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TRANSACTIONS - 
 
 OP THE 
 
 Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences 
 
 VOLUME I * PART II 
 
 Poe Centenary Exercises 
 
 January 19; 1909 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 Published for *thr Society 
 
 May, 1910 
 
 ! PS 2635 C B86" UniVerSi ' y Ubrary 
 ln m ,f .E'S.r'.f.'I'i E dgar Allan Poe. 1809-1849.J 
 
 3 1924 022 154 706 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022154706 
 
TRANSACTIONS 
 
 OF THE 
 
 Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences 
 
 VOLUME I PART II 
 
 Poe Centenary Exercises 
 
 January 19, 1909 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 Published for the Society 
 
 May, 1910 
 
Copyright, 1910, by the 
 Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences 
 
 Press of 
 
 The new era printing company 
 
 lancaster. pa. 
 
 1- 
 
 ft; 
 
IN MEMORIAM 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 1809-1849 
 
 „JDvov^y, ^o<=i~e-L dj> r\A"l o-^ ;>a< 
 
 ^,^&e-^ - 
 
 JANUARY NINETEENTH 
 NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINE 
 
A^osB^'e? 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 EDMUND T. QUINN, Sculptor. 
 
 Bronze bust, erected in Poe Park and presented to the City of New York 
 by The Bronx Society of Arts, and Sciences. 
 
TRANSACTIONS 
 
 OF THE 
 
 BRONX SOCIETY OP ARTS AND SCIENCES 
 
 / 
 
 POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 
 
 OT many eminent literary men have made their 
 homes in what is now the Borough of the Bronx. 
 It is therefore proper that of all those who have 
 dwelt here and have deserved recognition the 
 souvenir should be preserved. This is an obvious duty in the 
 case of Edgar Allan Poe, whose place among the foremost 
 in his particular realm is now secure. 
 
 The stay of more than three years in Fordham witnessed 
 not the least tragic period of that tragic life, its pathos being 
 heightened by the contrast with its idyllic setting and the 
 enjoyment of its commencement, which are described in his 
 " Landor's Cottage." The cottage still stands, the principal 
 material relic of this period. It was the scene of the new 
 start in life under the pleasantest auspices, but the sunny skies 
 were soon overclouded by the renewed struggle with mis- 
 fortune, want, sickness and suffering, his apprehension for 
 the life of his Virginia, only too well justified by her death. 
 Here he produced some of his most important literary work. 
 He paced its little porch or wandered among the trees of its 
 orchard as he sought the inspiration of his weird muse or 
 agonized at his loved one wasting' away, at times even cold 
 and hungry. Hence she was carried to her temporary resting 
 place in the church yard not far off. Nearby are some of 
 the houses, still standing, where he visited. Not far distant 
 is the site of the little cemetery, the ideally conceived scene of 
 
Vi^B^e* 
 
 EDGAR ALLAN POE. 
 
 EDMUND T. QU1NN. Sculptor. 
 
 Bronze bust, erected in Poe Park and presented to the City of New York 
 by The Bronx Society of Arts, and Sciences. 
 
TRANSACTIONS 
 
 OF THE 
 
 BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 
 
 POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 
 
 OT many eminent literary men have made their 
 homes in what is now the Borough of the Bronx. 
 It is therefore proper that of all those who have 
 dwelt here and have deserved recognition the 
 souvenir should be preserved. This is an obvious duty in the 
 case of Edgar Allan Poe, whose place among the foremost 
 in his particular realm is now secure. 
 
 The stay of more than three years in Fordham witnessed 
 not the least tragic period of that tragic life, its pathos being 
 heightened by the contrast with its idyllic setting and the 
 enjoyment of its commencement, which are described in his 
 " Landor's Cottage." The cottage still stands, the principal 
 material relic of this period. It was the scene of the new 
 start in life under the pleasantest auspices, but the sunny skies 
 were soon overclouded by the renewed struggle with mis- 
 fortune, want, sickness and suffering, his apprehension for 
 the life of his Virginia, only too well justified by her death. 
 Here he produced some of his most important literary work. 
 He paced its little porch or wandered among the trees of its 
 orchard as he sought the inspiration of his weird muse or 
 agonized at his loved one wasting away, at times even cold 
 and hungry. Hence she was carried to her temporary resting 
 place in the church yard not far off. Nearby are some of 
 the houses, still standing, where he visited. Not far distant 
 is the site of the little cemetery, the ideally conceived scene of 
 
D THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 " Ulalume." Further afield are his haunts and walks : — High 
 Bridge, West Farms, the aqueduct, and the region around the 
 present site of New York University. 
 
 The city long ago recognized the importance of his memory 
 by establishing the park bearing his name, opposite the cottage. 
 
 In view of his sojourn here and the impress of his memory 
 left upon this region, it was thought to be eminently fitting 
 that the Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences should conduct 
 memorial exercises on the centenary of his birth, to perpetuate 
 the local associations and leave a permanent monument near 
 the spot where he lived, and to honor the name and work of 
 Poe as a man of letters. 
 
 With this in view, exercises were planned and carried out, 
 consisting of two distinct parts, those centering around the 
 cottage and the monument to be dedicated, and those con- 
 ducted in the auditorium of New York University nearby. 
 
 The very meritorious bust of Poe by the sculptor, Edmond 
 T. Quinn, secured by the Society through the generous gifts 
 of its members and others, was placed on a suitable marble 
 pedestal in a spot in Poe Park, directly opposite the cottage 
 and facing it across Kings Bridge Road, and was presented 
 to the City by the Society. 
 
 The cottage was decorated with flags and was opened to 
 visitors, who were received by a committee of ladies. The 
 Park Commissioner had erected a platform near the monument 
 for the convenience of guests. He set up a flagstaff and 
 furnished a flag to use at the unveiling, and he put his car at 
 the service of the committee, as did some others, to bring the 
 special guests from the station. The Park Department built 
 the foundation for the monument, and it has since made a 
 plantation of evergreens around it which make a proper back- 
 ground and greatly add to its effect. The Second Battery 
 furnished a detail to fire the salute. Mr. Wilton Lackaye 
 accepted the invitation of the Committee to read at both parts 
 of the exercises. The day was very cold and clear; the 
 ground was covered with snow. About two hundred people 
 were present at these unveiling exercises. 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 
 
 DEDICATION OF A MONUMENT 
 
 IN 
 
 POE PARK, FORDHAM, NEW YORK CITY 
 BUST BY EDMOND T. QUINN SCULPTOR 
 
 READING 
 
 Poe's Cottage at Fordham Boner 
 
 WILTON LACKAYE 
 PRESENTATION TO THE CITY 
 
 ARTHUR A. STOUGHTON, Chairman, Poe Memorial Committee 
 
 ACCEPTANCE ON BEHALF OF THE CITY 
 
 HON. JOSEPH I. BERRY, Commissioner of Parks for the Bronx 
 
 UNVEILING 
 
 Salute fired by the Second Battery Field Artillery, N. G. N. Y. 
 
 CAPTAIN LANSFORD F. SHERRY 
 
 OPENING OF THE COTTAGE TO VISITORS 
 
THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 Mr. Stoughton said: 
 
 " One hundred years ago was born the man whose eminence 
 in letters, as poet, story teller and critic, we celebrate today. 
 
 It is singularly fitting that a memorial of him should face 
 the cottage, the only place which, in his maturity, he could 
 call home; which he held till his death, and through whose 
 ' lowly portal ' he came and went during the wasting away 
 of his adored Virginia and his own heroic struggle with fate, 
 and in which, often cold and hungry, always burdened in 
 mind, he calmly wrote his later masterpieces. 
 
 Others will today render homage to his genius, and appreci- 
 ation of his work as man of letters; it is my privilege to stand 
 for a brief moment as the mouthpiece of those who delight 
 to honor the former tenant of this cottage, whose spirit haunts 
 this region, and whose name this Park bears, offering to the 
 City of New York this bronze, the sympathetic work of the 
 artist, Edmond T. Quinn. 
 
 On behalf of the Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences, and 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. Q 
 
 of those others who have aided in this undertaking, I have the 
 honor, Mr. Commissioner, to give into your keeping this monu- 
 ment to Edgar Allan Poe." 
 
 Hon. Joseph I. Berry replied, accepting the gift for the City, 
 on behalf of the Park Department, giving an interesting de- 
 scription from his personal recollection and knowledge, of the 
 former state of the neighborhood and of the features of the 
 surrounding country, visible from the Poe cottage, before 
 fields and farms and country roads and cow-paths had given 
 way to city improvements, and when the drowsy hamlet of 
 Fordham did not suspect that it was soon to be swallowed up 
 by the distant New York. He brought back the old setting of 
 the cottage very vividly, telling of his own familiarity with it, 
 and reminiscences of the relations of his family with the other 
 families of the place, including the Poes. 
 
 At the close of these exercises those present were trans- 
 ported to New York University in special cars, where a large 
 audience filled to overflowing the great hall. Professor 
 Woodberry came from Beverly, Mass., to preside. A number 
 of guests occupied places on the platform, literary men, repre- 
 sentatives of universities and local organizations. Among 
 them Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, since deceased, deserves 
 mention for the ready aid and counsel he gave to the com- 
 mittee during the preparation of the program. Of those who 
 contributed to the musical part of the program Mr. David 
 Bispham should be remarked. His performance was unique 
 in giving a completely satisfying rendering of The Raven. 
 
IO THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 1 
 
 
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 LB^VT 
 
 
 MEMORIAL MEETING 
 
 AT 
 
 NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 ADDRESS 
 POEM 
 
 ADDRESS 
 READINGS 
 
 CHANCELLOR HENRY M. MACCRACKEN 
 President of the Society 
 
 PROFESSOR GEORGE E. WOODBERRY 
 
 Our Israfel 
 Written for the Occasion EDWIN MARKHAM 
 
 Poe's Life at Fordham 
 
 HENRY NOBLE MACCRACKEN 
 
 *Ulalume 
 To One in Paradise 
 
 WILTON LACKAYE 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. I I 
 
 SONGS 
 
 * Annabel Lee 
 From the unpublished musical score of Professor Miles M. Dawson 
 
 *The Bells 
 
 W. POSTLEY SINCLAIR 
 
 ORATION 
 
 Poe at the End of a Century 
 
 HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE 
 
 READINGS 
 
 To Helen 
 
 The City in the Sea 
 
 WILTON LACK A YE 
 
 RECITATION TO MUSIC 
 
 The Raven, a Melodrame 
 
 DAVID BISPHAM 
 MS. First time of performance. Accompanied by the Composer, 
 Arthur Bergh 
 
 Music by the Orchestra of the Morris High School pre- 
 ceding the Exercises 
 
 * Written at Fordham 
 
I l 
 
 ; 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 BY CHANCELLOR HENRY MITCHELL MACCRACKEN, 
 
 PRESIDENT OF THE SOCIETY. 
 
