AN APPRECIATION
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one
burden bore—
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden
bore
Of “never—never
more!”
This stanza from “The Raven” was
recommended by James Russell Lowell as an inscription
upon the Baltimore monument which marks the resting
place of Edgar Allan Poe, the most interesting and
original figure in American letters. And, to
signify that peculiar musical quality of Poe’s
genius which inthralls every reader, Mr. Lowell suggested
this additional verse, from the “Haunted Palace”:
And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,
And sparkling ever more,
A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.
Born in poverty at Boston, January 19 1809, dying
under painful circumstances at Baltimore, October
7, 1849, his whole literary career of scarcely fifteen
years a pitiful struggle for mere subsistence, his
memory malignantly misrepresented by his earliest
biographer, Griswold, how completely has truth at last
routed falsehood and how magnificently has Poe come
into his own, For “The Raven,” first published
in 1845, and, within a few months, read, recited and
parodied wherever the English language was spoken,
the half-starved poet received $10! Less than
a year later his brother poet, N. P. Willis, issued
this touching appeal to the admirers of genius on
behalf of the neglected author, his dying wife and
her devoted mother, then living under very straitened
circumstances in a little cottage at Fordham, N. Y.:
“Here is one of the finest scholars, one of
the most original men of genius, and one of the most
industrious of the literary profession of our country,
whose temporary suspension of labor, from bodily illness,
drops him immediately to a level with the common objects
of public charity. There is no intermediate stopping-place,
no respectful shelter, where, with the delicacy due
to genius and culture, he might secure aid, till,
with returning health, he would resume his labors,
and his unmortified sense of independence.”
And this was the tribute paid by the American public
to the master who had given to it such tales of conjuring
charm, of witchery and mystery as “The Fall
of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia”;
such fascinating hoaxes as “The Unparalleled
Adventure of Hans Pfaall,” “MSS.
Found in a Bottle,” “A Descent Into a Maelstrom”
and “The Balloon Hoax”; such tales of
conscience as “William Wilson,” “The
Black Cat” and “The Tell-tale Heart,”
wherein the retributions of remorse are portrayed
with an awful fidelity; such tales of natural beauty
as “The Island of the Fay” and “The
Domain of Arnheim”; such marvellous studies
