Chapter 1

The Works of Edgar Allan Poe

by Edgar Allan Poe

The Raven Edition

Contents

PREFACE
LIFE OF POE
DEATH OF POE
THE UNPARALLELED ADVENTURES OF ONE HANS PFAALL
THE GOLD-BUG
FOUR BEASTS IN ONE—THE HOMO-CAMELEOPARD
THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE
THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET.(*1)
THE BALLOON-HOAX
MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE
THE OVAL PORTRAIT

EDGAR ALLAN POE
AN APPRECIATION

Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore—
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of “never—never more!”

This stanza from “The Raven” was recommended by James Russell
Lowell as an inscription upon the Baltimore monument which marks
the resting place of Edgar Allan Poe, the most interesting and
original figure in American letters. And, to signify that
peculiar musical quality of Poe’s genius which inthralls every
reader, Mr. Lowell suggested this additional verse, from the
“Haunted Palace”:

And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,
And sparkling ever more,
A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.

Born in poverty at Boston, January 19, 1809, dying under painful
circumstances at Baltimore, October 7, 1849, his whole literary
career of scarcely fifteen years a pitiful struggle for mere
subsistence, his memory malignantly misrepresented by his
earliest biographer, Griswold, how completely has truth at last
routed falsehood and how magnificently has Poe come into his own.
For “The Raven,” first published in 1845, and, within a few
months, read, recited and parodied wherever the English language
was spoken, the half-starved poet received $10! Less than a year
later his brother poet, N. P. Willis, issued this touching appeal
to the admirers of genius on behalf of the neglected author, his
dying wife and her devoted mother, then living under very
straitened circumstances in a little cottage at Fordham, N. Y.:

“Here is one of the finest scholars, one of the most original men
of genius, and one of the most industrious of the literary
profession of our country, whose temporary suspension of labor,
from bodily illness, drops him immediately to a level with the
common objects of public charity. There is no intermediate
stopping-place, no respectful shelter, where, with the delicacy
due to genius and culture, he might secure aid, till, with
returning health, he would resume his labors, and his unmortified
sense of independence.”

And this was the tribute paid by the American public to the
master who had given to it such tales of conjuring charm, of
witchery and mystery as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and
“Ligeia”; such fascinating hoaxes as “The Unparalleled Adventure
of Hans Pfaall,” “MSS. Found in a Bottle,” “A Descent Into a
Maelstrom” and “The Balloon-Hoax”; such tales of conscience as
“William Wilson,” “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-tale Heart,”
wherein the retributions of remorse are portrayed with an awful
fidelity; such tales of natural beauty as “The Island of the Fay”
and “The Domain of Arnheim”; such marvellous studies in
ratiocination as the “Gold-bug,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,”
“The Purloined Letter” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” the
latter, a recital of fact, demonstrating the author’s wonderful
capability of correctly analyzing the mysteries of the human
mind; such tales of illusion and banter as “The Premature Burial”
and “The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether”; such bits of
extravaganza as “The Devil in the Belfry” and “The Angel of the
Odd”; such tales of adventure as “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym”; such papers of keen criticism and review as won for Poe the
enthusiastic admiration of Charles Dickens, although they made
him many enemies among the over-puffed minor American writers so
mercilessly exposed by him; such poems of beauty and melody as
“The Bells,” “The Haunted Palace,” “Tamerlane,” “The City in the
Sea” and “The Raven.” What delight for the jaded senses of the
reader is this enchanted domain of wonder-pieces! What an
atmosphere of beauty, music, color! What resources of
imagination, construction, analysis and absolute art! One might
almost sympathize with Sarah Helen Whitman, who, confessing to a
half faith in the old superstition of the significance of
anagrams, found, in the transposed letters of Edgar Poe’s name,
the words “a God-peer.” His mind, she says, was indeed a “Haunted
Palace,” echoing to the footfalls of angels and demons.

“No man,” Poe himself wrote, “has recorded, no man has dared to
record, the wonders of his inner life.”

