Part 5 (1/2)
At the time that Cooper lived in New York there walked along Broadway, between Ca.n.a.l Street and the Chapel of St. Paul's, on almost every pleasant afternoon, a man who in appearance was a veritable Hamlet.
His garb was a customary suit of solemn black, and his eyes sought the ground as he moved with pensive step. This was McDonald Clarke, whose eccentric appearance and acts and whose melancholy verses gave him the name of The Mad Poet.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PARK THEATRE, PARK ROW, 1831.]
If Broadway was his walk of an afternoon, Park Row was his haunt by night; and Windust's place, a door or two below the Park Theatre (literally below it, for it was beneath the sidewalk), was his centring point.
The resort of Edward Windust was not an old place, but a famous one.
It was opened in 1824 and lasted only until 1837, when the proprietor thought himself cramped in s.p.a.ce and opportunity and, moving away to seek a larger field, found failure. It was the actors' museum of the city. Its walls were lined with reminders of the stage: playbills, and swords that had seen the service of savage mimic wars; pictures, and frames of clippings, and bits of the wardrobes of kings and queens who had strutted their brief hour and pa.s.sed away. It was the nightly gathering point of such actors as were in town, such writers, such wits, such gallant gentlemen. Edmund Kean and the Wallacks, Harry Placide and Cooper, Jack Scott, Mitch.e.l.l, Brown, and Junius Brutus Booth were frequenters, with Fitz-Greene Halleck, Willis, Morris, and the rest, who nightly crowded the tier of stalls that ranged along one side of the room, making them resound with gay and brilliant talk.
In Windust's, too, sat McDonald Clarke in gloomy majesty night after night. There he formed among many others the acquaintance of Mordecai M. Noah, journalist and playwright, who had been Consul at Tunis and who in the years to come was to start several unsuccessful papers, until in 1843 he was to publish the _Sunday Times and Messenger_, which continued for more than half a century.
From Windust's McDonald Clarke often wandered out into the City Hall Park over the way, and sat there through many a long summer night dreaming over his _Elixir of Moons.h.i.+ne_, or, with the memory of his afternoon walks upon him, composing lines for his _Afara, or the Belles of Broadway_, and many another melancholy verse. Often he sat there until daybreak, then went on into Broadway again. He had a favorite early-morning stand on the Fulton Street side of St. Paul's Churchyard, and there, an hour before the town was stirring, soliloquized as he looked through the railings at the brown tombstones.
On these same mornings, but a few hours later, another writer looked down on the same faded tombstones, for Ray Palmer was the teacher of a young ladies' school down Fulton Street beyond Broadway. He was young then, in his twenty-second year, in ill-health, and suffering under discouragements that would have been unendurable to a weaker-dispositioned man. As he looked from the school window into the churchyard he wrote a hymn which remained in his desk for several years, until it was published in quite an accidental manner by Dr. Lowell Mason, when he needed material for a book of church music which he had compiled. In a few years this hymn, _My Faith Looks Up to Thee_, was to be sung oftener than any other American hymn.
The sights and the sounds of the busy city that were an inspiration to Ray Palmer always sent The Mad Poet in another direction,--on up Broadway to Leonard Street, turning down there two short blocks to Chapel Street, to the house where at that time he made his home. It was a dreary enough street and a dismal enough upper room, but there was a narrow window where the poet could look over the housetops in the midnight hour and watch the stars that he seemed ever to hold converse with. Or, if it was in the early evening, he had but to lean forward from his window to see the people going into the Italian Opera House on the next corner. The Italian Opera House had a great deal of attraction for The Mad Poet. Not that he went there often to attend the performances, but he liked to inspect it from his window height as though he caught a glimpse of the sorrows and disappointments connected with it. He had moved into the house in the year 1833--the year that the opera house was opened after it had been built for a company headed by Lorenzo Da Ponte.
This Da Ponte had come to America in 1805, having a record as an Italian dramatist, who had furnished libretti for Mozart's operas, _Don Giovanni_ and _Nozze di Figaro_. He was professor in Columbia College when he matured an idea for establis.h.i.+ng a home for Italian opera in New York, a plan which led to the building of the opera house near which The Mad Poet lived. It opened splendidly with the singers of the Cavalier di Rivafinoli, but a short season ended Lorenzo Da Ponte's hopes.
If The Mad Poet from his housetop could have seen what the next few years had in store, he would have beheld the aged dramatist dying at his home in Spring Street, close to Broadway, his body followed from there by his mourning friends--Halleck and Verplanck and Woodworth and some few others,--followed to the churchyard surrounding the nearby St. Patrick's Church; he would have seen the mark above the grave crumbling away, leaving nothing to point the spot where Da Ponte lay buried with his dreams and his hopes. But no inspiration hinted any of these things to McDonald Clarke, and once, in speaking of Da Ponte, he said that there at least was a man who had lived long unrewarded but had attained his ambition at last.
