Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, by Sherwin Cody

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"There was no clothing on the bed, which was only straw, but a
snow-white counterpane and sheets. The weather was cold and the sick
lady had the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic fever of
consumption. She lay on the bed wrapped in her husband's great-coat,
with a large tortoise-shell cat in her bosom."

On one Saturday in January, 1847, Virginia died. Her husband, wrapped
in the military cloak that had once covered her, followed the body to
the tomb in the family vault of the Valentines, relatives of the
family.

CHAPTER X

POE AS A STORY-WRITER

Next to "The Raven," Poe's most famous work is that fascinating story,
"The Gold-Bug," perhaps the best detective story that was ever
written, for it is based on logical principles which are instructive
as well as interesting. Poe's powerful mind was always analyzing and
inventing. It is these inventions and discoveries of his which make
him famous.

The story of the gold-bug is that of a man who finds a piece of
parchment on which is a secret writing telling where Captain Kidd hid
his treasure off the coast of South Carolina. The gold-beetle has
nothing whatever to do with the real story, and is only introduced to
mystify. It is one of the principles of all conjuring tricks to have
something to divert the attention. Poe's detective story is a sort of
conjuring trick, but it is all the more interesting because he fully
explains it.

Cryptographs are systems of secret writing. The letter _e_ is
represented by some strange character, perhaps the figure 8. In "The
Gold-Bug" _t_ is a semicolon and _h_ is 4, so that; 48 means _the_.
Sometimes the letter _e_ is represented by several signs, any one of
which the writer may use; and perhaps the word _the_, which occurs so
often, is represented by a single character, like _x_. Often, too, the
words are run together, so that at first sight you cannot tell where
one word begins and another ends.

Solving a cryptograph is like doing a mathematical problem, and Poe
was very clever at it.

He published a series of articles on "Cryptography" or systems of
secret writing, in _Alexander's Weekly Messenger_, and challenged any
reader to send in a cipher which he could not translate into ordinary
language. Hundreds were sent to him, and he solved them all, though it
took up a great deal of his time.

In the same line with this was another feat of his. Dickens's story,
"Barnaby Rudge," was coming out in parts from week to week, as a
serial publication. From the first chapters Poe calculated what the
outcome of the plot would be, and published it in the _Saturday
Evening Post_. He guessed the story so accurately that Dickens was
greatly surprised and asked him if he were the devil.

Again at a later date Poe wrote a remarkable story, "The Mystery of
Marie Roget." A young girl had been murdered in New York. The
newspapers were full of accounts of the crime, but the police could
get no clew to the murderers. In Poe's story he wrote out exactly what
happened on the night of the murder, and explained the whole thing, as
if he were an expert detective. Afterward, by the confessions of two
of the participants, it was proved that his solution of the mystery
was almost exactly the truth.

"The Gold-Bug" was not published until sometime later, but it was as
editor of _Graham's Magazine_ that Poe first became known as a writer
of detective stories. One of the most famous is "The Murders of the
Rue Morgue." It is an imaginary story, but none the less interesting.
A murder was committed in Paris by an orang-outang, which had climbed
in at a window and then closed the window behind it. The police could
find no clew; but the hero of Poe's story follows the facts out by a
number of clever observations of small facts.

"The Gold-Bug" seems to have been written in 1842 for Poe's projected
magazine, _The Stylus_. F.O.C. Darley, the well-known artist, was to
draw pictures for it at seven dollars each. Poe himself took to him
the manuscript of "The Gold-Bug" and that of "The Black Cat."

As this magazine was never published, the story of "The Gold-Bug" was
sent to Graham some time after Poe had left him; but he did not like
it, and made some criticisms upon it. Poe got it back from Graham in
order to submit it for a prize of $100 offered by _The Dollar
Newspaper_. It won the prize, and became Poe's most popular story.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XI

HOW "THE RAVEN" WAS WRITTEN

"The Raven" was published in New York just two years before Mrs. Poe
died; it instantly made its author famous, although it brought him
little or no money. It is said that he was paid only ten dollars for
the poem; but as soon as it appeared it was the talk of the
nation,--being copied into almost every newspaper. Poe had written
and published many other poems, but none of them had attracted much
attention.