 T falls to me, as president of the Bronx Society of 
 Arts and Sciences, which has just entered upon its 
 fourth year of existence, to introduce the chair- 
 man of this centennial celebration of a great mas- 
 ter of the poetic and literary art. When this society adopted 
 its name, it intended to give each of the two words " arts " 
 and " sciences " the broadest meaning. We mean by " arts " 
 first the liberal arts, as that phrase is used when we speak of 
 a bachelor of arts or of a college of arts, and we mean also 
 the fine arts — architecture and sculpture and painting. By 
 " sciences " we mean both the pure and the applied sciences. 
 It is interesting to note that within our brief career of four 
 years we have established six committees, of which two are 
 devoted strictly to the sciences, namely: the Committee on 
 the Natural Sciences and the Committee on the Industries and 
 the Applied Sciences. The existence of the great botanical 
 and zoological gardens in our borough insure the society's 
 remembering the natural sciences, particularly when we have 
 as the chairman of our Executive Committee, Dr. Britton, 
 of the Botanical Garden, and when we have had given us for 
 our scientific and historical collections spacious room in the 
 Lorillard Mansion of Bronx Park. 
 
 The remaining four committees belong rather to the realm 
 of the arts, namely : the Committee on the Fine Arts, the Com- 
 mittee on Music, the Committee on Literature and Books, and 
 finally, the Committee on Historic Sites and Relics. 
 
 It is nearly three years since, on March 15, 1906, an appro- 
 priate committee was instructed to see what measures should 
 be taken to secure the preservation of the Poe Cottage — one 
 of the historic sites within our Borough of the Bronx. This 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 1 3 
 
 early attention to the connection of Edgar Allan Poe with this 
 part of New York City as a householder for several years 
 prepared our society to take prompt steps on the approach of 
 this centennial day for its appropriate celebration. The fruits 
 of the thoroughly intelligent and wise efforts of the committee 
 under Mr. Arthur A. Stoughton, its chairman, are manifest 
 in today's program. A portion of this program has already 
 been fulfilled by the dedication an hour ago of a monument 
 to the poet in the park which bears his name, directly opposite 
 to his former home, near a mile to the northeast of this uni- 
 versity campus. The more extended and important part of 
 the program, which includes the names of men distinguished 
 in literature, in poetry and in dramatic art, is now to engage 
 our attention for an hour. 
 
 Before introducing the Chairman of the clay, I beg permis- 
 sion to read the following telegram from the University of 
 Virginia : 
 
 "University of Virginia, January 20, 1909. 
 Chancellor Henry Mitchell MacCracken, University Heights, 
 
 New York City. 
 
 The University of Virginia greets New York University 
 with the hope that the Hall of Fame may some day be as 
 hospitable to genius as is your University to-day. 
 
 (Signed) Charles W. Kent, 
 Head of the Department of English Literature." 
 
 To which the following reply has been sent : 
 
 " Professor Charles W. Kent, Head of the Department of 
 
 English Literature, University of Virginia. 
 
 New York University reciprocates the greeting of the Uni- 
 versity of Virginia and will gladly fellowship with her in com- 
 municating to the One Hundred Electors of the Hall of Fame, 
 representing all the forty-five states of our union, important 
 facts and enduring sentiments respecting famous Americans. 
 (Signed) Henry M. MacCracken." 
 
14 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 Letters of regret have been received from a number of 
 literary people, of which I will read the following : 
 
 Northampton, Mass., Dec. 27, 1908. 
 " Doctor Arthur B. Lamb, 
 
 Secretary of the Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences. 
 
 Dear Sir: — I am grateful for the special invitation of the 
 Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences to the celebration of the 
 centenary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, and sincerely regret 
 that my absence at the date of it in a distant part of the country 
 must prevent my attendance. 
 
 In my sense of deprivation may I be allowed to say that, to 
 my mind, our American civilization had, and has, in Poe, not 
 only one of the greatest among its few most masterful poets, but 
 one who, more than any other, initially kindled, and still kindles, 
 the priceless flame of poetic feeling in the hearts of innumerable 
 Americans at the fateful moment when they are first seeking 
 to find or make their share and place in the world's life and 
 onward march. 
 
 With renewed thanks for the honor offered me, I beg to re- 
 main ever, 
 
 Yours truly, 
 
 (Signed) George W. Cable." 
 
 Upon the recommendation of the Centennial Committee of 
 the Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences, it is now my duty and 
 privilege to present as the chairman of this Celebration of the 
 birth of Edgar Allan Poe, one who is well known to all of us 
 both as author and as teacher, Dr. George E. Woodberry. 
 formerly of this city. 
 
THE POE CENTENARY. 
 
 ADDRESS BY PROF. GEO. E. WOODBERRY. 
 
 j E are gathered here to do honor to genius. One 
 name is on our lips, one memory is in our hearts 
 — that of Edgar Allan Poe. Sixty years ago five 
 mourners stood round his grave; today in five 
 great cities of the nation, and elsewhere, men gather, as we do 
 here, by scores and hundreds, to commemorate his birth. It 
 is because genius, once born into life, is indestructible; it is 
 safe alike from any stroke of earthly fortune and from time's 
 attack, it is the immortal vigor of the race. Men do not 
 willingly let the memory of it die; men protect its memory, 
 and this is singularly true of Poe. No American name in 
 literature is, I think, so warmly cherished. It is a pleasure, 
 too, to recognize American genius, and today it is an added 
 grace that Poe was a child of the South. He was, neverthe- 
 less, both in his genius and his life, remarkably free from 
 locality. It has not been sufficiently observed hitherto, I think, 
 that more than any of his contemporaries Poe occupied a 
 central position in his generation; he was better acquainted 
 with the literary product of the time, and both by his residence 
 and his letters was in touch with a wide area of the country. 
 He had lived in Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New 
 York, and had repeatedly visited New England, and his corre- 
 spondence reached Cincinnati, St. Louis, Louisville, Tennessee 
 and Georgia. More than the others, he had national range. 
 
 Poe was a Southerner by his breeding ; he was an American 
 by his career; he was a citizen of the world by his renown. 
 It was a distinguishing trait of his personality that when his 
 first tales were hardly dry from the press, he was already 
 negotiating for publication in England. He always belonged 
 in spirit to the larger world. The adventurous sense of it was 
 his cadet dream of joining the armies of Poland when he left 
 
1 6 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 West Point. The literary stamp of it was that in the first 
 line of his criticism, unfledged critic that he was, he set up a 
 standard, not that of his leisured hearth of Virginia or the 
 newspaper offices of New York or the parlor coteries of 
 Boston, but the standard of all the world ; and though he con- 
 tracted opportunism, that was only the wear and tear of 
 practical life on a fine ideal. 
 
 But it is not enough to be a critic. No critic ever had his 
 hundredth birthday celebrated. Poe was from his youth an 
 all-round man of letters. One trait which peculiarly wins 
 the respect of his fellow craftsmen, I think, is that he never 
 was anything else but a man of letters. He never earned 
 any money except by his pen. He labored twenty years ; for 
 four of these he had a salary as an editor, and a dozen times 
 he spoke from a platform; otherwise he was an unattached 
 writer and lived from day to day. I have no manner of 
 doubt he was sincere in saying that in thus adhering to his 
 profession he cheerfully bore poverty. His profession pauper- 
 ized him. Is it not startling to think that we are gathered 
 here, in a city which is the shrine and throne of gold, to do 
 honor to a man who was a beggar all his days? It is a 
 striking tribute to true values. I make no complaint of fate. 
 Literature dedicates her sons to the vow of worldly sacrifice. 
 It has been so of old time. He was not chosen to be poor 
 more than the others were chosen. Hawthorne and Emerson 
 and Poe — the three most brilliant men in our literature — all 
 led meagre lives, but Poe alone was the perfect victim. Poe 
 not only lived meagrely; at times he starved. Poverty is a 
 terrible foe; it is thorough in its work on men and nations; 
 it kills. What a victory it is of the spirit over its life, of the 
 spirit that makes for immortality through all disguises of 
 human wretchedness — that we have today in our minds and 
 hearts, out of Poe's meagre and starved life, poetry, romance, 
 the imagery that fades not away ! It is true that there is that 
 in it which terrifies; here is the legend and superscription of 
 pain and death; his music is the requiem of the soul that 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 1 7 
 
 breathed it forth. But his, too, is praise. Poe made of his 
 fate his victory and, for the victim of life, that is the master- 
 stroke. We " bid fair peace be to his sable shroud." 
 
 It is fit now, though late, to bring the laurel to him who 
 first sent the dark green leaf across the sea to Tennyson and 
 Mrs. Browning, and among ourselves brought it to Haw- 
 thorne and Lowell in their obscure years. And he has more 
 to grace his memory — that which all men value, the kindly 
 recollection of those who were most nigh him. Poe won the 
 laurel and the marble ; but the mortal flower upon his grave is 
 his — that he endeared himself to his friends. He had many 
 friends. He had the best. There was no truer gentleman 
 then alive than Kennedy, who to the honor of Baltimore be- 
 friended his early manhood. There was no more kindly col- 
 league than Willis, who gave him his hand in New York and 
 never drew it away. There were no warmer comrades for 
 mates in life than Thomas, Halleck and Burr. Poe had also 
 that power which is one of the singularities of genius — the 
 power to let the soul shine on all. His office-boy idolized him; 
 children suffered him to play with them ; and every wayfarer 
 who touched his hand or had speech of him on his wandering 
 road, seems to have remembered the light of that day forever. 
 
 Sad are some of the thoughts that rise in me on this occasion. 
 I seem to share them with you. These traits of fortune and 
 of character to which I have alluded, belong to humanity, and 
 link genius to the understanding hearts of men; but genius 
 is itself the most revealing force of the soul; its manifesta- 
 tions are revelations of our nature. The genius of Poe was 
 one of the manifold forms of humanity; else it were not 
 genius; but that man who would speak rightly of him must, 
 in his vision of human nature, have room and marge enough 
 to know that the spirit of life is infinite in its flowering, that 
 the Shepherd of us all has many folds. 
 
