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My own impression is that these ladies were perfectly happy, that they had nothing of that maggior' dolore which we mortals know, and for which our joys have so often to pay. Let us hope so at any rate, for about a fairy or a growing boy conscious of the prison-shades could Poe have spun his horrors. "To the Greeks foolishness," I said in my haste; but in very truth it was far from being so.
Piranesi simply gave wing to his fancy, recalling the more vivid of his nightmares as did Coleridge, De Quincey, Poe, Baudelaire, and the rest of the drug-steeped choir. We recall one plate of Piranesi's in which a miserable devil climbs a staircase suspended over an abyss; as he mounts each step the lower one crumbles into the depths below.
Poe was a tireless critic of his own work, and both his standards of workmanship and his critical precepts have been of great service to his careless countrymen. He turned out between four and five short stories a year, was poorly paid for them, and indeed found difficulty in selling them at all. Yet he was constantly correcting them for the better. His best poems were likewise his latest.
The light of memory has a wondrous gift of heightening most of the pleasures of this life, but the conversation of those early hours was far more stimulating and inspiring than any memory of it can ever be. There were few men, except Poe, famous in American or English literature of that era who did not appear once at least.
Of course the attack began at once, coming from front, flank, and rear. There were two small redoubts, with slight parapets and ditches, one on each side of the deep railroad-cut. These redoubts had been located by Colonel Poe, United States Engineers, at the time of our advance on Kenesaw, the previous June.
A quite different view of the matter was taken by other members of the Poe connection in Baltimore particularly the men, who positively refused to regard the love affair as anything more than sentimental nonsense "moonshine" they called it, which would be as fleeting as it was foolish.
Every bit of available football material is eagerly sought by the coaches. I recall so well my freshman year at Princeton, how Garry Cochran, captain of the football team, went about the college with Johnny Poe, looking over the undergraduates and watching the incoming trains for football possibilities.
The repetitions of Edgar Poe seem hard and mechanical after this, so exquisite and evanescent is the rhythm, and the intonations come as sweetly and suddenly as a gust of perfume; it is as the vibration of a fairy orchestra, flute and violin disappearing in a silver mist; but the clouds break, and all the enchantment of a spring garden appears in a shaft of sudden sunlight.
Out from the warmth and the light and the perfume and the luxury and the praise of the beautiful drawing-room with its distinguished assemblage, out into the streets of New York into the bleakness and the darkness of the winter's night stepped Edgar Poe and his wife.
They learned the art of short story writing from Poe. Then these French stories were translated into English, and English and American writers have imitated them and adopted similar methods of writing.
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