We have spoken of Poe as a story-writer, and now in "The Raven" we see
him a great poet.

It is not unusual to think of poetry as the work of inspiration or
genius; but how it is written, nobody knows. Poe maintained that
literary art is something that can be studied and learned. To
illustrate this he told how he wrote "The Raven." Some people
considered this a sort of joke; but it was not. When Poe began to
write, his work was not at all good; as years went on, he learned by
patient practice to write well. It was more than anything else this
long course of training that made him so great.

The essay in which he tells how he wrote "The Raven," begins by saying
that when he thought of writing it he decided that it must not be too
long nor too short. It must be short enough so that one could read it
through at a sitting; but also it must be long enough to express fully
the idea which he had in mind.

Then, it must be beautiful. All true poetry is about beauty. It
doesn't teach anything useful, or analyze anything, but it simply
makes the reader feel a certain effect. When you read "The Raven" you
hardly know what the poet is saying; but you feel the ghostly scene,
and it makes you shudder; and there is a strange fascination about it
that makes you like it, even if it is horrible.

He goes on to say that he decided to have a refrain at the end of each
stanza, the single word "Nevermore." At first he thought he would have
a parrot utter it; but a raven can talk as well as a parrot, and is
more picturesque. The most striking subject he could think of was the
death of a beautiful woman--this he felt to be so because of his own
impressions concerning the approaching death of his sweet wife.

Besides this, Poe said that poetry and music are much alike, and he
tried to have his poem produce the effect of solemn music. All his
best poetry is very much like music.

With these materials at his command, he now turned his attention to
the construction of the poem. He would ask questions, and the raven
would always reply by croaking "Nevermore." As an answer to some
questions, this would sound very terrible. Says he: "I first
established in my mind the climax, or concluding query,--that query in
reply to which the word 'nevermore' should involve the utmost
conceivable amount of sorrow and despair. Here, then, the poem may be
said to have its beginning--at the end, where all works of art should
begin--for it was here, at this point of my preconsiderations, that I
first put pen to paper in the composition of the stanza:--

"'Prophet!' said I, 'thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or devil!
By the heaven that bends above us--by that God we both adore!--
Tell this soul with sorrow laden, if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore,--
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.'
Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'"

This principle of beginning at the end or climax to write a poem or
story was one so important that Poe insisted on it at great length. In
the "Murders in the Rue Morgue" the author necessarily began at the
end, imagined the solution of the mystery, and gradually worked back
to the beginning, bringing in his detective after everything had been
carefully constructed for him, though to the ordinary reader of the
story it seems as if the detective came to a real mystery.

It may be observed that all of Poe's stories and poems are built up
about some principle of the mind. They illustrate how the mind works.
After the principle is stated the illustration is given.

Can anything be more important and interesting than to know how the
mind thinks, how it is inspired with terror or love or a sense of
beauty? If you know just how the mind of a man works in regard to
these things, you can yourself create the conditions which will make
others laugh or cry, be filled with horror, or overflow with a sense
of divine holiness. Ordinary story-tellers and ordinary poets write
poems or stories that are pretty and amusing; but it is only a master
like Poe who writes to illustrate and explain some great principle.
His stories teach us how we may go about producing similar effects in
the affairs of life. We wish success in business, in society, in
politics. To gain it we must make people think and feel as we think
and feel. To do that we must understand the principles on which men's
minds work, and no poet or writer analyzed and illustrated those
principles so clearly as Poe.

CHAPTER XII

MUSIC AND POETRY

Poe always maintained that music and poetry are very near of kin, and
in nearly all his greatest poems he seems to write in such a way as to
produce the impression of music. As you read his verses you seem to
hear a musical accompaniment to the words, which runs through the very
sounds of the words themselves.