In these twentieth century days—of lavish recognition—artistic,
popular and material—of genius, what rewards might not a Poe
claim!

Edgar’s father, a son of General David Poe, the American
revolutionary patriot and friend of Lafayette, had married Mrs.
Hopkins, an English actress, and, the match meeting with parental
disapproval, had himself taken to the stage as a profession.
Notwithstanding Mrs. Poe’s beauty and talent the young couple had
a sorry struggle for existence. When Edgar, at the age of two
years, was orphaned, the family was in the utmost destitution.
Apparently the future poet was to be cast upon the world homeless
and friendless. But fate decreed that a few glimmers of sunshine
were to illumine his life, for the little fellow was adopted by
John Allan, a wealthy merchant of Richmond, Va. A brother and
sister, the remaining children, were cared for by others.

In his new home Edgar found all the luxury and advantages money
could provide. He was petted, spoiled and shown off to strangers.
In Mrs. Allan he found all the affection a childless wife could
bestow. Mr. Allan took much pride in the captivating, precocious
lad. At the age of five the boy recited, with fine effect,
passages of English poetry to the visitors at the Allan house.

From his eighth to his thirteenth year he attended the Manor
House school, at Stoke-Newington, a suburb of London. It was the
Rev. Dr. Bransby, head of the school, whom Poe so quaintly
portrayed in “William Wilson.” Returning to Richmond in 1820
Edgar was sent to the school of Professor Joseph H. Clarke. He
proved an apt pupil. Years afterward Professor Clarke thus wrote:

“While the other boys wrote mere mechanical verses, Poe wrote
genuine poetry; the boy was a born poet. As a scholar he was
ambitious to excel. He was remarkable for self-respect, without
haughtiness. He had a sensitive and tender heart and would do
anything for a friend. His nature was entirely free from
selfishness.”

At the age of seventeen Poe entered the University of Virginia at
Charlottesville. He left that institution after one session.
Official records prove that he was not expelled. On the contrary,
he gained a creditable record as a student, although it is
admitted that he contracted debts and had “an ungovernable
passion for card-playing.” These debts may have led to his
quarrel with Mr. Allan which eventually compelled him to make his
own way in the world.

Early in 1827 Poe made his first literary venture. He induced
Calvin Thomas, a poor and youthful printer, to publish a small
volume of his verses under the title “Tamerlane and Other Poems.”
In 1829 we find Poe in Baltimore with another manuscript volume
of verses, which was soon published. Its title was “Al Aaraaf,
Tamerlane and Other Poems.” Neither of these ventures seems to
have attracted much attention.

Soon after Mrs. Allan’s death, which occurred in 1829, Poe,
through the aid of Mr. Allan, secured admission to the United
States Military Academy at West Point. Any glamour which may have
attached to cadet life in Poe’s eyes was speedily lost, for
discipline at West Point was never so severe nor were the
accommodations ever so poor. Poe’s bent was more and more toward
literature. Life at the academy daily became increasingly
distasteful. Soon he began to purposely neglect his studies and
to disregard his duties, his aim being to secure his dismissal
from the United States service. In this he succeeded. On March 7,
1831, Poe found himself free. Mr. Allan’s second marriage had
thrown the lad on his own resources. His literary career was to
begin.

Poe’s first genuine victory was won in 1833, when he was the
successful competitor for a prize of $100 offered by a Baltimore
periodical for the best prose story. “A MSS. Found in a Bottle”
was the winning tale. Poe had submitted six stories in a volume.
“Our only difficulty,” says Mr. Latrobe, one of the judges, “was
in selecting from the rich contents of the volume.”

During the fifteen years of his literary life Poe was connected
with various newspapers and magazines in Richmond, Philadelphia
and New York. He was faithful, punctual, industrious, thorough.
N. P. Willis, who for some time employed Poe as critic and
sub-editor on the “Evening Mirror,” wrote thus:

“With the highest admiration for Poe’s genius, and a willingness
to let it alone for more than ordinary irregularity, we were led
by common report to expect a very capricious attention to his
duties, and occasionally a scene of violence and difficulty. Time
went on, however, and he was invariably punctual and industrious.
We saw but one presentiment of the man—a quiet, patient,
industrious and most gentlemanly person.