OUR ISRAFEL. 
 
 In Memory of Edgar Allan Poe. 
 BY EDWIN MARKHAM. 
 
 Feb. 19, 1909. 
 
 I 
 
 The sad great gifts the austere Muses bring 
 In their stern hands to make their poets of 
 
 Were laid on him that he might darkly sing 
 Of Beauty, Death and Love. 
 
 They laid upon him hunger as a dower, 
 
 A hunger for a loveliness more strange 
 Than Earth can give — more wild than any hour 
 
 Of all this chance and change. 
 
 They laid upon him Music's trembling charm, 
 
 The mystery of sound, of shaken air, 
 Whose touch can lift the spirit or alarm — 
 
 Build rapture, build despair. 
 
 They touched him with imagination's rod, 
 
 The power that built these heavens that soar and seem- 
 These heavens that are the daring of some God 
 
 Stirred by the lyric dream. 
 
 And then (for oh, the Muses do not spare!) 
 
 They set for him one final gift apart : 
 They gave him sorrow as a pack to bear, 
 
 Sorrow to break the heart. 
 
 II 
 
 And so they called the poet into Time, 
 
 The saddest and the proudest of the race 
 
 That ever came this way with sound of rhyme, 
 In quest of Beauty's face. 
 
 He came with rumor of the mystery, 
 
 Crying the wonder ever on before, 
 The laureate of dreams that cannot be, 
 
 Of Night and the Nevermore. 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 1 9 
 
 He steered toward shadow with melodious helm, 
 Touching with somber prow the wharves of Dis, 
 
 Exploring all the dim and hollow realm 
 This side the last abyss. 
 
 He looked on cities in their crumbling hours, 
 Where Death obscurely mumbles out his rune, 
 
 Hoary, remote, alone, where time-torn towers 
 Hang spectral in the moon. 
 
 He mused among the dim sarcophagi, 
 
 While far upon the rim of ruin fled 
 A host of hooded forms that hurried by 
 
 With laughters to the dead. 
 
 Ill 
 
 He walked our streets as on a lonely strand: 
 
 His country was not here — it was afar. 
 Not here his home, not here his motherland, 
 
 But in some statelier star. 
 
 Life was his exile, Earth his alien shore, 
 
 And these were foreign faces that he passed : 
 For he had other, language, other lore, 
 
 And he must home at last. 
 
 His country was not here, but in the isles 
 
 Of Aidenn ringed around with lustrous seas, 
 Where golden galleys skim the silver miles 
 
 Or sleep upon the breeze. 
 
 And there were gardens where the fountains springs 
 
 In valleys of a many-colored grass — 
 Gardens where bulbuls in the shadows sing, 
 
 And rose-pale maidens pass — 
 
 Gardens of hyacinths and asphodels, 
 
 Inwoven with the sounds of warbling rills, 
 With triple-tinted suns and lilied wells, 
 
 Walled in by golden hills. 
 
20 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 And there he built him palaces of song, 
 
 Lifting their spires against the pallid moon, 
 
 With corridors where shapes of shadow throng 
 When night is at her noon. 
 
 He sought his dream-love there by many names 
 
 Of terror and of pity and of peace — 
 Lenore, Ligeia (burning like pale flames) 
 
 Morella, Berenice. 
 
 He trod high chambers lit with ruby light, 
 And heard in the hush the somber arras stir, 
 
 And stir again, in the deep and secret night, 
 With memories of her. 
 
 He heard the demon whispers in the deep, 
 
 And songs of deathless love where seraphs are; 
 
 He saw the cliffs of Time, a ghostly heap, 
 But over the cliffs the star ! 
 
 IV 
 
 O poet, not for you the trampling street, 
 
 The wrangling crowd that cry and clutch for gold, 
 
 And so you followed Beauty's flying feet 
 Into the dim and old. 
 
 O poet, life was bitter to your heart: 
 
 These stones have memories of the tears you shed. 
 Forgive the serpent tongue, the flying dart — 
 
 Forgive us from the dead. 
 
 You sang your song : we gave you scorn for pay : 
 For beauty's bread we gave a stone; and yet 
 
 Because our eyes were holden on the way, 
 Remember to forget. 
 
 Sing, Israfel : you have your star at last, 
 
 Your morning star ; but we — we still must live ! 
 
 So now that all is over, all is past, 
 Forget, forget — forgive ! 
 
THE POE COTTAGE FROM KINGS BRIDGE ROAD 
 
 In its original location 
 
 Photographed 1884 by Stoughton 
 
 POE'S LIFE IN FORDHAM. 
 BY HENRY NOBLE MACCRACKEN, Ph.D., 
 
 OF YALE UNIVERSITY. 
 
 HE three years from June, 1846, to June, 1849, 
 which Edgar Allan Poe passed at Fordham in our 
 Borough of the Bronx were made up of half a 
 year of foreboding and illness, of an " immemorial 
 year " of seclusion and inactivity, and of a year and a half 
 of fitful yet fruitful renewal of literary effort. One event 
 determines this division of his life; one shadow darkens his 
 clays to the end; the loss of his wife. The half-year of fore- 
 boding and illness tells the story of Poe's loss of self-mastery 
 brought on by dread of the coming of death to his Virginia ; 
 the immemorial, vear tells us of the prostration of his faculties 
 
22 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 when the blow had fallen; the eighteen months of fitful 
 effort outline the slow and only^partial recovery, as he put 
 aside his grief for her, and feverishly sought the world again. 
 
 For her sake Poe had left the house on Amity Street in the 
 city, nearer our old university home* than his Fordham house 
 is to this new one, had bidden farewell to the pleasant daily 
 society among the literati on Waverley Place, and practised 
 economy and looked for rest and recovery in the white cottage 
 on the Kingsbridge Road, of which I am to tell you. 
 
 In the very year that Poe came to Fordham the township 
 of West Farms was made, comprising all that part of the 
 township of Westchester lying west of the Bronx River, north 
 of the Harlem, south of Yonkers and east of the Hudson. It 
 included not only the region known as West Farms, but also 
 the land included in the old manors of Fordham and Mor- 
 risania. In all this territory, in Poe's day, lived not more 
 than three thousand people, of which number the village of 
 West Farms, at the head of navigation on the Bronx River, 
 contained about three hundred. No other collection in this 
 region was more than a mere hamlet, and Fordham was one 
 of the least of these. At first it was a mere cross-roads, where 
 the roads from Williams' or Williams's Bridge and Kings- 
 bridge met to continue to West Farms, and the Pelham Manor 
 road crossed east and west. It was only when the Harlem 
 railway gave to its station at that point the name of Fordham. 
 which up to that time had been vaguely attached to Kings- 
 bridge and its vicinity, that a distinct community settled down 
 at the gates of the Jesuit College of St. John. 
 
 The road from the station, winding up on a pavement of 
 native rock to the level of Fordham Ridge and turning sharply 
 to the north, in ten minutes passed close by the little old house 
 which Poe chose. The wider road of today goes even closer. 
 You who today have seen the house need no description of 
 it from me. Its interior has not changed save that the ex- 
 tension to the east, as Mr. W. H. Valentine tells me, is a later 
 
 * Washington Square East. 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 
 
 23 
 
 POE CHERRY TREE 
 
 Since cut down 
 
 From a Photograph by Geo. E. Stonebridge 
 
 addition. There were fruit-trees in the yard, cherry-trees 
 near the house, and an apple orchard farther off near the rocky 
 ledge, that served as retaining wall for the eastern part of the 
 acre. From the little piazza one could look out on the sloping 
 acre of closely cropped greensward under the trees, towards 
 the east and south, over St. John's grounds and the meadows 
 below them. The higher points of the ledge afforded glimpses 
 of the Long Island hills beyond the East River. To the north- 
 west of the cottage extended a wood. Here Poe walked with 
 his friends, or competed with them in friendly athletics. 
 
24 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 Later in his residence, Poe started a flower garden, and kept 
 singing birds in cages hung under the cherry branches. We 
 are told of mignonette and heliotrope, of dahlias and other 
 autumnal flowers. 
 
 The disposition of the rooms in the house is a matter of 
 uncertainty. It seems probable, however, that the west room 
 downstairs was a bedroom, the east a sittingroom; the west 
 room upstairs was Poe's study, the east Mrs. Clemm's room. 
 
 There were but few neighbors. Across the road, a little to 
 the south still stands John Valentine's white cottage; farther 
 up the road were others of the same type, preserving the old 
 Dutch ideal of neatness, compactness and simplicity. 
 
 The history of the Poe cottage, aside from Poe's brief 
 residence in it, has not hitherto interested Poe's many biog- 
 raphers. For the few facts I bave been able to gather about 
 it, I am chiefly indebted to the kindness of one of the members 
 of the New York University Council, Mr. Clarence H. Kelsey, 
 president of the Title Guarantee and Trust Company. To 
 go no further back than the end of the eighteenth century and 
 the Fordham Manor days, we find the little triangular piece of 
 ground about one acre in extent, with the cottage in its north- 
 west corner, in the possession of John Berrian. It was known 
 to the nearest farmer in 1816 as Berrian's land. In 1822 
 Jonas Farrington bought it for $500 and sold it to Richard 
 Corsa in March, 1828, for $650, after a sale and repurchase 
 in November and March 27-8. John Valentine bought the 
 tract from Corsa, March 28, 1846, for a thousand dollars. 
 He must have advertised the place for rent at once, for by 
 June, 1846, Poe had become his tenant. Acting on good 
 business principles, Valentine let the house for ten per cent, 
 of its cost, a hundred dollars a year. 
 
 To the cottage, then, in the summer of 1846, came the poet, 
 aged thirty-six, his wife, aged twenty-three, and his wife's 
 mother, who was also his aunt, a woman of fifty-six. From 
 the stray scraps we can gather, they were from the first pleased 
 with their home. " The place is a beautiful one," wrote Poe 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 
 
 25 
 
 FORDHAM MANOR REFORMED CHURCH 
 
 Virginia was buried here in the Valentine Vault 
 
 From a Photograph by A. E. Lickman 
 
 to a friend. Two years later, in a fanciful love-letter to Mrs. 
 Whitman, he placed this cottage in an idyllic setting not unlike 
 its real surroundings, as the home of his happiest dreams. 
 This he afterwards enlarged into the sketch called Landor's 
 Cottage. Here the resemblance is even striking. 
 