Poe explained that poetry and music are alike in that both obey
absolute laws of time, and that the laws of time or rhythm in poetry
are just as exact as the laws of time in music. He wrote an essay
entitled "The Rationale of Verse," in which he demonstrated that all
the rules for scanning poetry are defective. Every one knows that the
ordinary rules for meter have numerous exceptions, but that if the
rules were exact in the first place, there would be no exceptions.

Perhaps you know something about musical notes. If so, a simple
illustration will show you what "feet" in poetry are. You have perhaps
been taught that a "foot" in verse is an accented syllable with one or
more unaccented syllables, and you scan poetry by marking all the
accented syllables. In Latin, poetry was scanned by marking long
vowels and short. Let us scan the first two lines of "The Raven":

"Once up | on a midnight | dreary, || while I | pondered
| weak and | weary,
Over | many a | quaint and | curious | volume | of
for | gotten | lore."

Observe that most of the feet have two syllables each, while two have
three. But if you read the lines in a natural tone you will see that
you give just as much time to one foot as to another, and where there
are three syllables they are short and can be pronounced quickly. Some
syllables take more time to pronounce than other syllables; and to
accent a syllable simply means to give it more time in pronouncing. In
music, time is accurately represented by notes, and a bar of music
always contains exactly the same amount of time, no matter how it is
divided by the notes; for if you wish, in place of a half note you can
use two quarter notes, or in place of a quarter note you can use two
eighth notes. Represented in music, our lines will be as follows:

[Illustration: (music) Once up on a midnight dreary, as I pondered,
weak and weary, O-ver man-y a quaint and cur-i--ous vol-ume of for-
got-ten lore.]

We see this still further illustrated in a poem of Tennyson's, where a
foot consists of but one long syllable, thus:

[Illustration: (music) Break, break, break, On thy cold grey stones, O
sea!]

One of Poe's greatest poems, "The Bells," was written for the express
purpose of imitating music in verse. The story of how it was first
written is as follows:

Poe went one Sunday morning to call on a lady friend of his, Mrs.
Shaw, who was something of a physician and had been very kind to his
wife. It was a bright morning, and the church bells were ringing. For
all that, Poe felt moody, and the church bells seemed to jangle.

"I must write a poem," said he, "and I haven't an idea in my head. For
some reason the bells seem frightfully out of tune this morning, and
nearly drive me distracted."

After he had been chatting with Mrs. Shaw for some time, he evidently
felt in better mood, and the sound of the bells grew more musical; or
perhaps their actual sound had stopped and his imagination suggested
bells that were indeed musical.

As he kept on complaining about his inability to write a poem, Mrs.
Shaw placed pen and ink and paper before him, first writing at the top
of a sheet the title, "The Bells, by E. A. Poe." Underneath she wrote,
"The bells, the little silver bells." Poe caught the idea, and
immediately wrote the first draft of the following stanza. According
to his habit he rewrote this poem many, many times. The original
stanza began with the words Mrs. Shaw had written. Here are the verses
as they may now be read in Poe's works:

Hear the sledges with the bells--
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heaven, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells,--
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Mrs. Shaw then wrote the words, "The heavy iron bells." Poe
immediately completed the stanza which now reads:

Hear the tolling of the bells,--
Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people--ah, the people--
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone!
They are neither man nor woman,--
They are neither brute nor human,--
They are Ghouls;
And their king it is who tolls,--
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls a paean from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells
With the paean of the bells!
And he dances, and he yells,
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the paean of the bells,
Of the bells.

The other stanzas were written afterward. There is music in these
words; but do not think that the music is all. Underneath is the deep
harmony of human suggestion, as in the lines,

Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone.

Now let us see if we can represent by musical notes the meter in which
this poem is written. We must remember that a punctuation mark at the
end of a line often makes a complete pause, which is represented in
music by a rest. In music a rest has the same effect in completing a
bar as the corresponding note. Here are the first two lines:

[Illustration: (music) Hear the sledg-es with the bells, Sil-ver
bells!]

