Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor Part 9

Poe went one Sunday morning to call on a lady friend of his, Mrs.

Shaw, who was something of a physician and had been very kind to his wife. It was a bright morning, and the church bells were ringing. For all that, Poe felt moody, and the church bells seemed to jangle.

"I must write a poem," said he, "and I haven't an idea in my head. For some reason the bells seem frightfully out of tune this morning, and nearly drive me distracted."

After he had been chatting with Mrs. Shaw for some time, he evidently felt in better mood, and the sound of the bells grew more musical; or perhaps their actual sound had stopped and his imagination suggested bells that were indeed musical.

As he kept on complaining about his inability to write a poem, Mrs.

Shaw placed pen and ink and paper before him, first writing at the top of a sheet the t.i.tle, "The Bells, by E. A. Poe." Underneath she wrote, "The bells, the little silver bells." Poe caught the idea, and immediately wrote the first draft of the following stanza. According to his habit he rewrote this poem many, many times. The original stanza began with the words Mrs. Shaw had written. Here are the verses as they may now be read in Poe's works:

Hear the sledges with the bells-- Silver bells!

What a world of merriment their melody foretells!

How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, In the icy air of night!

While the stars that oversprinkle All the heaven, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells,-- From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Mrs. Shaw then wrote the words, "The heavy iron bells." Poe immediately completed the stanza which now reads:

Hear the tolling of the bells,-- Iron bells!

What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!

In the silence of the night, How we s.h.i.+ver with affright At the melancholy menace of their tone!

For every sound that floats From the rust within their throats Is a groan.

And the people--ah, the people-- They that dwell up in the steeple, All alone, And who tolling, tolling, tolling, In that m.u.f.fled monotone, Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone!

They are neither man nor woman,-- They are neither brute nor human,-- They are Ghouls; And their king it is who tolls,-- And he rolls, rolls, rolls, Rolls a paean from the bells!

And his merry bosom swells With the paean of the bells!

And he dances, and he yells, Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the paean of the bells, Of the bells.

The other stanzas were written afterward. There is music in these words; but do not think that the music is all. Underneath is the deep harmony of human suggestion, as in the lines,

Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone.

Now let us see if we can represent by musical notes the meter in which this poem is written. We must remember that a punctuation mark at the end of a line often makes a complete pause, which is represented in music by a rest. In music a rest has the same effect in completing a bar as the corresponding note. Here are the first two lines:

[Ill.u.s.tration: (music) Hear the sledg-es with the bells, Sil-ver bells!]

In the two following lines the commas in the middle of the line stand for rests, like the punctuation at the end of the first line; or if we wish we can make the words "time, time, time," three longer notes. It all depends on how we p.r.o.nounce them:

[Ill.u.s.tration: (music) Keep--ing time, time, time, in a sort of Ru-nic rhyme.]

CHAPTER XIII

POE'S LATER YEARS

Poe had the hardest time of his life when he was at New York, living in that little cottage at Fordham, where his poor wife died. He was always borrowing money, from sheer necessity, to keep himself and his wife from starvation. Once while in New York he was so hard pressed that Mrs. Clemm went out to see if she could not get work for him. She went to the office of Nathaniel P. Willis, who was the editor and proprietor of _The Mirror_. Willis was then starting _The Evening Mirror_, and said he would give Poe work. So the poet came; he had his little desk in the corner, and did his work meekly and regularly,--poor hack work for which he was paid very little.

Later he had an interest in a paper called _The Broadway Journal_.

When it was about to cease publication Poe bought it himself for fifty dollars, giving a note which Horace Greeley endorsed and finally paid.

Once a young man wrote to Greeley, saying, "Doubtless among your papers you have many autographs of the poet, Edgar Allan Poe," and intimated that he should like to have one of them. Greeley wrote back that he had just one autograph of Poe among his papers; it was attached to a note for fifty dollars, and Greeley's own signature was across the back. The young man might have it for just half its face value.

But after Poe bought _The Broadway Journal_ he had no money to carry it on, and its publication was soon suspended.

He earned his livelihood mainly by writing stories or articles for various magazines and papers, which paid him from $5 to $50 each. It was a hand to mouth way of living, for he was often, often disappointed.

In 1845, a volume ent.i.tled, "Tales. By Edgar A. Poe," was published by Wiley and Putnam, and in the same year "The Raven and Other Poems"

appeared in book form from the same publis.h.i.+ng house. Poe also delivered lectures, and by way of criticism carried on what was called the "Longfellow War." Though he considered Longfellow the greatest American poet, he accused him of plagiarism, or stealing some of his ideas, which was very unjust on the part of Poe. Hawthorne and Lowell he praised highly.