“We heard, from one who knew him well (what should be stated in
all mention of his lamentable irregularities), that with a single
glass of wine his whole nature was reversed, the demon became
uppermost, and, though none of the usual signs of intoxication
were visible, his will was palpably insane. In this reversed
character, we repeat, it was never our chance to meet him.”

On September 22, 1835, Poe married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, in
Baltimore. She had barely turned thirteen years, Poe himself was
but twenty-six. He then was a resident of Richmond and a regular
contributor to the “Southern Literary Messenger.” It was not
until a year later that the bride and her widowed mother followed
him thither.

Poe’s devotion to his child-wife was one of the most beautiful
features of his life. Many of his famous poetic productions were
inspired by her beauty and charm. Consumption had marked her for
its victim, and the constant efforts of husband and mother were
to secure for her all the comfort and happiness their slender
means permitted. Virginia died January 30, 1847, when but
twenty-five years of age. A friend of the family pictures the
death-bed scene—mother and husband trying to impart warmth to her
by chafing her hands and her feet, while her pet cat was suffered
to nestle upon her bosom for the sake of added warmth.

These verses from “Annabel Lee,” written by Poe in 1849, the last
year of his life, tell of his sorrow at the loss of his
child-wife:

_I_ was a child and _she_ was a child,
In a kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea.
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her high-born kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

Poe was connected at various times and in various capacities with
the “Southern Literary Messenger” in Richmond, Va.; “Graham’s
Magazine” and the “Gentleman’s Magazine” in Philadelphia; the
“Evening Mirror,” the “Broadway Journal,” and “Godey’s Lady’s
Book” in New York. Everywhere Poe’s life was one of unremitting
toil. No tales and poems were ever produced at a greater cost of
brain and spirit.

Poe’s initial salary with the “Southern Literary Messenger,” to
which he contributed the first drafts of a number of his
best-known tales, was $10 a week! Two years later his salary was
but $600 a year. Even in 1844, when his literary reputation was
established securely, he wrote to a friend expressing his
pleasure because a magazine to which he was to contribute had
agreed to pay him $20 monthly for two pages of criticism.

Those were discouraging times in American literature, but Poe
never lost faith. He was finally to triumph wherever pre-eminent
talents win admirers. His genius has had no better description
than in this stanza from William Winter’s poem, read at the
dedication exercises of the Actors’ Monument to Poe, May 4, 1885,
in New York:

He was the voice of beauty and of woe,
Passion and mystery and the dread unknown;
Pure as the mountains of perpetual snow,
Cold as the icy winds that round them moan,
Dark as the caves wherein earth’s thunders groan,
Wild as the tempests of the upper sky,
Sweet as the faint, far-off celestial tone of angel whispers,
fluttering from on high,
And tender as love’s tear when youth and beauty die.

In the two and a half score years that have elapsed since Poe’s
death he has come fully into his own. For a while Griswold’s
malignant misrepresentations colored the public estimate of Poe
as man and as writer. But, thanks to J. H. Ingram, W. F. Gill,
Eugene Didier, Sarah Helen Whitman and others these scandals have
been dispelled and Poe is seen as he actually was—not as a man
without failings, it is true, but as the finest and most original
genius in American letters. As the years go on his fame
increases. His works have been translated into many foreign
languages. His is a household name in France and England—in fact,
the latter nation has often uttered the reproach that Poe’s own
country has been slow to appreciate him. But that reproach, if it
ever was warranted, certainly is untrue.

W. H. R.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

By James Russell Lowell

The situation of American literature is anomalous. It has no
centre, or, if it have, it is like that of the sphere of Hermes.
It is divided into many systems, each revolving round its several
suns, and often presenting to the rest only the faint glimmer of
a milk-and-water way. Our capital city, unlike London or Paris,
is not a great central heart from which life and vigor radiate to
the extremities, but resembles more an isolated umbilicus stuck
down as near as may be to the centre of the land, and seeming
rather to tell a legend of former usefulness than to serve any
present need. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, each has its
literature almost more distinct than those of the different
dialects of Germany; and the Young Queen of the West has also one
of her own, of which some articulate rumor barely has reached us
dwellers by the Atlantic.

