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And not only letters came, but the literati of the day in person glad to sit at Edgar Poe's feet, their hearts glowing with the eloquence of his speech and aching as they recognized in the lovely eyes of the girl-wife "the light that beckons to the tomb." But there were other visitors that winter, and less welcome ones.
They performed in the daylight stray clarified bits from Fletcher or Molière, drama of an era over-ripe; they sang only from an old book of madrigals; their very reading was fragmentary, now an emasculated Boccaccio, then a curdling phantasm of Poe's, and after some such scenic horror as the "Red Death" Helen Heath dashed off the Pesther Waltzes.
To Sandeau and Gautier the novelist explained, with such eloquence and precision, his scheme for obtaining the interred wealth that they were wrought up to the point of declaring themselves ready to set out, armed with pick-axe and spade, and to put into action Edgar Allen Poe's yarn of the Gold Bug. When money was the theme, Balzac's tongue was infinitely persuasive.
We had no time to say anything before it began to speak. Read Poe's account of the voice that came from the mesmerized dying man, and you will realize less than one half of the horror of that head's voice. There was an interval of a second or two between each word, and a sort of "ring, ring, ring," in the note of the voice like the timbre of a bell.
"I believe she means mischief," thought Grace to herself, as she watched the girl curiously. Miriam ran a brilliant scale up the piano, for music was another of her many accomplishments. Then she paused and turned to the others. "I won't sing," she said, "unless Miss Pierson promises to recite us something first, Poe's 'Raven, for instance."
This color effect of Poe's poetry I have felt very slightly, if at all, immediately on a first reading, as I feel the music of his verse a rereading, or the lapse of time, being required for its full development. I have not read a line of Poe in the last two or three years, and at the present moment I feel Ulalume as I would some weird scene or picture viewed long ago."
Of course I have Poe's works, and bound in morocco, too the grandest genius ever bestowed upon humanity by the prolific and liberal hand of our Creator.
Crolius, one of the hardest men to stop that Dartmouth ever had, tells of Arthur Poe's gameness, when they played together on the Homestead Athletic Club team, after they left college. "Arthur Poe was about as game a man as the football world ever saw. He was handicapped in his playing by a knee which would easily slip out of place.
And there are tales of conscience, of which "The Black Cat" is the most fearful and "William Wilson" the most subtle; and there are landscape sketches and fantasies and extravaganzas, most of these poor stuff. It is ungrateful and perhaps unnecessary to dwell upon Poe's limitations. His scornful glance caught certain aspects of the human drama with camera-like precision.
"Edgar Allan Poe's genius wuz worthy a place among the Immortals, no doubt; his poems and stories excite wonder and admiration. But do they move the soul like Mrs. Stowe's immortal story that thrilled the world and helped free a race? yes, two races for the curse of slavery held the white race in bondage, too.
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