learn that with characteristic recklessness of consequences, he was hurriedly married to a girl as poor as himself. Poe continued in this situation about a year and a half, in which he wrote many brilliant articles, and raised the Messenger to the first rank of literary periodicals.

He next removed to Philadelphia, to assist William K. Burton in the editorship of the Gentleman’s Magazine, a miscellany that in 1840 was merged in Graham’s Magazine, of which Poe became one of the principal writers, particularly in criticism, in which his papers attracted much attention, by their careful and skillful analysis, and generally caustic severity. At this period, however, he appears to have been more ambitious of securing distinctions in romantic fiction, and a collection of his compositions in this department, published in 1841, under the title of “Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque,” established his reputation for ingenuity, imagination, and extraordinary power in tragical narration.

Near the end of 1844 Poe removed to New-York, where he conducted for several months a literary miscellany called “The Broadway Journal.” In 1845 he published a volume of “Tales” in Wiley and Putnam’s Library of American Books, and in the same series a collection of his poems. Beside these volumes he was the author of “Arthur Gordon Pym,” a romance; “A New Theory of English Versification;” “Eureka,” an essay on the material and spiritual universe: a work which he wished to have “judged as a poem;” and several extended series of papers in the periodicals, the most noticeable of which are “Marginalia,” embracing opinions of books and authors; “Secret Writing,” “Autobiography,” and “Sketches of the Literati of New-York.”

His wife died in 1847, at Fordham, near the City, and some of our readers will remember the paragraphs in the papers of the time, upon his destitute condition. His wants were supplied by the liberality of a few individuals. We remember that Col. Webb collected in a few moments fifty or sixty dollars for him at the Union Club; Mr. Lewis, of Brooklyn, sent a similar sum from one of the Courts, in which he was engaged when he saw the statement of the poet’s poverty; and others illustrated in the same manner the effect of such an appeal to the popular heart.

Since that time Mr. Poe had lived quietly and with an income from his literary labors sufficient for his support. A few weeks ago he proceeded to Richmond in Virginia, where he lectured upon the poetical character, &c.; and it was understood by some of his correspondents here that he was this week to be married, most advantageously, to a lady of that city: a widow, to whom he had been previously engaged while a student in the University.

The character of Mr. Poe we cannot attempt to describe in this very hastily written article. We can but allude to some of its more striking phases.

His conversation was at times almost supra-mortal in its eloquence. His voice was modulated with astonishing skill, and 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. His imagery was from the worlds which no mortals can see but with the vision of genius. Suddenly starting from a proposition exactly and sharply defined in terms of utmost simplicity and clearness, he rejected the forms of customary logic, and by a crystalline process of accretion, built up his ocular demonstrations in forms of gloomiest and ghastliest grandeur, or in those of the most airy and delicious beauty—so minutely, and distinctly, yet so rapidly, that the attention which was yielded to him was chained till it stood among his wonderful creations—till he himself dissolved the spell, and brought his hearers back to common and base existence, by vulgar fancies or exhibitions of the ignoblest passion.

He was at all times a dreamer—dwelling in ideal realms—in heaven or hell—peopled with the creatures and the accidents of his brain. He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayer, (never for himself, for he felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned,) but for their happiness who at the moment were objects of his idolatry;—or, with his glances introverted to a heart gnawed with anguish, and with a face shrouded in gloom, he would brave the wildest storms; and all night, with drenched garments and arms beating the winds and rains, would speak as if to spirits that at such times only could be evoked by him from the Aidenn close by whose portals his disturbed soul sought to forget the ills to which his constitution subjected him—close by the Aidenn where were those he loved—the Aidenn which he might never see, but in fitful glimpses, as its gates opened to receive the less fiery and more happy natures whose destiny to sin did not involve the doom of death.

He seemed, except when some fitful pursuit subjugated his will and engrossed his faculties, always to bear the memory of some controlling sorrow. The remarkable poem of The Raven was probably much more nearly than has been supposed, even by those who were very intimate with him, a reflexion and an echo of his own history. He was that bird’s

—Unhappy master, Whom unmerciful disaster Followed fast and followed faster, Till his songs the burden bore— Till the dirges of his hope, the Melancholy burden bore Of “Nevermore,” of “Nevermore.”

Every genuine author in a greater or less degree leaves in his works, whatever their design, traces of his personal character: elements of his immortal being, in which the individual survives the person. While we read the pages of the Fall of the House of Usher, or of Mesmeric Revelations, we see in the solemn and stately gloom which invests one, and in the subtle metaphysical analysis of both, indications of the idiosyncracies,—of what was most remarkable and peculiar—in the author’s intellectual nature.