Perhaps there is no task more difficult than the just criticism
of contemporary literature. It is even more grateful to give
praise where it is needed than where it is deserved, and
friendship so often seduces the iron stylus of justice into a
vague flourish, that she writes what seems rather like an epitaph
than a criticism. Yet if praise be given as an alms, we could not
drop so poisonous a one into any man’s hat. The critic’s ink may
suffer equally from too large an infusion of nutgalls or of
sugar. But it is easier to be generous than to be just, and we
might readily put faith in that fabulous direction to the hiding
place of truth, did we judge from the amount of water which we
usually find mixed with it.

Remarkable experiences are usually confined to the inner life of
imaginative men, but Mr. Poe’s biography displays a vicissitude
and peculiarity of interest such as is rarely met with. The
offspring of a romantic marriage, and left an orphan at an early
age, he was adopted by Mr. Allan, a wealthy Virginian, whose
barren marriage-bed seemed the warranty of a large estate to the
young poet.

Having received a classical education in England, he returned
home and entered the University of Virginia, where, after an
extravagant course, followed by reformation at the last
extremity, he was graduated with the highest honors of his class.
Then came a boyish attempt to join the fortunes of the insurgent
Greeks, which ended at St. Petersburg, where he got into
difficulties through want of a passport, from which he was
rescued by the American consul and sent home. He now entered the
military academy at West Point, from which he obtained a
dismissal on hearing of the birth of a son to his adopted father,
by a second marriage, an event which cut off his expectations as
an heir. The death of Mr. Allan, in whose will his name was not
mentioned, soon after relieved him of all doubt in this regard,
and he committed himself at once to authorship for a support.
Previously to this, however, he had published (in 1827) a small
volume of poems, which soon ran through three editions, and
excited high expectations of its author’s future distinction in
the minds of many competent judges.

That no certain augury can be drawn from a poet’s earliest
lispings there are instances enough to prove. Shakespeare’s first
poems, though brimful of vigor and youth and picturesqueness,
give but a very faint promise of the directness, condensation and
overflowing moral of his maturer works. Perhaps, however,
Shakespeare is hardly a case in point, his “Venus and Adonis”
having been published, we believe, in his twenty-sixth year.
Milton’s Latin verses show tenderness, a fine eye for nature, and
a delicate appreciation of classic models, but give no hint of
the author of a new style in poetry. Pope’s youthful pieces have
all the sing-song, wholly unrelieved by the glittering malignity
and eloquent irreligion of his later productions. Collins’ callow
namby-pamby died and gave no sign of the vigorous and original
genius which he afterward displayed. We have never thought that
the world lost more in the “marvellous boy,” Chatterton, than a
very ingenious imitator of obscure and antiquated dulness. Where
he becomes original (as it is called), the interest of ingenuity
ceases and he becomes stupid. Kirke White’s promises were
indorsed by the respectable name of Mr. Southey, but surely with
no authority from Apollo. They have the merit of a traditional
piety, which to our mind, if uttered at all, had been less
objectionable in the retired closet of a diary, and in the sober
raiment of prose. They do not clutch hold of the memory with the
drowning pertinacity of Watts; neither have they the interest of
his occasional simple, lucky beauty. Burns having fortunately
been rescued by his humble station from the contaminating society
of the “Best models,” wrote well and naturally from the first.
Had he been unfortunate enough to have had an educated taste, we
should have had a series of poems from which, as from his
letters, we could sift here and there a kernel from the mass of
chaff. Coleridge’s youthful efforts give no promise whatever of
that poetical genius which produced at once the wildest,
tenderest, most original and most purely imaginative poems of
modern times. Byron’s “Hours of Idleness” would never find a
reader except from an intrepid and indefatigable curiosity. In
Wordsworth’s first preludings there is but a dim foreboding of
the creator of an era. From Southey’s early poems, a safer augury
might have been drawn. They show the patient investigator, the
close student of history, and the unwearied explorer of the
beauties of predecessors, but they give no assurances of a man
who should add aught to stock of household words, or to the rarer
and more sacred delights of the fireside or the arbor. The
earliest specimens of Shelley’s poetic mind already, also, give
tokens of that ethereal sublimation in which the spirit seems to
soar above the regions of words, but leaves its body, the verse,
to be entombed, without hope of resurrection, in a mass of them.
Cowley is generally instanced as a wonder of precocity. But his
early insipidities show only a capacity for rhyming and for the
metrical arrangement of certain conventional combinations of
words, a capacity wholly dependent on a delicate physical
organization, and an unhappy memory. An early poem is only
remarkable when it displays an effort of _reason,_ and the rudest
verses in which we can trace some conception of the ends of
poetry, are worth all the miracles of smooth juvenile
versification. A school-boy, one would say, might acquire the
regular see-saw of Pope merely by an association with the motion
of the play-ground tilt.