 He writes : " The main building was about twenty- four feet 
 long and sixteen broad, certainly not more. Its total height 
 from the ground to the apex of the roof, could not have ex- 
 ceeded eighteen feet." He tells how from a tree in front of 
 
26 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 the door hung cages, with mocking-bird, oriole and bobolink. 
 The pillars of the piazza were wreathed in jasmine and sweet 
 honeysuckle. The whole house, with its wings, was con- 
 structed of the old-fashioned Dutch shingles, broad, and with 
 unrounded corners. The road after passing the gate seemed 
 to lie upon a natural ledge, sloping gradually down along the 
 face of the northeastern cliffs. (This corresponds well to 
 the AVilliamsbridge road, as it used to run.) " The expanse 
 of the velvety green turf was relieved here and there, by an 
 occasional snowy shrub." 
 
 I need not multiply the likenesses of Landor's cottage to 
 the general picture of Poe's cottage as described by visitors. 
 It seems clear that far from being discontented with his 
 simple home, the poet could idealize it with delight, and put 
 many of its characteristic features into the romantic home 
 of his imagination. 
 
 " It was the sweetest little cottage imaginable," said Mrs. 
 Clemm, and added : " how supremely happy we were in our 
 dear cottage home ! We three lived only for each other. 
 Eddie rarely left his beautiful home. I attended to his 
 literary business, for he, poor fellow, knew nothing about 
 money transactions. How should he, brought up in luxury 
 and extravagance ? " 
 
 " He passed the greater part of the morning in his study, 
 and, after he had finished his task for the day, he worked in 
 our beautiful flower garden, or read and recited poetry to us. 
 Every one who knew him intimately, loved him." 
 
 But there were no flowers in the garden the first year. 
 Those who called upon the poet, whether literary friends from 
 the city, the kindly neighbors, or the companionable fathers 
 from the Jesuit College, found an anxious household. During 
 the first few months Poe's anxiety over his wife drove him 
 to nervous breakdown. To an early visitor he talked of his 
 Marginalia and Literati, a series of short critical essays on 
 notable figures in New York's literary world, then appearing. 
 The strain under which he labored is apparent. To a sug- 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 
 
 27 
 
 OLD AQUEDUCT PATH 
 
 A favorite walk of Poe 
 
 From a Photograph by Geo. E. Stonebridge 
 
 gestion that some of the criticisms were unduly eulogistic, he 
 said, " If (a critic) were placed on the rack, or if one he 
 loved better than his own life were writhing there, I can con- 
 ceive of his forging a note against the Bank of Fame, in 
 favour of a would-be poet. . . Would you blame a man 
 for not allowing his sick wife to die? " 
 
 Occasionally Poe went to the city, by the Harlem railway, 
 which ran half a dozen trains each way daily between Wil- 
 liamsbridge and the City Hall. More often, no doubt, as she 
 says, it was Mrs. Clemm who went. " Winter after winter," 
 
28 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 wrote N. P. Willis, " for years the most touching sight to 
 us, in this whole city, has been that tireless minister to genius, 
 thinly and insufficiently clad, going from office to office with 
 a poem, or an article on some literary subject, to sell — some- 
 times simply pleading in a broken voice that he was ill, and 
 begging for him, mentioning nothing but that ' he was ill,' 
 whatever might be the reason for his writing nothing — and 
 never, amid all her tears and recitals of distress, suffering one 
 syllable to escape her lips that could convey a doubt of him, 
 or a complaint, or a lessening of pride in his genius and good 
 intentions." 
 
 But with the falling leaves fell destitution. In her bed- 
 chamber, scant and poverty-stricken, yet so purely clean, lay 
 the wife. Only a white counterpane and sheets covered the 
 straw bed. She was wrapped in her husband's great coat, and 
 a large tortoise-shell cat lay on her bosom, giving warmth to 
 her chilled frame. 
 
 The visitor who tells us this enlisted the sympathies of Mrs. 
 M. L. Shew, the daughter of a physician, and full of charity. 
 All we need to know of the blessed presence of this woman 
 in the Fordham home, can be understood, without comment, 
 from this letter, one of the most touching in our language, 
 and written but two days before Virginia's death. 
 
 " Kindest dearest Friend — My poor Virginia yet lives, 
 although failing fast and now suffering much pain. May 
 God grant her life until she sees you and thanks you once 
 again. Her bosom is full to overflowing — like my own — 
 with a boundless, inexpressible gratitude to you. Lest she 
 may never see you more — she bids me say that she sends you 
 her sweetest kiss of love and will die blessing you. But come, 
 oh come tomorrow. Yes, I will be calm; everything you so 
 nobly wish to see me. My mother sends you, also, her warm- 
 est love and thanks. She begs me to ask you, if possible, to 
 make arrangements at home so that you may stay with us 
 tomorrow. I enclose the order to the Postmaster. Heaven 
 bless you and farewell. Edgar A. Poe." 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 
 
 2 9 
 
 flMgE|p|MBjik !*\5„ ^Hj 
 
 WBlfP^ ll| wiwww H^fci IT Mr ^\JM 
 
 ; -%dft - aaJT 
 
 
 HIGH BRIDGE— A HAUNT OF THE POET 
 
 The Speedway in the foreground is modern 
 
 From a Photograph by Geo. E. Stonebridge 
 
 Throughout the immemorial year of 1847 that followed, 
 Mrs. Shew remained, to use Poe's phrase, "' his good spirit, his 
 loyal heart, and an angel to his forlorn and darkened nature." 
 In view of the fact that our Poe celebration enjoys the 
 hospitality of the New York University, it is interesting to 
 remember that Mrs. Shew took Poe's case for diagnosis to 
 Dr. Valentine Mott, professor in the New York University 
 Medical College and one of the greatest physicians of his time. 
 Their decision was that in his best health Poe suffered from 
 lesion of one side of the brain. Night and day, sharing 
 the watch with Mrs. Clemm this devoted woman brought the 
 poet up from his prostration. Her reward was the undying- 
 gratitude of the poet, and three poems addressed to her. In 
 one of these Poe numbers himself as one 
 
30 BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 " Of all who on despair's unhallowed bed 
 Lying down to die, have suddenly arisen 
 At thy soft-spoken words ' Let there be light.' " 
 
 Another of these poems, now lost, since the lady did not 
 wish it to be published, was composed from the chatter of 
 Poe's fevered fancy taken down by Mrs. Shew. It repre- 
 sented, as Mr. Ingram tells us in The Bookman for January, 
 1909, the kind nurse, " so tired, so weary," watching until the 
 pulse shall sink to eighty beats and the sedative be admin- 
 istered. At last the time comes, and the fragment goes on, 
 
 " The soft head bows, the sweet eyes close, 
 The faithful heart yields to repose. 
 The pulse beats ten, and intermits, 
 God nerve the soul that ne'er forgets, 
 In calm or storm, by night or day, 
 Its steady toil, its loyalty." 
 
 The remainder of this year was devoted to recovery and 
 revery. By the middle of March, Poe was out of bed. 
 Sometimes he walked over to West Farms, the nearest post- 
 office for- his letters, sometimes as had been his wont, he 
 " vagabonded " through the woods ; more often he took his 
 favorite walk over the aqueduct right of way and across High 
 Bridge. In Poe's time the aqueduct walk had been builded 
 only three or four years. It has hardly changed in three 
 score years. No more delightful path can be imagined than 
 the grassy turf above the aqueduct in spring. Oxford has 
 her Addison's Walk ; let New York commemorate Poe's Walk. 
 
 Indefinite as Poe's descriptions of scenes generally are, I 
 think it likely that it was the view of the Harlem valley 
 from the lofty bridge, that suggested to Poe the account of 
 the river journey at the opening of The Domain of Arnheim. 
 This was published in March, 1847. None of the river scene 
 was in the earlier versions of this sketch, The Landscape 
 Garden, written before Poe came to Fordham. The rocky 
 and precipitous sides of the river, the rich dense foliage of 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 
 
 31 
 
 r>^ 
 
 LAAJ 
 
 JT/AJK i 
 
 
 r y >«r 
 
 rm&munm 
 
 iy^* 
 
 1C1 
 
 KB* 1 A 
 
 M 
 
 f\ : l 
 
 
 
 
 >!' i£*S? 
 
 
 
 Jm^Emmj' I "I l i 
 
 8 ^»J5 
 
 'M&fc 
 
 
 
 F* f/v 
 
 
 f Tu -'^^fcMHHT «3ri 
 
 
 _. .' ^^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 GRAVEYARD FORMERLY AT THE SOUTHEAST CORNER OF 
 FORDHAM LANDING ROAD AND SEDGWICK AVE. 
 
 Possibly the source of Poe's imagery in Ulalume 
 From a Photograph by Comfort 
 
 the trees among the rocks, the continual twisting of the stream, 
 the wide basin and lower hills of the Saw-mill creek end of 
 the stream, are all found in this romantic description. Poe 
 told Mrs. Whitman that he walked on High Bridge at all 
 hours, and that he loved the place. 
 
 Far more interesting than the Domain of Arnheim, how- 
 ever, is the other production of Poe's immemorial year, 
 Ulalume, the mystical tone-poem. Mrs. Whitman ten years 
 later thought she remembered that Poe had told her it had 
 been suggested by a midnight walk on the anniversary of a 
 burial. It is of reviving life and ambition, pictured as a 
 beautiful woman, that Poe tells. She wanders with him on 
 a night in the lonesome October, until they are confronted 
 with a tomb, the tomb of his lost Ulalume, and the mad grief 
 for the one he had lost returns. 
 
32 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 I put it forward timorously as a suggestion, that Poe has 
 followed in this poem, the walk from his home down the 
 Fordham Landing Road to what is now Sedgwick Avenue, 
 where formerly was a graveyard of some size. Here was the 
 " alley " shaded with great trees — cut down, I am sorry to say, 
 when the road was widened — here was the downward path, 
 and the dark tarn, dimly seen, may have been the smooth wide 
 waters of the Harlem seen through the barren trees from the 
 old graveyard. And here at the end of the path were tombs 
 to remind him of the tomb of Virginia, who was buried not 
 far away, behind the Fordham Manor church in the Valen- 
 tines' vault. I like to think that Poe walked this way, and 
 received inspiration for his mystic lines from this spot. The 
 vagaries of an antiquary, you know, must be forgiven. 
 