But we see here only the better phases of this nature, only the symbols of his juster action, for his harsh experience had deprived him of all faith, in man or woman. He had made up his mind upon the numberless complexities of the social world, and the whole system with him was an imposture. This conviction gave a direction to his shrewd and naturally unamiable character. Still, though he regarded society as composed altogether of villains, the sharpness of his intellect was not of that kind which enabled him to cope with villainy, while it continually caused him by overshots to fail of the success of honesty. He was in many respects like Francis Vivian in Bulwer’s novel of “The Caxtons.” “Passion, in him, comprehended many of the worst emotions which militate against human happiness. You could not contradict him, but you raised quick choler; you could not speak of wealth, but his cheek paled with gnawing envy. The astonishing natural advantages of this poor boy—his beauty, his readiness, the daring spirit that breathed around him like a fiery atmosphere—had raised his constitutional self-confidence into an arrogance that turned his very claims to admiration into prejudices against him. Irascible, envious—bad enough, but not the worst, for these salient angles were all varnished over with a cold repellent cynicism, his passions vented themselves in sneers. There seemed to him no moral susceptibility; and, what was more remarkable in a proud nature, little or nothing of the true point of honor. He had, to a morbid excess, that desire to rise which is vulgarly called ambition, but no wish for the esteem or the love of his species; only the hard wish to succeed—not shine, not serve—succeed, that he might have the right to despise a world which galled his self-conceit.”

We have suggested the influence of his aims and vicissitudes upon his literature. It was more conspicuous in his later than in his earlier writings. Nearly all that he wrote in the last two or three years—including much of his best poetry—was in some sense biographical; in draperies of his imagination, those who had taken the trouble to trace his steps, could perceive, but slightly concealed, the figure of himself.

There are perhaps some of our readers who will understand the allusions of the following beautiful poem. Mr. Poe presented it in MS. to the writer of these paragraphs, just before he left New-York, recently, remarking that it was the last thing he had written:

Annabel Lee.

It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea That a maiden there lived who you may know By the name of Annabel Lee; And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea. But we loved with a love that was more than love— I and my Annabel Lee— With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea, A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling My beautiful Annabel Lee; So that her highborn kinsmen came And bore her away from me, To shut her up in a sepulchre In this kingdom by the sea.

The angles, not half so happy in heaven, Went envying her and me— Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea) That the wind came out of the cloud by night, Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we— Of many far wiser than we— And neither the angles in heaven above, Nor the demons down under the sea, Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee: And so, all the night-tide, I like down by the side Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, In her sepulchre there by the sea— In her tomb by the sounding sea.

We must omit any particular criticism of Mr. Poe’s works. As a writer of tales it will be admitted generally, that he was scarcely surpassed in ingenuity of construction or effective painting. As a critic, he was more remarkable as a dissector of sentences than as a commenter upon ideas: he was little better than a carping grammarian. As a poet, he will retain a most honorable rank. Of his “Raven,” Mr. Willis observes, that in his opinion, “it is the most effective single example of fugitive poetry ever published in this country, and is unsurpassed in English poetry for subtle conception, masterly ingenuity of versification, and consistent sustaining of imaginative lift.” In poetry, as in prose, he was most successful in the metaphysical treatment of the passions. His poems are constructed with wonderful ingenuity, and finished with consummate art. They illustrate a morbid sensitiveness of feeling, a shadowy and gloomy imagination, and a taste almost faultless in the apprehension of that sort of beauty most agreeable to his temper.

We have not learned the circumstances of his death. It was sudden, and from the fact that it occurred in Baltimore, it is to be presumed that he was on his return to New-York.

“After life’s fitful fever, he sleeps well.”

Ludwig.

It is Impossible to Exaggerate

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the recent decision of the Supreme Court. The grounds and methods of that decision we have exposed elsewhere; and we now turn from them to contemplate the great fact which it establishes -- the fact that Slavery is National; and that, until that remote period when different Judges, sitting in this same Court, shall reverse this wicked and false judgment, the Constitution of the United States is nothing better than the bulwark of inhumanity and oppression.