Mr. Poe’s early productions show that he could see through the
verse to the spirit beneath, and that he already had a feeling
that all the life and grace of the one must depend on and be
modulated by the will of the other. We call them the most
remarkable boyish poems that we have ever read. We know of none
that can compare with them for maturity of purpose, and a nice
understanding of the effects of language and metre. Such pieces
are only valuable when they display what we can only express by
the contradictory phrase of _innate experience._ We copy one of
the shorter poems, written when the author was only fourteen.
There is a little dimness in the filling up, but the grace and
symmetry of the outline are such as few poets ever attain. There
is a smack of ambrosia about it.

TO HELEN

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand!
The agate lamp within thy hand,
Ah! Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!

It is the tendency of the young poet that impresses us. Here is
no “withering scorn,” no heart “blighted” ere it has safely got
into its teens, none of the drawing-room sansculottism which
Byron had brought into vogue. All is limpid and serene, with a
pleasant dash of the Greek Helicon in it. The melody of the
whole, too, is remarkable. It is not of that kind which can be
demonstrated arithmetically upon the tips of the fingers. It is
of that finer sort which the inner ear alone _can_ estimate. It
seems simple, like a Greek column, because of its perfection. In
a poem named “Ligeia,” under which title he intended to personify
the music of nature, our boy-poet gives us the following
exquisite picture:

Ligeia! Ligeia!
My beautiful one,
Whose harshest idea
Will to melody run,
Say, is it thy will,
On the breezes to toss,
Or, capriciously still,
Like the lone albatross,
Incumbent on night,
As she on the air,
To keep watch with delight
On the harmony there?

John Neal, himself a man of genius, and whose lyre has been too
long capriciously silent, appreciated the high merit of these and
similar passages, and drew a proud horoscope for their author.

Mr. Poe had that indescribable something which men have agreed to
call _genius_. No man could ever tell us precisely what it is,
and yet there is none who is not inevitably aware of its presence
and its power. Let talent writhe and contort itself as it may, it
has no such magnetism. Larger of bone and sinew it may be, but
the wings are wanting. Talent sticks fast to earth, and its most
perfect works have still one foot of clay. Genius claims kindred
with the very workings of Nature herself, so that a sunset shall
seem like a quotation from Dante, and if Shakespeare be read in
the very presence of the sea itself, his verses shall but seem
nobler for the sublime criticism of ocean. Talent may make
friends for itself, but only genius can give to its creations the
divine power of winning love and veneration. Enthusiasm cannot
cling to what itself is unenthusiastic, nor will he ever have
disciples who has not himself impulsive zeal enough to be a
disciple. Great wits are allied to madness only inasmuch as they
are possessed and carried away by their demon, while talent keeps
him, as Paracelsus did, securely prisoned in the pommel of his
sword. To the eye of genius, the veil of the spiritual world is
ever rent asunder that it may perceive the ministers of good and
evil who throng continually around it. No man of mere talent ever
flung his inkstand at the devil.