After the death of his wife, Poe was very melancholy. He went to lecture, and to visit friends in Providence, Rhode Island, and in Lowell, Ma.s.sachusetts, and afterward went south to Richmond, where he planned to raise enough money by lecturing to start _The Stylus_.

He was hospitably entertained in Richmond, and became engaged to marry his boyhood's first love, Miss Royster, now the widow, Mrs. Shelton.

Their marriage was to take place at once, and Poe started north to close up his business in New York and bring Mrs. Clemm south. In Baltimore it seems that he fell in with some politicians who were conducting an election. They took him about from one polling place to another to vote illegally; then some one drugged him, and left him on a bench near a saloon. Here he was found by a printer, who notified his friends, and they sent him to the hospital, where he died on the 7th of October, 1849. He was nearly forty-one years old.

Poe had a great and wonderful mind. In the latter part of his life he gave much of his time to a book called "Eureka," which was intended to explain the meaning of the universe. Of course he was not a philosopher; but he wrote some things in that book which were destined afterward to be accepted by such great men as Darwin and Huxley and many others.

His life was so full of work and poverty, so crossed and crossed again by unhappiness and hards.h.i.+p, that he never had time or strength of mind to think out anything as he would otherwise have done. All his work is fragmentary, broken bits on this subject or on that. He wrote very few poems, not many stories, and only a little serious criticism.

But a Frenchman will tell you that Poe, among American poets and writers, is the greatest; his writings have been translated into nearly every European language. In England, too, he is spoken of as our one great poet and critic, our first great story-writer, the inventor of the artistic short story.

Poor, unhappy Poe! After his death a monument was to have been erected over his grave; but by a strange fatality it was destroyed before it was finished. Twenty-five years later admiring friends placed over his remains the first monument to an American poet. No such memorial was needed, however, for American hearts will never cease to thrill at the weird, beautiful music of "Annabel Lee," "The Bells," and "The Raven."

THE STORY OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

[Ill.u.s.tration: _JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL_.]

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

CHAPTER I

ELMWOOD

James Russell Lowell was born on the 22d of February, 1819, in Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts. Elmwood, the home of the Lowells, was to the west of the village of Cambridge, quite near Mount Auburn cemetery.

When James Russell was a boy, Elmwood was practically in the country, and was surrounded on nearly all sides by woods, meadows, and pastures. The house stood on a triangular piece of land surrounded by a very high and thick hedge, made up of all sorts of trees and shrubs, such as pines, spruces, willows, and oaks, with smaller shrubs at the bottom so as to form a thick wall of green. In front of the house were some fine English elms, quite different from the American variety, and from these the house got its name. It was a large, square, old-fas.h.i.+oned wooden house, and though it had stood for over a hundred years, it remained during Lowell's life in perfect condition.

The house was surrounded by a fine, well-kept lawn, and at the back were pasture, orchard, and garden, while half a mile away lay Fresh Pond, the haunt of herons and other shy birds and land creatures. From the upper windows one could look out on beautiful Mount Auburn cemetery, which was to the south, while to the east was a low hill called Symonds's Hill, beyond which could be seen a bright stretch of the Charles River.

Elmwood faced on a lane, between two roads. In his essay in "Fireside Travels," ent.i.tled "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago," Lowell describes the scene towards the village as it was in his childhood. Approaching "from the west, by what was then called the New Road (it is called so no longer, for we change our names whenever we can, to the great detriment of all historical a.s.sociation), you would pause on the brow of Symonds's Hill to enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid.

In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts.... Over it rose the noisy belfry of the college, the square brown tower of the church, and the slim yellow spire of the parish meeting-house, by no means ungraceful, and then an invariable characteristic of New England religious architecture. On your right the Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt meadows, darkened here and there with the blossoming black gra.s.s as with a stranded cloud-shadow. Over these marshes, level as water but without its glare, and with softer and more soothing gradations of perspective, the eye was carried to a horizon of softly rounded hills.

To your left upon the Old Road you saw some half dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting southward." One of these, the largest and most stately, was the Craigie House, famous as the headquarters of Was.h.i.+ngton in 1776, and afterwards as the home of Longfellow. And at the end of the New Road toward Cambridge was a row of six fine willows, which had remained from the stockade built in early days as a defense against the Indians.