Part 30 (2/2)

CHAPTER x.x.x.

But it was not always possible to take a hopeful view. Continued poverty which oftentimes reached the degree of positive want, anxiety for Virginia's health and inability to provide for her the remedies and comforts he felt might preserve her life, were enough to arouse Edgar Poe's blue devils, and they did.

Why detail the hara.s.sments of the rest of that winter, during which The Dreamer led a strange double life--a life in the public eye of distinction, prosperity, popularity, but in private, a hunted life--a life of constant dread of the wrath of a too long indulgent landlord or grocer--a flitting from one cheap lodgement to another.

One gleam of genuine suns.h.i.+ne brightened the dreary days. The acquaintance with Frances Osgood begun at Miss Lynch's salon soon ripened into close friends.h.i.+p. She found her way up the two flights of stairs and Edgar and Virginia and the Mother received her with as ready courtesy and welcome as though the two rooms that looked on the sky had been a palace. Her intimacy became so complete--her understanding of, and sympathy with, the three who lived for each other only so perfect that it was almost as if she had been admitted to the Valley of the Many-Colored Gra.s.s.

Upon her The Dreamer bestowed in abundant measure that poetic love which the normal heart is no more capable of feeling than the normal mind is capable of producing his poetry. A love which was like his landscapes, not of this world or of the earth earthy--a love of the mind, the imagination, the poetic faculty. A love whose desire was not to possess, but to kneel to. In his rhapsodies over the phantasmal women his genius created or the real ones whose charm he felt, it was never of flesh and blood beauty--of blooming cheek or rounded form--that he sang, but of the expression of the eye, the tones of the voice, the graces and gifts of the spirit and the intellect.

In return for this love he asked only sympathy--sympathy such as he drew from the sky and the forest and the rock-bound lake and the winds of heaven--mood sympathy.

It was a love quite beyond the imagination of Rufus Griswold to conceive of, even. His furtive eye was on the watch, his jealous heart was filled with foul surmises and he added a new poison to the old, with which he was working, drop by drop, upon the good name of Edgar Poe.

Meantime the poet, hara.s.sed by troubles of divers kinds but innocent of the new poison as he had been of the old, welcomed the intimacy of this congenial woman friend as balm to his tried spirit; and delved away at his work.

Upon his desk one morning, were piled a number of the small rolls of narrow ma.n.u.script with which the reader is familiar. These were a series of critical sketches ent.i.tled ”The Literati of New York,” by which he hoped to keep the pot boiling some days. Virginia was listening for a step on the stair, for she had written Mrs. Osgood a note that morning, begging her to come to them, and she knew that she would respond. The door opened and the slight, graceful figure and delicate face with the gentle eyes, she looked for, appeared.

”What are all these?” asked the visitor, when she had embraced Virginia warmly and when the poet had, after bowing over her hand, which he lightly touched with his lips, led her to a chair.

Her eyes were fixed upon the pile of ma.n.u.scripts.

”One of them is yourself, Madam,” replied the poet.

”Myself?” she questioned, in amazement.

He bowed, gravely. ”Yourself--as one of the Literati of New York. In each one of these one of you is rolled up and discussed. I will show you by the difference in their length the varying degrees of estimation in which I hold you literary folk. Come Virginia, and help me!”

The fair visitor smiled as they drew out to the full length roll after roll of the ma.n.u.script--letting them fly together again as if they had been spiral springs. The largest they saved for the last. The poet lifted it from its place and gave an end to his wife and like two merry, laughing children they ran to opposite corners, stretching the ma.n.u.script diagonally across the entire s.p.a.ce between.

”And whose 'linked sweetness long drawn out' is that?” asked the visitor.

”Hear her!” cried Edgar Goodfellow who was in the ascendent for the first time in many a long day. ”Hear her! Just as if her vain little heart didn't tell her it's herself!”

But the moment of playfulness was a rarity, and all the more enjoyed for that.

The papers came out in due course, serially, and created a new sensation and brought their little reward, but they also plunged their author into a succession of unsavory quarrels. As each one appeared, it was looked for with eagerness and read with intense interest by the public, but frequently with as intense anger by the subject.

Perhaps the most caustic of all the critiques was the one upon the work of Mr. Thomas Dunn English, whom Poe contemptuously dubbed, ”Thomas Done Brown.”

Mr. English bitterly retorted with an attack upon his critic's private character. A fierce controversy followed in which English became so abusive that Poe sued and recovered two hundred and twenty-five dollars damages--which goes to prove that even an ill wind can blow good.

Long after the papers had been published the scene of playful idleness, with all its holiday charm, when Edgar Poe drew out the strips of ma.n.u.script in which were rolled up ”The Literati of New York” remained in Mrs. Osgood's memory, and in his own. To him it was indeed a gleam of brightness amid a throng of ”earnest woes,” a season of calm in a ”tumultous sea.”

But, as been said, why dwell upon the details of that bleak, despairing winter? Spring brought a change which makes a more pleasant picture.

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