When we say that Mr. Poe had genius, we do not mean to say that
he has produced evidence of the highest. But to say that he
possesses it at all is to say that he needs only zeal, industry,
and a reverence for the trust reposed in him, to achieve the
proudest triumphs and the greenest laurels. If we may believe the
Longinuses and Aristotles of our newspapers, we have quite too
many geniuses of the loftiest order to render a place among them
at all desirable, whether for its hardness of attainment or its
seclusion. The highest peak of our Parnassus is, according to
these gentlemen, by far the most thickly settled portion of the
country, a circumstance which must make it an uncomfortable
residence for individuals of a poetical temperament, if love of
solitude be, as immemorial tradition asserts, a necessary part of
their idiosyncrasy.

Mr. Poe has two of the prime qualities of genius, a faculty of
vigorous yet minute analysis, and a wonderful fecundity of
imagination. The first of these faculties is as needful to the
artist in words, as a knowledge of anatomy is to the artist in
colors or in stone. This enables him to conceive truly, to
maintain a proper relation of parts, and to draw a correct
outline, while the second groups, fills up and colors. Both of
these Mr. Poe has displayed with singular distinctness in his
prose works, the last predominating in his earlier tales, and the
first in his later ones. In judging of the merit of an author,
and assigning him his niche among our household gods, we have a
right to regard him from our own point of view, and to measure
him by our own standard. But, in estimating the amount of power
displayed in his works, we must be governed by his own design,
and placing them by the side of his own ideal, find how much is
wanting. We differ from Mr. Poe in his opinions of the objects of
art. He esteems that object to be the creation of Beauty, and
perhaps it is only in the definition of that word that we
disagree with him. But in what we shall say of his writings, we
shall take his own standard as our guide. The temple of the god
of song is equally accessible from every side, and there is room
enough in it for all who bring offerings, or seek in oracle.

In his tales, Mr. Poe has chosen to exhibit his power chiefly in
that dim region which stretches from the very utmost limits of
the probable into the weird confines of superstition and
unreality. He combines in a very remarkable manner two faculties
which are seldom found united; a power of influencing the mind of
the reader by the impalpable shadows of mystery, and a minuteness
of detail which does not leave a pin or a button unnoticed. Both
are, in truth, the natural results of the predominating quality
of his mind, to which we have before alluded, analysis. It is
this which distinguishes the artist. His mind at once reaches
forward to the effect to be produced. Having resolved to bring
about certain emotions in the reader, he makes all subordinate
parts tend strictly to the common centre. Even his mystery is
mathematical to his own mind. To him X is a known quantity all
along. In any picture that he paints he understands the chemical
properties of all his colors. However vague some of his figures
may seem, however formless the shadows, to him the outline is as
clear and distinct as that of a geometrical diagram. For this
reason Mr. Poe has no sympathy with Mysticism. The Mystic dwells
in the mystery, is enveloped with it; it colors all his thoughts;
it affects his optic nerve especially, and the commonest things
get a rainbow edging from it. Mr. Poe, on the other hand, is a
spectator _ab extra_. He analyzes, he dissects, he watches

“with an eye serene,
The very pulse of the machine,”

for such it practically is to him, with wheels and cogs and
piston-rods, all working to produce a certain end.

This analyzing tendency of his mind balances the poetical, and by
giving him the patience to be minute, enables him to throw a
wonderful reality into his most unreal fancies. A monomania he
paints with great power. He loves to dissect one of these cancers
of the mind, and to trace all the subtle ramifications of its
roots. In raising images of horror, also, he has strange success,
conveying to us sometimes by a dusky hint some terrible _doubt_
which is the secret of all horror. He leaves to imagination the
task of finishing the picture, a task to which only she is
competent.

“For much imaginary work was there;
Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
That for Achilles’ image stood his spear
Grasped in an armed hand; himself behind
Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind.”

Besides the merit of conception, Mr.