 Arnhcim, Ulalume, and Eureka, these are the products of 
 Poe's immemorial year. The last was, according to Poe, a 
 prose-poem ; to the uninitiated it was a lecture on the universe, 
 from the proceeds of which the poet hoped to get funds to 
 start his long-dreamt-of magazine. As philosophy it has never 
 been seriously treated by the philosophical world; upon the 
 copy in the Yale library some scornful youth has penciled 
 " This is the lore of a child." Yet there is enough of the 
 stars about it to hint at the night-communings of the poet 
 with them in his rambles through the Bronx woods. 
 
 And now we enter the last period of his residence at Ford- 
 ham, beginning with the year 1848. The publication of 
 Eureka gave him some money, and he made a short visit to 
 Richmond. The early summer was notable for the composi- 
 tion of The Bells. The first stanzas of the poem, as is well 
 known, were written at the home of Mrs. Shew in the city; 
 the rest, or nineteen-twentieths, was probably written at Ford- 
 ham. Since, according to the city directories of 1848 and 
 1849, Mrs. Shew was living at 51 Tenth Street, near Broad- 
 way, the church-bells which annoyed Poe, and led this friend 
 to suggest that instead of annoyance he should get from them 
 some verses, were the bells of Grace Church, which edifice 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 33 
 
 then, as now, was on Tenth Street at the corner of Broad- 
 way. Mrs. Shew, with a physician's mind, but nothing of the 
 poetic, desired merely to relieve the overwrought tension of 
 the poet's fevered brain. The line she set him was " the little 
 silver bells." By the time he had written eighteen lines the 
 tension was gone and he fell almost immediately into a twelve- 
 hours sleep. Next day Mrs. Shew drove him back to Fordham. 
 The latter part of the summer and the fall of this year were 
 chiefly devoted to a woman of a very different sort, Mrs. 
 Sarah Helen Whitman of Providence. She was a poet; she 
 wrote poems and valentines to the impressionable man, 
 
 " I seem 
 To lie entranced as in some wondrous dream ; 
 All earthly joys forgot, all earthly fear, 
 Purged in the light of thy resplendent sphere." 
 
 These are some of her words to Poe. But she could not 
 give the poet what he needed most, — a physician's wisdom, and a 
 nurse's constant attention. The result was a broken engage- 
 ment, and Poe, disillusioned and embittered, wrote in January, 
 1849, to Mrs. Richmond of Lowell, a new friend: " From this 
 day forth I shun the pestilential society of literary women. 
 They are a heartless, unnatural, venomous, dishonorable set, 
 with no guiding principle but inordinate self-esteem." 
 
 This Mrs. Annie Richmond, the Annie of his poem, whose 
 friendship he had found on a lecturing trip to Lowell in the 
 summer of 1848, was now his only comfort. In January of 
 1849 Poe thought to leave Fordham, and to live with Mrs. 
 Clemm in Lowell near Annie ; but there were difficulties in the 
 way, and by February he had taken the cottage for another 
 year. Other equally sudden changes took place in his affairs. 
 In January he was full of hope, in March he was hopeless and 
 penniless. Still the literary work went on; besides various 
 tales of no great merit, the early part of the year saw the 
 composition of Annabel Lee and For Annie. 
 
 Then came the chance of lecturing at Richmond, and about 
 
34 BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 the end of June, 1849, Poe bade farewell to Mrs. Clemm, 
 whom, like the child he was, he still called " Muddie," and 
 left the Fordham home forever. Through the three and a 
 half months that brought him to his death, it is not my duty 
 to lead you. His life in Fordham was ended. 
 
 Let me in a word sum up the later history of the cottage. 
 The kind neighbors came in, and helped Mrs. Clemm to gather 
 her few effects, and leave the sad gray house. Two articles, 
 the Poe family Bible and the clock, are still in the Bronx in 
 the hands of Mr. W. H. Valentine and his brother. Mr. 
 Valentine told me recently that he was a child of four when 
 in 1850, he had his first Christmas-tree in the Poe cottage. 
 
 Since 1866, when the Valentines sold it, the property has 
 belonged to Mr. John Berrian, Mr. Charles Carey, and finally 
 to the present owner, M. Chauvet. Mr. Carey once offered 
 the house to the Park Department on the condition that it be 
 set up in Bronx Park. The offer was refused. The obvious 
 course at the present time, for a city with real civic pride, 
 would be to buy the house and the plot adjoining, as a part 
 of Poe Park. Certainly no other house in this city can boast 
 of having sheltered a poet engaged in the composition of 
 poems of such haunting and melancholy beauty, and of such 
 enduring worth. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 Notes and Map.* 
 
 * Prepared at Dr. MacCracken's request, by the Title Guarantee and 
 Trust Co., through the courtesy of its president, Mr. Clarence H. Kelsey; 
 amplified by Mr. John Hume, Assistant Engineer in charge of street open- 
 ings in the Bronx. 
 
 The Poe Cottage stood in the northwest corner of a 
 small tract of about one acre, almost triangular in shape, 
 
36 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 622 Cp. 37 originally and from a very early date, part of the 
 W - Co - farm of Hendrick Ryer. Some time before 1822 
 
 John Berrian came into possession of this plot, for 
 in that year he sells it to Jonas Farrington for 
 $500.00. This undoubtedly included the house, 
 which seems to have been standing in April of 
 1816, for in that year Hendrick Ryer, conveying 
 the adjacent form to his son, Henry Ryer, describes 
 the boundary line as running " southwest along a 
 Z X y^ r 27 ledge of rocks to land of John Berrian at a Cedar 
 Bush at the point of rock, and thence along Ber- 
 rian's land hack of the house to the stone on the 
 road to Kingsbridge marked " L." 
 
 623 Cp. 191 Farrington sold the acre to Peter Lawrence in 
 622CP.60 November, 1827, for $600.00, buying it back in 
 
 IV. Co. March of 1828 for the same price. April 1st, 
 622 Cp. 47 ^28, he sold it to Richard Corsa for $650.00, who 
 112 Co -17 ret ained it until March 28th, 1846, when John 
 
 W. Co. Valentine purchased it for $1,000.00. 
 
 The Valentine family continued to own this little acre 
 until 1866, so it appears certain, both from the records and 
 from the article quoted above, that John Valentine was Poe's 
 landlord. 
 
 The description of the acre in 622 Cp. 37 and subsequent 
 deeds is as follows: 
 
 " Beginning at the northwest corner of the lot at a stone 
 marked ' L.' 
 
 " Thence east and southeast along the land of Hendrick 
 Ryer to a cedar bush by the first point of rocks. 
 
 " Thence along said land to land of Peter Lawrence, for- 
 merly of Richard Berrian. 
 
 " Thence along that land, southwest, in a line with a stone 
 wall along the road by the stone barn, up the hill, close to a 
 young apple tree. 
 
 " Thence, along the road to King's Bridge to, the stone 
 marked ' L ' and beginning. 
 
 " One acre of land more or less." 
 
POE AT THE END OF A CENTURY. 
 
 BY HAMILTON W. MABIE. 
 
 CENTURY has passed since Edgar Allan Poe 
 was born and sixty-nine years since he died ; surely 
 the time has come for a just estimate of the 
 quality and value of his work. It has been partly 
 his fault and partly his misfortune that opinion about him 
 has been so confused and conflicting; that he is, in the judg- 
 ment of many, the most original figure in American literature ; 
 and that he is, in the opinion of others, a man of notable but 
 unreal talent; a magician who achieved extraordinary effects 
 by mechanical, artificial and insincere methods ; a writer whose 
 art was largely a subtle dexterity and not a skill of the soul. 
 This divergence of opinion found some justification in the 
 confusion of Poe's life, its serious and undeniable faults, the 
 disastrous weakness of his will. In so far as inadequate 
 recognition of his genius has been due to moral weakness and 
 to the limitations of his art, Poe has been paying the price 
 exacted and rightly exacted of every man born in a world in 
 which — to quote John Morley — morality is not in the order 
 of things; it is the order of things. 
 
 But Poe's misfortunes have greatly outnumbered his faults. 
 His prose and verse were written at a time when our literature 
 was definitely and almost of set purpose didactic; when the 
 moral feeling and teaching were so obvious that even the way- 
 faring man, though in great haste, could not escape them; 
 when the passion for reform in the literature-producing sec- 
 tion of the country was steadily rising; when, to quote Lowell, 
 " all New England was a pulpit " ; when to be a preacher was 
 a part of every man's vocation because a host of Americans 
 could not recognize any other form of teaching; when the 
 meaning and function of art were so little understood in a 
 new country sorely pressed by its tasks that they were negli- 
 
38 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 gible; when practical work of some sort was held to be the 
 only authentic and adequate expression of a man's spirit; 
 when to be an artist meant, for the majority of Americans, 
 to be a painter of tavern signs, a mere decorator, or a reveller 
 strayed from ancient immoral revels with scantily clothed 
 goddesses and muses, one who had no lot in a world in which 
 the saving of a man's soul was the one real business of life. 
 
 Of beauty as the ultimate form of truth, and of art as the 
 universal language of the human spirit, the men of Poe's time 
 had only the faintest perception. If Hawthorne's subtle 
 genius had not so deeply concerned itself with sin it would 
 not- have gained its early recognition ; and Emerson's serene 
 and beautiful insight, translating life into larger terms, made 
 men of traditional temper shiver as if a fresh wind had sud- 
 denly penetrated a close room. A host of Poe's contem- 
 poraries did not understand him because they spoke a dialect 
 while he used the universal language; and there are still those 
 to whom the dialect is dear because, like the dialect spoken 
 on the canals of Venice, it offers such a large vocabulary of 
 abusive and profane words. 
 
 Poe was unfortunate in the period in which he lived be- 
 cause it was alien to him and out of sympathy with his point 
 of view and conception of art; he has been also marvelously 
 unlucky in his friends. Enemies are rarely dangerous; their 
 motives are so obvious and their methods so clumsy that, in 
 most cases, their attacks are purely spectacular; like those 
 animosities which some newspapers substitute for principles. 
 The bombs our enemies prepare with malevolent devotion and 
 surreptitious skill generally burst in their hands. But friends 
 are a great and serious peril ; and at times one understands 
 Ibsen's cynical remark that he could not afford to have friends ; 
 they were too expensive. When Gilfillan, in a moment of 
 rashness, knocked at the door of the house in Cheyne Row 
 and Carlyle opened it in person the ardent admirer introduced 
 himself by saying: " Mr. Carlyle, I've been lecturing on you." 
 " And a damned piece of impertinence it was," cried the great 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 39 
 
 man as he violently closed the door. It is a perilous hour 
 for a writer when men and women confuse clamorous lauda- 
 tion with intelligent appreciation and will not let the air rest 
 from their noisy protestations; and for the poet the hour in 
 which he becomes food for recitation is often the hour of 
 doom. That Poe has survived the pealing of the bells and 
 the invocation to the Raven is a sign of his genius ; it has been 
 said, you remember, that the fact that the Christian religion 
 had survived written sermons is proof of its divine origin. 
 