It is most true that this decision is bad law; that it is based on false historical premises and wrong interpretations of the Constitution; that it does not at all represent the legal or judicial opinion of the Nation; that it is merely a Southern sophism clothed with the dignity of our highest Court. Nevertheless there it is; the final action of the National Judiciary, established by the founders of the Republic to interpret the Constitution, and to embody the ultimate legal conclusions of the whole people -- an action proclaiming that in the view of the Constitution slaves are property. The inference is plain. If slaves are recognized as property by the Constitution, of course no local or State law can either prevent property being carried through an individual State or Territory, or forbid its being sold as such wherever its owner may choose to hold it. This is all involved in the present decision; but let a single case draw from the Court an official judgment that slaves can be held and protected under National law, and we shall see men buying slaves for the New York market. There will be no legal power to prevent it. At this moment, indeed, any wealthy New York jobber connected with the Southern trade can put in his next orders: "Send me a negro cook, at the lowest market value! Buy me a waiter! Balance my account with two chambermaids and a truckman!" Excepting the interference of the Underground Railroad and the chance of loss, there will be nothing to stop this. But then these underhanded efforts for stealing property must, of course, be checked by our Police. Mr. Matsell will have no more right to allow gentlemen's servants to be spirited away by burglarious Abolitionists than gentlemen's spoons. They are property under even stronger pledges of security than mere lifeless chattels. The whole power of the State -- the military, the Courts and Governor of the State of New York -- will necessarily be sworn to protect each New York slave-owner from the robbery or burglary of his negro. If they are not sufficient, why then the United States Army and Navy can be called upon to guard that singular species of property which alone of all property the Constitution of the United States has especially recognized. Slaves can be kept in Boston; Mr. Toombs can call the roll of his chattels on the slope of Bunker Hill; auctions of black men may be held in front of Faneuil Hall, and the slave-ship, protected by the guns of United States frigates, may land its dusky cargo at Plymouth Rock. The free hills of Vermont, the lakes of Maine, the valleys of Connecticut, the city where the ancient Oak of Liberty has wisely fallen, may be traversed by the gangs of the negro-driver, and enriched by the legitimate commerce of the slave-pen. Are we told that public opinion will prevent this? What can public opinion do against the Supreme Court and all the power of the United States? Shall not a citizen of this Union have the right to take and hold his property, his horses, his oxen, his dogs, his slaves, wherever it seems to him good? According to the law now established, the Free-State men of Kansas are robbers, for they attack the Constitutional and inalienable rights of property. The bogus laws of which they presume to complain, but which the mild and paternal punishment of death is not to protect from infractions, are just and necessary laws for the safety of those sacred rights. The number of Free Soil men in that Territory can make no difference hereafter, as it has made none hitherto. Slavery is there, as the ownership of horses or land is there, by supreme national law. Of what use, then, to contend for such a shadow as the difference between a Free and a Slave Constitution? Or what sense in that old fiction of State Rights? The States have no rights as respects Freedom; their rights consist only in establishing and strengthening Slavery -- nothing more.

Another most pregnant change is wrought by this decision, in respect of the Northern people. We have been accustomed to regard Slavery as a local matter for which we were in no wise responsible. As we have been used, to say, it belonged to the Southern States alone, and they must answer for it before the world. We can say this no more. Now, wherever the stars and stripes wave, they protect Slavery and represent Slavery. The black and cursed stain is thick on our hands also. From Maine to the Pacific, over all future conquests and annexations, wherever in the islands of western seas, or in the South American Continent, or in the Mexican Gulf, the flag of the Union, by just means or unjust, shall be planted, there it plants the curse, and tears, and blood, and unpaid toil of this "institution." The Star of Freedom and the stripes of bondage are henceforth one. American Republicanism and American Slavery are for the future synonymous. This, then, is the final fruit. In this all the labors of our statesmen, the blood of our heroes, the life-long cares and toils of our forefathers, the aspirations of our scholars, the prayers of good men, have finally ended! America the slavebreeder and slaveholder!

A Southern Manifesto

A Southern Manifesto

The speech of Jefferson Davis to the Democracy of Mississippi, assembled in Convention at Jackson, which we print in to-day's Tribune, is a manifesto of more than ordinary importance. Mr. Davis is unquestionably the foremost man of the South at the present day. In the Senate, his preëminence among his slaveholding colleagues is conceded on all hands. Every Northern Senator will admit that from the Southern side of that floor, the most formidable adversary to meet in debate is the thin, pale, polished, intellectual-looking Mississippian, with the unimpassioned demeanor, the habitual courtesy, and the occasional unintentional arrogance which reveals the keen consciousness of great and commanding power. It is a mistake to confound him with declaimers like Keitt, or with vulgar, conceited brawlers like Brown, his senatorial colleague from Mississippi, or with mere scheming politicians like Green, Clingman, Slidell, and Benjamin. He belongs to a higher grade of public men, of whom, formerly, the Slaveholding Democracy was prolific, but of whom, in Congress at least, himself and Mr. Hunter of Virginia are the only examples left. From the weight of their character in their own section, the words of such men, on subjects of national interest, are entitled to national consideration.