In the two following lines the commas in the middle of the line stand
for rests, like the punctuation at the end of the first line; or if we
wish we can make the words "time, time, time," three longer notes. It
all depends on how we pronounce them:

[Illustration: (music) Keep--ing time, time, time, in a sort of Ru-nic
rhyme.]

CHAPTER XIII

POE'S LATER YEARS

Poe had the hardest time of his life when he was at New York, living
in that little cottage at Fordham, where his poor wife died. He was
always borrowing money, from sheer necessity, to keep himself and his
wife from starvation. Once while in New York he was so hard pressed
that Mrs. Clemm went out to see if she could not get work for him. She
went to the office of Nathaniel P. Willis, who was the editor and
proprietor of _The Mirror_. Willis was then starting _The Evening
Mirror_, and said he would give Poe work. So the poet came; he had
his little desk in the corner, and did his work meekly and
regularly,--poor hack work for which he was paid very little.

Later he had an interest in a paper called _The Broadway Journal_.
When it was about to cease publication Poe bought it himself for fifty
dollars, giving a note which Horace Greeley endorsed and finally paid.

Once a young man wrote to Greeley, saying, "Doubtless among your
papers you have many autographs of the poet, Edgar Allan Poe," and
intimated that he should like to have one of them. Greeley wrote back
that he had just one autograph of Poe among his papers; it was
attached to a note for fifty dollars, and Greeley's own signature was
across the back. The young man might have it for just half its face
value.

But after Poe bought _The Broadway Journal_ he had no money to carry
it on, and its publication was soon suspended.

He earned his livelihood mainly by writing stories or articles for
various magazines and papers, which paid him from $5 to $50 each. It
was a hand to mouth way of living, for he was often, often
disappointed.

In 1845, a volume entitled, "Tales. By Edgar A. Poe," was published by
Wiley and Putnam, and in the same year "The Raven and Other Poems"
appeared in book form from the same publishing house. Poe also
delivered lectures, and by way of criticism carried on what was called
the "Longfellow War." Though he considered Longfellow the greatest
American poet, he accused him of plagiarism, or stealing some of his
ideas, which was very unjust on the part of Poe. Hawthorne and Lowell
he praised highly.

After the death of his wife, Poe was very melancholy. He went to
lecture, and to visit friends in Providence, Rhode Island, and in
Lowell, Massachusetts, and afterward went south to Richmond, where he
planned to raise enough money by lecturing to start _The Stylus_.

He was hospitably entertained in Richmond, and became engaged to marry
his boyhood's first love, Miss Royster, now the widow, Mrs. Shelton.
Their marriage was to take place at once, and Poe started north to
close up his business in New York and bring Mrs. Clemm south. In
Baltimore it seems that he fell in with some politicians who were
conducting an election. They took him about from one polling place to
another to vote illegally; then some one drugged him, and left him on
a bench near a saloon. Here he was found by a printer, who notified
his friends, and they sent him to the hospital, where he died on the
7th of October, 1849. He was nearly forty-one years old.

Poe had a great and wonderful mind. In the latter part of his life he
gave much of his time to a book called "Eureka," which was intended to
explain the meaning of the universe. Of course he was not a
philosopher; but he wrote some things in that book which were destined
afterward to be accepted by such great men as Darwin and Huxley and
many others.

His life was so full of work and poverty, so crossed and crossed again
by unhappiness and hardship, that he never had time or strength of
mind to think out anything as he would otherwise have done. All his
work is fragmentary, broken bits on this subject or on that. He wrote
very few poems, not many stories, and only a little serious criticism.

But a Frenchman will tell you that Poe, among American poets and
writers, is the greatest; his writings have been translated into
nearly every European language. In England, too, he is spoken of as
our one great poet and critic, our first great story-writer, the
inventor of the artistic short story.