 It is a serious misfortune, too, when a man's friends juggle 
 with the facts of his life or claim for him qualities and ex- 
 cellences which he obviously lacked, or push his inferior work 
 to the front and demand that on the strength of it he be 
 admitted into the company of the immortals. All these 
 things Poe's unwise admirers have clone : they have tried to 
 ignore indisputable facts, they have claimed for him a vitality 
 and range of genius which he does not possess ; and they have 
 pressed his secondary work on the attention of the world. 
 
 Poe's fame has survived the enormously over-worked popu- 
 larity of " The Raven " and " The Bells." The first of these 
 poems is probably known by more people than any other 
 piece of verse yet written on this continent; obviously that 
 is a fact which has its weight. In both poems Poe's technical 
 skill is marvelous; he plays like a great virtuoso on the open 
 and closed vowels; he produces the most striking effects by 
 the use of the refrain and repetend. In the world of sound 
 these poems are of a magical effectiveness; they have a 
 hypnotic influence. But while the outer courts of the soul 
 are swept with melody the inner courts are silent. Poe's 
 genius must be sought elsewhere ; there is a note of artificiality 
 in both these poems ; they have no spiritual root, and no deep 
 artistic necessity fashioned them. 
 
 It has been Poe's misfortune also to fall into the hands 
 of malicious or self-exploiting biographers, whose portraits 
 of him have been as much out of drawing as is Froude's 
 striking but misleading sketch of Carlyle; examples of that 
 
40 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 kind of portrait painting in which the details are true and the 
 general effect distorted and false. There are evil elements 
 in every man, but to paint a man as if he were a devil is to 
 violate a fundamental canon of art as well as of morals; for 
 truth is the foundation of morals and art. It would be well 
 if we could erase everything we know and the vast number 
 of things we have been told about Poe and make fresh 
 acquaintance with him through his work ; but since that is im- 
 possible let us erase our preconceptions and prejudices and pay 
 him the tribute we owe to all men, great or small, obscure or 
 famous — the clear recognition and the frank statement of the 
 truth. 
 
 We should have no concern with Poe's personal history 
 on this anniversary if distorted reports and exaggerated state- 
 ments had not affected the judgment of a host of people and 
 were not thrust upon us by those who are afflicted with an 
 ignoble relish for the weakness of their fellows, by those to 
 whom insignificant personal details are more interesting than 
 artistic achievements, and by those unimaginative and un- 
 sympathetic persons whose judgments are matters of the tape 
 line and foot rule. 
 
 Fortunately it is possible to put this matter of Poe's in- 
 firmities and the principles of judgment to be applied in such 
 cases succinctly and be done with them. It is, in the first 
 place, immoral and useless to attempt to conceal the facts or to 
 minimize their effects ; the first duty to a man of Poe's quality 
 is to state the facts dispassionately and to give them their 
 full weight. It is, in the second place, immoral and useless 
 to attempt to ignore the fact that the law is supreme and that 
 it is executed with exact impartiality on the man of genius and 
 on the average man; both pay the same penalties, but the 
 man of genius pays most obviously and pays most dearly, and 
 he pays where the penalty falls most heavily : on his power 
 of growth, on his sanity of vision, on his grasp and concen- 
 tration. Poe paid heavily, not in the charm of his art nor 
 in his technical skill; but in the richness of his production, 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 4 1 
 
 the quality of his insight, the fibre of his art, the diminishing 
 energy of his mind. He paid in the blighting interruptions 
 of his work, his increasing detachment from men, his dimin- 
 ishing independence, the confusion of his affairs, the pre- 
 mature disintegration of his delicately endowed spirit. This 
 is an old story; it was told and retold by his contemporaries; 
 none knew so well as he ; none felt its tragic blight so deeply 
 as he. But must it be retold year after year as if it were 
 the positive achievement and not the negative limitation ; as if 
 it were the sum total of a career rather than an incident in 
 that career, impossible to overlook but always to be kept 
 subordinate? Is there no statute of limitations against weak- 
 nesses of the body when the spirit is brought into judgment? 
 Is the light of the torch to be denied because the hand that 
 holds it sometimes wavers? Are we still so far from an 
 understanding of life that we confuse the power of seeing 
 weaknesses and offences with the ability to measure that 
 relation of resistance to temptation which is the one determin- 
 ing factor in moral judgment 
 
 In its judgment of men of genius whose careers have been 
 marked by moral confusion, wrote Carlyle in his noble essay 
 on Burns, the world is habitually unjust ; " unjust on many 
 grounds, of which this one may be stated as the substance : 
 It decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes; and not 
 positively but negatively, less on what is clone right, than on 
 what is or is not clone wrong." When two ships come to 
 anchorage ; one clean and sound, with masts straight and sails 
 white, and the other blackened and stained, with broken spars 
 and torn sails ; before you pronounce judgment find out what 
 voyages they have made : one may have crossed the harbor 
 and the other may have come round the world ! Men and 
 women who have never been outside the harbor are prone to 
 love judgment and pursue it with ignorant assurance. 
 
 Let us concede, too, the limitations of Poe's art, to keep for 
 the moment on the negative side of his work with many of 
 his critics ; let us frankly recognize that he was a man of 
 
42 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 solitary temper; that he never struck root in any soil and that 
 coming upon his work without the marks of authorship it 
 might be difficult to determine its locality; that there was a 
 touch of unreality in that work and that it often lacks the deep 
 sincerity of the art that is bone of a man's bone and flesh of 
 his flesh ; that his talent was not nourished and warmed by a 
 large, rich humanity; that he worked habitually in phantasy, 
 so to speak, and that his men and women are phantoms and 
 the world they live in spectral ; that the field of his observa- 
 tion and interest was narrow; that his prose and verse lack 
 mass, reality, passion, spirituality. 
 
 Accept the confusion of his life and the limitations of his 
 art: what remains?: "the singular and exquisite genius of 
 Poc," to quote Mr. Swinburne; a reputation and influence in 
 Europe unique in its quality in the experience of American 
 poets ; the record of a service to American literature in 
 criticism of high importance ; a group of prose tales which 
 in originality of invention, skill in construction and perfection 
 of form place their author with the masters of the short 
 story, and a few poems touched with the magic which wears 
 beauty like a flower that has never known tool or toil. He 
 stands beside Emerson and Hawthorne in the forefront of 
 our literature by virtue of this individual genius, this dis- 
 tinction of craftsmanship, this grace of manner. 
 
 Do you question his right to this companionship because 
 his claim rests on songs so few and of a quality so elusive? 
 When was poetry measured by magnitude and valued by 
 weight? Does not its imponderability, its- aerial grace, carry 
 it to a height to which no ardor of toil or straining of the 
 muscles can rise? How little there is of Keats and how 
 securely his kinship with the greater English poets rests on 
 that group of odes and sonnets? How often Emerson came 
 with serene and smiling face to the temple; how rarely he 
 brought the gods the gifts of immortal poetry? 
 
 We rarely think of Poe as a critic but his work in this 
 field filled a large place in the minds of his contemporaries and 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 43 
 
 must fill a large place in any future survey of American 
 literature. It was in the columns of the " Southern Literary 
 Messenger " that his penetrating and searching comment on 
 the books and writers of the day made lovers of literature 
 aware that a writer of fresh and original force was weighing 
 and measuring the literary work of the hour. There were 
 a few writers of high intelligence and a little group of men 
 of real if somewhat narrow genius making the second chapter 
 of our literary history, but there was so little authoritative 
 criticism that local feeling and provincial taste were in pos- 
 session of the field; and slovenly workmanship, commonplace 
 thinking, silly sentimentalism and cheap and pretentious dic- 
 tion went unchallenged to the rewards of reputation and 
 success. Seventy-four years ago last December Poe fell upon 
 " Norman Leslie," a popular novel of flamboyant mediocrity, 
 and made an example of it by a cutting disclosure of its 
 crudity, in a review of such penetration and intelligence that it 
 arrested the attention of thoughtful people in all parts of the 
 country. Here, evidently, was a critic who knew the best 
 that had been thought and said, to whom local pride and 
 provincial standards were things of naught ; a judge with 
 ideas and convictions, who knew the law and had small 
 mercy for offenders. It was clear also that here was a judge 
 who invested his function with the interest which flows from 
 a mind of extraordinary penetration and a style charged with 
 individual force. " Norman Leslie " has gone the way of all 
 crude and pretentious books into that limbo which must have 
 been enormously enlarged when the printing press began to 
 multiply the leaves which make for the weariness of nations, 
 and Poe rendered a signal service to our literature by defining 
 a standard in an age of ignorance and indifference to artistic 
 quality in the arts. That he found pleasure in the destructive 
 process does not diminish the judicial value of his work ; a 
 just judge must always find satisfaction in bringing offenders 
 to book and making an end of that kind of anarchy which 
 takes the form of inefficiency and slovenliness. 
 
44 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 Poe does not belong with Goethe, Coleridge, Sainte Beuve 
 and Arnold among the critics who have made criticism litera- 
 ture; but he had rare analytical power, a keen sense of form, 
 a broad if discursive knowledge of literature, a perception of 
 principles which gave him standing ground for impersonal 
 judgment; and he did not object to controversy when sharp 
 and merciless condemnation was the duty of the hour. In 
 the admirable edition of his works edited by Mr. Stedman 
 and Professor Woodberry, his criticism fills three volumes 
 and has not lost its interest. 
 
