Part 1 (1/2)
Literary Hearthstones of Dixie.
by La Salle Corbell Pickett.
FOREWORD.
The fires still glow upon the hearthstones to which our southern writers in the olden days gave us friendly welcome. They are as bright to-day as when, ”four feet on the fender,” we talked with some gifted friend whose pen, dipped in the heart's blood of life, gave word to thoughts which had flamed within us and sought vainly to escape the walls of our being that they might go out to the world and fulfil their mission. They who built the shrines before which we offer our devotion have pa.s.sed from the world of men, but the fires they kindled yet burn with fadeless light.
To us who have dwelt in the same environment and found beauty in the same scenes that inspired them to eloquent expression of the thoughts, the loves, the hopes, and the aspirations which were our own as well as theirs, these writers of our South are living still and will live through the long procession of the years. In the garden of our lives they planted the flowers of poesy, of fable, and of romance. With the changes of the years those flowers may have pa.s.sed into the realm of the old-fas.h.i.+oned, like the blossoms in Grandmother's garden, but are there any sweeter or more royally blooming than these?
The l.u.s.tre of our gifted ones is not dimmed by the pa.s.sage of time, but in the rush of new books upon the world the readers of to-day lose sight of the volumes which wove threads of gold into the joys and sorrows of the generation now travelling the downward slope of life.
Their starry radiance is sometimes lost to view in the electric flash of the present day. If these pages can in any slight way aid in keeping their memory bright they will have reached their highest aim.
The poets of Dixie in war days tended the flames that glowed upon the altar of patriotism. Their lives were given to their country as truly as if their blood had crimsoned the sod of hard-fought fields. They gave of their best to our cause. Their bugle notes echo through the years, and the mournful tones of the dirges they sang over the grave of our dreams yet thrill our hearts. Before our eyes ”The Conquered Banner” sorrowfully droops on its staff and ”The Sword of Lee” flashes in the lines of our Poet-Priest.
For the quotations with which are ill.u.s.trated the varying phases of his poetic thought I am indebted to the kindness of the publishers of Father Ryan's poems, Messrs. P.J. Kenedy & Sons. For certain selections from the poems of Hayne I am indebted to the Lothrop, Lee & Shephard Company, and for selections from Dr. Bagley's ”The Old Fas.h.i.+oned Gentleman,” Messrs. Charles Schribner's Sons.
My thanks are due the Houghton, Mifflin Company for permission to include in my paper on Margaret Junkin Preston two poems and other quotations from the ”Life and Letters of Margaret J. Preston,” by Mrs.
Allan, the step-daughter of Mrs. Preston.
The selections in the article on Georgia's doubly gifted son, Sidney Lanier, poet and musician, are given through the kind permission of Professor Edwin Mims and of Doubleday, Page & Company, publishers of Mrs. Clay's ”A Belle of the Fifties.”
”THE POET OF THE NIGHT”
EDGAR ALLAN POE
”I am a Virginian; at least, I call myself one, for I have resided all my life until within the last few years in Richmond.”
Thus Edgar A. Poe wrote to a friend. The fact of his birth in Boston he regarded as merely an unfortunate accident, or perhaps the work of that malevolent ”Imp of the Perverse” which apparently dominated his life. That it const.i.tuted any tie between him and the ”Hub of the Universe,” unless it might be the inverted tie of opposition, he never admitted. The love which his charming little actress mother cherished for the city in which she had enjoyed her greatest triumphs seemed to have turned to hatred in the heart of her brilliant and erratic son.
In his short and disastrous sojourn in Boston, when his fortunes were at their lowest ebb, it is not likely that his thought once turned to the old house on Haskins, now Carver, Street, where his ill-starred life began.
The reason given by Poe, ”I have resided there all my life until within the last few years,” suggests but slight cause for his love of Richmond, the home of his childhood, the darkening clouds of which, viewed through the softening lens of years, may have shaded off to brighter tints, as the roughness of a landscape disappears and melts into mystic, dreamy beauty as we journey far from the scene.
The three women who had been the stars in the troubled sky of his youth irradiated his memory of the Queen City of the South. In the churchyard of historic old Saint John's, that once echoed to the words of Patrick Henry, ”Give me liberty or give me death!” Poe's mother lay in an unidentified grave. In Hollywood slept his second mother, who had surrounded his boyhood with the maternal affection that, like an unopened rose in her heart, had awaited the coming of the little child who was to be the sunbeam to develop it into perfect flowering. On Shockoe Hill was the tomb of ”Helen,” his chum's mother, whose beauty of face and heart brought the boyish soul
To the Glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome.
Through the three-fold sanctification of the twin priestesses, Love and Sorrow, Richmond was his home.
So Virginia claims her poet son, the tragedy of whose life is a gloomy, though brilliant, page in the history of American literature.
There are varying stories told of Poe's Richmond home. The impression that he was the inmate of a stately mansion, where he was trained to extravagance which wrought disaster in later years, is not borne out by the evidence. When the loving heart and persistent will of Mrs.
Allan opened her husband's reluctant door to the orphaned son of the unfortunate players, that door led into the second story of the building at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Tobacco Alley, in which Messrs. Ellis & Allan earned a comfortable, but not luxurious, living by the sale of the commodity which gave the alley its name. As it was customary in those days for merchants to live in the same building with their business, the fact that he did so does not argue that Mr. Allan was ”down on his luck,” but neither does it presuppose that he was the possessor of wealth. But it was a home in the truest sense for little Edgar, for it was radiant with the love of the tender-hearted woman who had brought him within its friendly walls.
From this home Mr. Allan went to London to establish a branch of the Company business. He was accompanied by Mrs. Allan and Edgar, and the boy was placed in the school of Stoke-Newington, shadowy with the dim procession of the ages and gloomed over by the memory of Eugene Aram.
The pictured face of the head of the Manor School, Dr. Bransby, indicates that the hapless boys under his care had stronger than historic reasons for depression in that ancient inst.i.tution.
England was thrilling with the triumph of Waterloo, and even Stoke-Newington must have awakened to the pulsing of the atmosphere.
Not far away were Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, and Keats, at the beginning of their brief and brilliant careers, the glory and the tragedy of which may have thrown a prophetic shadow over the American boy who was to travel a yet darker path than any of these.