For nine years after The Mad Poet went to the Chapel Street house his Broadway walks continued, his dress each year growing more shabby, his eye more downcast, and his verse more melancholy. Then one day he was seen close by his favorite stand near the Churchyard of St. Paul's, acting so strangely that he was thought to be intoxicated. Next morning he awoke to find himself a prisoner in a vagrant cell, and the shock to his sensitive nature sent him, a madman indeed, to the Blackwell's Island Asylum, where in a few days he died.
Years after, the author of _Glimpses of Home Life_, Emma C. Embury, whose home was in Brooklyn, told of a knoll in Greenwood Cemetery by the side of a little lake where the oak-trees shaded a modest tomb on which there were some lines of verse. They were lines written by McDonald Clarke. The tomb is there yet, still shaded by oaks that have grown st.u.r.dier with the pa.s.sing years, and the grave by the lake is the grave of The Mad Poet.
Chapter VIII
Those Who Gathered about Poe
When New York was a much younger city than it is, when it was well within bounds on the lower part of the island of Manhattan, long before there was a thought that it would overspread the island, jump over a stream and go wandering up the mainland, overleap a river and go spreading over another island to the sea,--long before the time when these things came to be, there lay scattered in several directions on the island of Manhattan and dotting the rolling country land beyond, several tiny villages. These were Harlem, and Yorkville, and Odellville, and Bloomingdale, and Chelsea, and Greenwich. The last was the hamlet closest to the city. Quaint and curious, it spread its scattered way along the Hudson River where houses had been set up according to the needs and vagaries of men on roads natural and unplanned. When the city grew larger and finally swept around Greenwich Village, the roads becoming city streets, the village continued a labyrinthian way, where strangers wandered and were lost before they knew it.
[Ill.u.s.tration: On Bloomingdale Road near 75th St. in Poe's time]
In the very core of this old-time Greenwich section and at the very place where the streets are so tangled, so irregular, so crooked, so often no thoroughfare, so winding that they seem to be seeking out the old farmhouses which they led to in early days, there is a pretty little playground for children. This Hudson Park is an open spot with green lawns and marble walks and a tall iron fence surrounding it; quite a model park with everything about fresh, and new, and modern.
It is so very new and so very neat and so very clean that one would not look there for old-time flavor. But curiously enough one thing about it seems out of tone. On the green lawn is a monument old and faded which, in an effort to match it with its natty surroundings, has been set upon a base of glistening white marble. The monument is a sort of key for the antiquarian, for without it this playground in its spick-and-span newness might not be readily identified as the old St.
John's Burying-Ground, where once stood the acc.u.mulated tombstones of more than fourscore years, until they were swept away and buried as deep as those whose memories they marked. A new generation tramples in and romps over the new park, with no knowledge or thought of what is below the surface.
The graveyard of St. John's was a quiet, restful place in a quiet, restful locality in the year 1837, when Edgar Allan Poe had a habit of wandering through it. In that year Poe lived within a few steps of the burial-ground in a modest wooden house that was numbered 113 Carmine Street. He was then in his twenty-eighth year, had published three volumes of poems, and had written some short stories and criticisms.
He had but just given up the editors.h.i.+p of the _Southern Literary Messenger_ at Richmond, a position he had secured through the friends.h.i.+p of John P. Kennedy, who had been his friend in his early struggles in Baltimore and who was to continue a friend to him through all his life. In 1832 Poe had first met him, when Kennedy was writing _Swallow Barn_. Afterwards Kennedy wrote _Horseshoe Robinson_ and other books before abandoning literature for politics and, in time, becoming Secretary of the Navy.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The House in Carmine Street]
So Poe came to New York, and with him Virginia, his child wife, who was already marked a victim of consumption, and there in the Carmine Street house they lived. Sometimes she walked with her sombre-faced husband through the nearby burying-ground, but more often she sat at an upper window from which she could watch him on his ramble. In the same house lived William Gowans the bookseller of Na.s.sau Street; and there Poe did work for the _New York Quarterly Review_; there also he finished _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_.
In another house, some little distance away but in a direct course up Carmine Street, in Sixth Avenue close by Waverley Place, Poe lived for a short time, but long enough to write _The Fall of the House of Usher_ and some magazine work, when he went to Philadelphia to _The Gentleman's Magazine_, edited by William E. Burton, the famous comedian. Oddly enough, when Burton died years afterwards, he found a resting place in the obscure St. John's Burying-Ground.
[Ill.u.s.tration:
1. RICHARD HENRY STODDARD.
2. JOHN JAMES AUDUBON.