 The time was ripe for frank and disinterested criticism, 
 and Poe not only recognized the opportunity but regarded 
 himself as having definite reformatory work to do. He was 
 a born lover of beauty and of art for its own sake, without 
 reference to anything beyond the immediate impression pro- 
 duced; and he was, therefore, well adapted to the task of 
 judging a generation whose limited intelligence and uncertain 
 taste in matters of workmanship made it the dupe or the victim 
 of the cheap, the meretricious, and pretentious in contemporary 
 writing. Much of his critical writing was of slight value; 
 none of it is likely to survive by reason of its intrinsic interest, 
 for Poe was creative and masterful only when his imagination 
 was in play. But this work absorbed a large part of his time ; 
 it attracted wide attention among his contemporaries, and it 
 filled an important place in the literary development of the 
 country. He was quick to recognize excellence, and his early 
 discernment of Hawthorne's quality must always be remem- 
 bered to his credit ; he hated slovenly work and vulgarity of 
 manner, and never hesitated to hold them up to ridicule ; he 
 meant to be impartial and disinterested; but he was some- 
 times misled by his own wilfulness of mind, as when he 
 failed to discriminate between Longfellow's frank and open 
 use of existing literary material and plagiarism; and he was 
 sometimes blinded by his theories of art, as in his sweeping 
 condemnation of the writers who were more or less in sym- 
 pathy with the Transcendental movement. He was not 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 45 
 
 entirely free from those personal influences which at times 
 deflect the judgment of most critics : he was sometimes led 
 away by the showy brilliancy of a momentary success ; his 
 poise was disturbed by his own conditions; he often wrote 
 under great pressure and without due consideration and self- 
 restraint. His critical work was, however, in the main, 
 sound, wholesome, and of great value in educating public, 
 opinion. The fact that his estimates of Bryant, Cooper, 
 Hawthorne, Lowell, and Tennyson, formed when these writers 
 were making the first disclosures of their genius, were largely 
 predictive of the judgment of a later and more critical age, 
 is conclusive evidence of his possession of critical insight and 
 power. 
 
 In a short story published in " The Southern Literary Mes- 
 senger " in 1835 Poe brought onto the stage a figure that was 
 to become typical in his fiction and to reappear again and again, 
 under various names, in his later work. Egseus in Berenice 
 belongs to the race of visionaries whose sphere of interest and 
 experience touches the realities of life only at rare intervals 
 and then solely for the sake of heightening the sense of its 
 difference and remoteness. Gloomy towers, gray hereditary 
 halls, a solitary and desolate landscape, subtly suggest to the 
 senses the tragedy of disordered fancy, morbid temperament, 
 diseased will, and abnormal fate which is to be worked out 
 in a series of impressions designed to envelop the reader in 
 an atmosphere of melancholy forebodings. The moment one 
 breathes the air of Poe's tales an oppressive sense of some- 
 thing ominous and sinister is felt. For Poe had the art which 
 Maeterlinck has so successfully practised, of securing posses- 
 sion of the reader's mind by assailing his senses one after 
 the other with the same set of sensations. Poe's tales, like 
 Maeterlinck's plays, are marvellously constructed to shut the 
 reader in by excluding all other objects and impressions until 
 his imagination is entirely at the mercy of the story-teller. 
 Like those Egyptian temples which produced, by architectural 
 devices, an impression of depth and space, out of all proper- 
 
46 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 tion to their magnitude, Poe's tales have the magical and 
 elusive influence of imaginative suggestion. We are never 
 absolutely convinced of their reality, but we are entirely under 
 their spell. They withdraw us completely from the world of 
 reality by the skill with which the scenes are changed in the 
 Opera House at Bayreuth; one scene merging into another 
 so gradually that the spectator is transported from the sunlit 
 glade to the dusky grotto without the consciousness that his 
 senses are being deceived. Poe effects the transition into the 
 realm of fantasy by an art so rare and so beguiling that he 
 almost persuades us that we are dealing with realities and not 
 with abstractions. 
 
 Egjeus has no human warmth or passion; although, like 
 most of Poe's heroes, he is consumed with the desire of posses- 
 sion. Berenice is a veritable phantasm, and never for a 
 moment deceives us by the semblance of reality; her fate is 
 repulsive, for Poe's artistic feeling often failed to keep him 
 in the realm of pure suggestion in dealing with the horrible. 
 In the most perfect of the prose tales, The Fall of the House 
 of Usher, Ligeia, Eleanora, and The Masque of the Red 
 Death, the full force of Poe's marvellous accuracy and 
 vraiscmblancc of detail is felt by the imagination; but it must 
 be added that the failure to completely possess the mind of the 
 reader is due to no limitation in Poe's art; it is due to the 
 limitation of his material. He went as far on the road to 
 complete illusion as his subject-matter permitted; but his 
 subject-matter was so largely made up of the morbid, the 
 abnormal, the phantasmal, that it can never seem other than 
 it was in its substance. In these tales, so full of powerful 
 effects and charms wrought out of the potencies of sin, disease, 
 solitary desolation, abnormal play of the senses, Poe's artistic 
 quality is supreme ; in them, as in half a dozen poems, he 
 is one of the modern masters of technique; and their limita- 
 tions as works of art must be sought not in the skill but in 
 the soul of the workman. That limitation is found in the 
 fact that Poe deals with experience of a very narrow and 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 47 
 
 limited kind; with emotions, passions, and tendencies which 
 are exceptional and abnormal; with landscapes and localities 
 which are essentially phantasmal and unreal, not in the sense 
 of being purely imaginary, but of lying outside the range of 
 imagination creating along lines of normal activity. 
 
 In the short story as in the short poem Poe was an artist 
 of consummate skill who enriched our literature with a little 
 group of masterpieces as distinctive and original as any tales 
 of their kind that have appeared; after the novels of Cooper 
 and the charming essays of Irving these stories were next in 
 point of time to secure readers abroad. They made a deep 
 impression on some of the younger writers in France and 
 Germany; they were admirably translated; they gave fresh 
 impulse and direction to the art of short story writing, and 
 were the forerunnners of a brood of stories of terror, of 
 baffling invention, of intricate and subtle analysis. 
 
 But it is by his poetry that Poe must ultimately stand or 
 fall; for in his poetry his genius and its limitations are most 
 clearly revealed. Although not in any sense a deep and 
 consistent thinker, Poe made his art a matter of constant 
 meditation, and, with the aid of Coleridge, evolved a theory 
 both of verse and of short-story writing' which throws clear 
 light on his aims and methods. The Rationale of Verse and 
 The Poetic Principle are lucid and definite in the statement 
 of that theory. Truth, he held, appealed and gave expression 
 to the intellect, passion stirred the heart, but beauty was the 
 natural speech of the soul ; beauty was, therefore, the expres- 
 sion of the deepest part of man's nature, the immortal part ; 
 its presence liberated the noblest forces in him, excited the 
 highest emotions and supplied the deepest satisfactions. Un- 
 der the pressure of the need of his own soul and the recogni- 
 tion of the beautiful in the world about him man is impelled 
 to create, under the forms of art, a beauty of his own in 
 which the real and the imaginary are harmoniously blended. 
 From this creative activity truth and passion are not to be 
 excluded ; but they are to be kept in strict subordination to 
 
4§ THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 the main purpose of creating a definite and overpowering im- 
 pression of beauty. The soul is to be nourished and enriched 
 not by ethical impulse, nor by the vision of larger knowledge, 
 but by the dilation of the imagination. It must be added 
 that beauty, in Poe's view, was a witness to the presence of 
 the divine in the world, and had, therefore, a spiritual sig- 
 nificance and quality. Poetry he defined as " the rhythmical 
 creation of beauty " ; he insisted upon brevity as essential to 
 lyrical perfection, and went so far as to affirm that " a long 
 poem does not exist " ; he did not exclude ethical or allegorical 
 conceptions, as his Haunted Palace and The Conqueror Worm 
 show, but he held that the poet should aim to produce a single 
 and perfectly definite effect, and that any secondary meaning 
 should arise inevitably out of a clear impression of a beautiful 
 creation; and he insisted that every piece of verse ought to 
 have some marked quality of metre or rhythm. 
 
 If these principles or maxims are applied to Poe's verse, 
 it will be found that it stands the test. No artist has made 
 his work more consistently embody and express his conception 
 of the aims and methods of his art. Unlike Wordsworth and 
 Whitman, Poe gains by the approach of his poetry to his 
 philosophy. So far as his philosophy of art was concerned, 
 there was nothing original in it; it was, however, exactly 
 suited to his temperament and his genius. So far as his 
 maxims of construction are concerned, they are the laws of 
 his own nature rather than of art. They so nicely bring out 
 the structure of his own work that the suspicion of the 
 ex post facto origin cannot be avoided. 
 
 Within the limits which Poe set to the poetic art, there was 
 ample room for the deepest and noblest activity of the poetic 
 impulse; for Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Tenny- 
 son. But this field was greatly narrowed by his maxims for 
 verse production. In this narrower field of artistic vision and 
 power he made his great and lasting success. In at least half 
 a dozen poems he has shown a skill akin to magic in producing 
 a single striking and unusual effect, by concentration of in- 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 49 
 
 terest, subordination of secondary meaning, compression of 
 thought within a narrow compass, and the identification of 
 the poem with a distinctive metrical effect. Within these 
 narrow limits, imposed by his own genius, confirmed by his 
 character, and later, rationalized into a philosophy, Poe was 
 a master. He fashioned, under these rules, a few poems 
 which are finalities, and a finality marks the end of the path. 
 Poe has gone as far as man can go in his own field, and that 
 is saying that he was a creative artist; one whose work be- 
 trays not only perfection of form but individuality of touch. 
 At the end of a hundred years how stands the account with 
 Poe and what place does he hold in our literature? Poets, 
 critics, story-writers of high rank abroad have given him the 
 first place ; at home there has been a great confusion of voices ; 
 reckless charge and countercharge; unmeasured condemna- 
 tion, unmeasured laudation. In the Hall of Fame, of which 
 the university whose guests we are today is the custodian but 
 without voice in the selection of names inscribed on its walls 
 and therefore free of all responsibility, Poe's has not yet 
 found a place. That is a small matter so far as his fame is 
 concerned, for fame does not rest on the suffrages of any 
 lesser jury than the great body of intelligent readers. If 
 symmetry of life and faultless contour of conduct are the 
 tests which determine fitness for this enrolment among the 
 immortals Poe must be content to be excluded as Coleridge 
 and Shelley and Burns — all irregular in life but none of 
 them corrupt in nature — Chopin and Wagner, Raphael and 
 Turner would be shut out were they brought to the same 
 seat of judgment. If character, that is the equation between 
 temptation in temperament, inheritance, physique and the 
 insidious and searching influence of conditions, and resistance, 
 the final direction of the struggling spirit in the storm and 
 mystery of life, is the determining element then the exclusion 
 of Poe is a usurpation of a function which Infinite Wisdom 
 alone is intelligent and just enough to discharge. If the 
 determining test is, as it ought to be, the quality of a man's 
 
SO THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 work then the exclusion of Poe's name is a survival of the 
 provincialism of judgment and taste against which he raised 
 his voice seventy years ago. Is the selection of names in the 
 Hall of Fame to be a record of individual tastes and opinions 
 or of the judgment of that company of intelligent readers who 
 constitute a court of ultimate jurisdiction? 
 