Poor, unhappy Poe! After his death a monument was to have been erected
over his grave; but by a strange fatality it was destroyed before it
was finished. Twenty-five years later admiring friends placed over his
remains the first monument to an American poet. No such memorial was
needed, however, for American hearts will never cease to thrill at the
weird, beautiful music of "Annabel Lee," "The Bells," and "The Raven."

THE STORY OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

[Illustration: _JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL_.]

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

CHAPTER I

ELMWOOD

James Russell Lowell was born on the 22d of February, 1819, in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Elmwood, the home of the Lowells, was to the
west of the village of Cambridge, quite near Mount Auburn cemetery.
When James Russell was a boy, Elmwood was practically in the country,
and was surrounded on nearly all sides by woods, meadows, and
pastures. The house stood on a triangular piece of land surrounded by
a very high and thick hedge, made up of all sorts of trees and shrubs,
such as pines, spruces, willows, and oaks, with smaller shrubs at the
bottom so as to form a thick wall of green. In front of the house were
some fine English elms, quite different from the American variety,
and from these the house got its name. It was a large, square,
old-fashioned wooden house, and though it had stood for over a hundred
years, it remained during Lowell's life in perfect condition.

The house was surrounded by a fine, well-kept lawn, and at the back
were pasture, orchard, and garden, while half a mile away lay Fresh
Pond, the haunt of herons and other shy birds and land creatures. From
the upper windows one could look out on beautiful Mount Auburn
cemetery, which was to the south, while to the east was a low hill
called Symonds's Hill, beyond which could be seen a bright stretch of
the Charles River.

Elmwood faced on a lane, between two roads. In his essay in "Fireside
Travels," entitled "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago," Lowell describes the
scene towards the village as it was in his childhood. Approaching
"from the west, by what was then called the New Road (it is called so
no longer, for we change our names whenever we can, to the great
detriment of all historical association), you would pause on the brow
of Symonds's Hill to enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid.
In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, lindens, and
horse-chestnuts.... Over it rose the noisy belfry of the college, the
square brown tower of the church, and the slim yellow spire of the parish
meeting-house, by no means ungraceful, and then an invariable
characteristic of New England religious architecture. On your right
the Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt meadows,
darkened here and there with the blossoming black grass as with a
stranded cloud-shadow. Over these marshes, level as water but without
its glare, and with softer and more soothing gradations of
perspective, the eye was carried to a horizon of softly rounded hills.
To your left upon the Old Road you saw some half dozen dignified old
houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting southward." One
of these, the largest and most stately, was the Craigie House, famous
as the headquarters of Washington in 1776, and afterwards as the home
of Longfellow. And at the end of the New Road toward Cambridge was a
row of six fine willows, which had remained from the stockade built in
early days as a defense against the Indians.

And here is Harvard Square, where stand the buildings of the famous
college:

"A few houses, chiefly old, stood around the bare Common, with ample
elbow-room, and old women, capped and spectacled, still peered through
the same windows from which they had watched Lord Percy's artillery
rumble by to Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome Virginia
general who had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. People
still lived who regretted the unhappy separation from the mother
island. . . The hooks were to be seen from which swung the hammocks of
Burgoyne's captive redcoats. If memory does not deceive me, women
still washed clothes in the town spring, clear as that of Bandusia.
Commencement had not ceased to be the great holiday of the Puritan
Commonwealth, and a fitting one it was--the festival of Santa
Scholastica, whose triumphal path one may conceive strewn with leaves
of spelling-books instead of bay."

James was the youngest of four brothers and two sisters, a handsome
boy, and his mother's darling. He always thought he inherited his love
of nature and poetic aspirations from her, whose family was from the
Orkneys--those islands at the extreme north of Scotland.

His father was a strikingly handsome man, gracious and of rare
personal qualities, and a faithful pastor over his flock. Often he
took his youngest son on long drives with him, when he went to
exchange pulpits with neighboring clergymen. Because of his wide
family connection, and his father's position, James saw not a little
of New England society as it was in those days, pure Yankee through
and through.

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