Mr. Davis begins with a eulogium upon the Democratic Party, which he styles "the party of stability and progress," to the prevalence of whose principles for fifty years he ascribes the fame, the prosperity, the growth and happiness of the country. Passing over this, which though skillfully put, is not particularly novel, we come to the equally stale assertion that the North is greatly benefitted by the Slavery of the South. "Deduct from their trade and manufactures all which is dependent upon the product of slave labor, their prosperity would fate, and poverty would come upon them 'as one who traveleth.'" Doubtless Mr. Davis knows better than this. His residence in New-England last Summer must have taught him that the prosperity of the North is due to intelligence, industry, and energy, which are qualities of Freedom and not of Slavery. But the character of his ignorant and prejudiced audience made the presentation of such flattering fallacies, perhaps, necessary. The truth is, that all that the trade and manufactures of the North draw from the products of slave labor, is less than is drawn from any one of a dozen of her own crops or her own staples; less than the hay crop, the potato crop, the fruit crop; less, by far, than the annual yield of the forests or the mines. There are many branches of trade and manufacture at the North, the loss of which would be more severely felt than the entire cessation of intercourse with the Slave States. Throughout this part of his speech Mr. Davis argues as if the Free States were wholly commercial and manufacturing communities, "who, for want of land and by rigor of climate, find in the workshops their only industrial employment." What preposterous nonsense is this! The agriculture of the North is far in advance of that of the South, and feeds well and clothes well seventeen millions of people, while that of the Slave States performs the same service imperfectly for less than twelve millions.

The question of reopening the slave-trade, Mr. Davis deals with boldly and frankly. He denies the power of Congress to prohibit the African slave-trade, and makes the admission, which may be of importance in the not distant future, that Congress has just as much right to regulate the inter-State slave-trade as the foreign slave-trade. The law of 1820 against the African traffic, he regards as "one of those departures which result from substituting a temporary expediency for immutable truth." Even considerations of public safety or interest "could not justify the Government in branding as infamous the source from which the chief part of our laboring population is derived. It is this feature of the law which makes it offensive to us, and stimulates us to strive for its repeal."

Mr. Davis, however, regards the repeal of the laws against the slave-trade as hopeless for the present. Nor, if they were repealed, is he quite sure that it would be good policy for Mississippi to avail herself of the opening. "Her place in history; her rank among the States; her power to maintain natural and constitutional rights, depend upon her people - the free, intelligent, high-minded sons of the governing race." Too great an influx of negroes might be detrimental; but this view, he significantly adds, "is not supposed to be applicable to Texas, to New-Mexico, or to any future acquisitions to be made south of the Rio Grande - all of which countries can only be developed by slave labor in some of its forms." From the consideration of the slave-trade, Mr. Davis passes to that of Slavery. "The judgments of God are not as those of men," he piously ejaculates. "When the Spaniards discovered this continent, and reduced the sons of Shem to bondage, unsuited to that condition they pined and rapidly wasted away in unproductive labor. The good Bishop Las Casas, with philosophical humanity, inaugurated the importation of the race of Ham; they came to relieve from an unnatural state the dwellers in tents, and to fulfill their own destiny - that of being the servant of servants." A profound theologian is Mr. Davis. First, by a bold stroke in ethnology, he solves the perplexing problem of the origin of the American Indians by calling them the sons of Shem - a solution for which, we need scarcely say, there is not the slightest authority in Scripture, history, or tradition. Next, the negroes are the race of Ham, for which there is just as little authority. By Ham, or the children of Ham, the Scriptures designated the Egyptians. In the last century, when it was commonly believed from certain passages in Herodotus, and from the erroneous statements of a few travelers, that the ancient Egyptians were negroes, the term Ham was applied to the whole African race, purely because they were believed to be of the same origin with the Egyptians. Modern ethnological science has, however, shown conclusively that the Egyptians were not negroes, but were a brown race of Asiatic origin, of the same general stock with the Arabs, the Jews, the Syrians, &c. That being the case, it follows that the ascription of the lineage of Ham to the negroes is a sheer blunder. Yet the Pro-Slavery casuists of the South, while they eagerly accept the demonstration which shows that the learned and civilized Egyptians were not negroes, just as eagerly cling to the notion of the Hametic origin of the Africans which depended entirely on their identity of race with the people of Egypt.