 The real obstacle in the way of the adequate appreciation 
 of Poe has been and is the lack of the sense of beauty, the 
 undeveloped artistic feeling of the country. In this vast 
 workshop, where a new order of society is being fashioned, 
 his work has been and still is misunderstood and undervalued. 
 Its detachment from work-a-day interests, from ethical agita- 
 tions, from social and political movements, from the toils and 
 trials of the hour, from the spirit of restless energy, have 
 seemed to many Americans to show an entire lack of serious- 
 ness, and without seriousness there is no real art; they have 
 failed to see that Poe was deeply and genuinely serious in his 
 love of beauty, his passion for perfection of form. In his 
 vision of the place of beauty in the rounded life of the soul, 
 in the harmonious social expression of humanity, he was far 
 in advance of the civilization in which he lived, and he is 
 still far in advance of any general sensitiveness to the delicate 
 and spiritual harmonies of which art is the language. 
 
 The sum and substance of Poe's real offence is that he was 
 an artist and an artist only. Poe reacted so radically from 
 the practical ideals and work of his time that he took refuge 
 in pure ideality. The refuge of the artist is always to be 
 found in his art ; and to a nature so sensitive as Poe's, a mind 
 so delicately adjusted to its tools and its task, and so easily 
 thrown out of relation to them, there was perhaps no other 
 resource. Between the art of the author of Israfel and the 
 life about him there was a deep abyss which the poet never 
 attempted to cross. The material with which he constantly 
 dealt becomes significant alike of the extraordinary suscepti- 
 bility of his genius, and of the lack of the forms of life about 
 him to satisfy and inspire him. He expresses the dissonance 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 5 I 
 
 which has so far existed between the essentially ideal quality 
 of the American mind and the intensely practical character 
 of the task which has fallen to Americans. If he had been 
 born a century later, his verse and prose might have come 
 closer to the heart of his people, without losing that exquisite 
 fineness which reveals the rare and beautiful quality of his 
 genius. It is hardly possible to miss the significance of the 
 fact that two men of such temper and gifts as Hawthorne and 
 Poe were driven by inward necessity to deal with the life of 
 an earlier time, with life in an older and riper society, or 
 with the life of the spirit in its most disturbed and abnormal 
 experiences. 
 
 Poe's passion for perfection of form, his ideality, and the 
 sensitiveness of his temperament are all subtly combined in 
 the quality of distinction which characterizes his best work 
 in prose and verse. His individuality is not only strongly 
 marked, but it is expressed with the utmost refinement of 
 feeling and of touch. In his prose and verse, Poe was pre- 
 eminently a man who not only brought artistic integrity and 
 capacity to his work, but suffused it with purity, dignity, and 
 grace. In the disconnected product of his broken life there 
 is not a line to be blotted out on the score of vulgarity or lack 
 of reticence concerning the hidden and sacred things of life. 
 In his most careless imaginative writing the high quality of 
 his mind is always apparent. So ingrained is this distinction 
 of tone that, however he may waste his moral fortunes, his 
 genius is never cheapened nor stained. In his worst estate 
 the great traditions of art were safe in his hands. 
 
 Poe's very detachment in artistic interest from the world 
 about him was a positive gain for the emancipation of the 
 imagination of the young country, so recently a province of 
 the Old World. His criticism was almost entirely free from 
 that narrow localism which values a writer because he belongs 
 to a section, and not because his work belongs to literature. 
 He brought into the field of criticism large knowledge of the 
 best that had been done in literature, and clear perception of 
 
52 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 the principles of the art of writing. His touch on his con- 
 temporaries who won the easy successes which are always 
 within reach in untrained communities was often caustic, as it 
 had need to be; but the instinct which made him the enemy 
 of inferior work gave him also the power of recognizing 
 the work of the artist, even when it came from unknown 
 hands. He discerned the reality of imagination in Hawthorne 
 and Tennyson as clearly as he saw the vulgarity and crudity 
 of much of the popular writing of his time. By critical 
 intention, therefore, as well as by virtue of the possession of 
 genius, which is never provincial, Poe emancipated himself, 
 and went far to emancipate American literature, from the 
 narrow spirit, the partial judgment, and the inferior standards 
 of a people not yet familiar with the best that has been thought 
 and said in the world. To the claims of local pride he opposed 
 the sovereign claims of art; against the practice of the half- 
 inspired and the wholly untrained he set the practice of the 
 masters. When the intellectual history of the country is 
 written, he will appear as one of its foremost liberators. 
 
 Poe's work holds a first place in our literature, not by reason 
 of its mass, its reality, its range, its spiritual or ethical sig- 
 nificance, but by reason of its complete and beautiful indi- 
 viduality, the distinction of its form and workmanship, the 
 purity of its art. With Hawthorne he shares the primacy 
 among all who have enriched our literature with prose or 
 verse of high artistic quality; but, unlike his great contem- 
 porary, he has had to wait long' for adequate and just recogni- 
 tion. His time of waiting is not yet over; for while the 
 ethical insight of Hawthorne finds quick response where his 
 artistic power alone would fail to move, Poe must be content 
 with the suffrages of those who know that the art which he 
 practiced with such magical effect is in itself a kind of 
 righteousness. " I could not afford to spare from my circle," 
 wrote Emerson to a friend, " a poet, so long as he can offer so 
 indisputable a token as a good poem of his relation to what 
 is highest- in Being." To those who understand that char- 
 
POE CENTENARY EXERCISES. 53 
 
 acter is never perfect until it is harmonious, and truth never 
 finally revealed until it is beautiful, Poe's significance is not 
 obscured nor his work dimmed by the faults and misfortunes 
 of his life. The obvious lessons of that pathetic career have 
 been well learned; it is time to seek the deeper things for 
 which this fatally endowed spirit stood ; for the light is more 
 than the medium through which it shines. 
 
 CHINESE PUZZLE OF CARVED IVORY 
 
 Given to Miss Sarah F. Miller by Poe, and by her presented to the 
 Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences; at present on exhibition in the So- 
 ciety's museum in the Lorillard Mansion, Bronx Park. 
 
THE POE COTTAGE FROM THE ORCHARD ON THE 
 SOUTHEAST 
 
 In its original location 
 Photograph taken in 1884 by Stoughton 
 
 POE'S COTTAGE AT FORDHAM 
 John Henry Boner 
 
 Here lived the soul enchanted 
 
 By melody of song ; 
 Here dwelt the spirit haunted 
 
 By a demoniac throng ; 
 Here sang the lips elated ; 
 Here grief and death were- sated ; 
 Here loved and here unm'ated 
 
 Was he, so frail, 'So: strong. 
 
 Proud, mad, but not defiant, 
 
 He touched at heaven and hell. 
 
 Fate found a rare soul pliant 
 And rung her changes well. 
 
 Alternately his lyre, 
 
 Stranded with strings of fire, 
 
 Led earth's most happy choir, 
 Or flashed with Israfel. 
 
 Here wintry winds and 'cheerless No singer of old story 
 
 The dying firelight blew, Luting accustomed lays, 
 
 While he whose song was peerless No harper for new glory, 
 
 Dreamed the drear midnight through, No mendicant for praise, 
 
 And from dull embers chilling He struck high chords and splendid, 
 
 Crept shadows darkly filling Wherein were fiercely blended 
 
 The silent place, and thrilling Tones that unfinished ended 
 His fancy as they grew. With his unfinished days. 
 
 Here with brow bared to heaven, 
 In starry night he stood, 
 
 With the lost star of seven 
 Feeling sad brotherhood. 
 
 Here in the sobbing showers 
 
 Of dark autumnal hours 
 
 He heard suspected powers 
 
 Shriek through the stormy wood. 
 
 Here through this lowly portal, 
 
 Made sacred by his name, 
 Unheralded immortal 
 
 The mortal went and came. 
 And fate that then denied him, 
 And envy that decried him, 
 And malice that belied him, 
 
 Have cenotaphed his fame. 
 
 Courtesy of The Century Co. 
 
OFFICERS AND COMMITTEES 
 1909-1910 
 
 PRESIDENT 
 
 CHANCELLOR HENRY M. MacCRACKEN, D..D., LL,D. 
 
 VICE-PRESIDENTS 
 
 SUPERINTENDENT ALFRED T. SCHAUFFLER 
 PRINCIPAL JOHN H. DENBIGH ^, 
 
 DIRECTOR WILLIAM- T. HORNADAY 
 
 SECRETARY TREASURER 
 
 DR. ARTHUR B. LAMB OLIN J. STEPHENS 
 
 COUNCILLORS ['.'. 
 
 1 DR. NATHANIEL , L. BRITTON, Cfc<M«fcan 
 
 HENRY M. BROWN, D.D. ' WALTER E. HALLETT 
 
 C. GORDON COPP PRINCIPAL HUGO NEWMAN 
 
 ALBERT E. DAVIS GEORGE E. STONEBRIDGE 
 
 LOUIS ERNST. ARTHUR -A. STOUGHTON 
 
 AND THE OFFICERS EX-OFFICIQ 
 
 COMMITTEES 
 
 ' . ■ ART 
 
 ARTHUR A. STOUGHTON, Chairman 
 
 MUSIC , 
 
 SUPERINTENDENT ALFRED T. SCHAUFFLER, Chairman 
 
 . NATURAL SCIENCES 
 
 DR. JOHN H. DENBIGH, Chairman 
 
 INDUSTRIES AND APPLIED SCIENCES 
 
 HENRY M. BROWN, D.D., Chairman 
 
 BOOKS AND LITERATURE 
 
 WALTER E. HALLETT, Chairman 
 
 PRESERVATION OF NATURAL SCENERY 
 
 '/ALBERT E. DAVIS, Chairman 
 
 MUSEUM COMMITTEE 
 
 ALBERT E. DAVIS, Chairman 
 DR. NATHANIEL L..BRITTON, HENRY M. BROWN, D.D. 
 PRINCIPAL JOHN H. DENBIGH. WALTER E. HALLETT . - ' 
 ARTHUR A. '.STOUGHTON GEORGE E. STONEBRIDGE 
 
 SUPT. ALFRED T. SCHAUFFLER •