He called upon me one morning and found me preparing to start for Philadelphia, where I was engaged for a course of lectures, and our interview was necessarily short. He seemed disappointed–grieved.
“I have so much — so much I wished to say.”
I recall his look of pain, his unearthly eyes, his emaciated form, his weird look of desolation with a pang, even now. […]
It is asserted in the American Cyclopedia, that Edgar Poe died in consequence of a drunken debauch in his native city. This is not true.
At the instigation of a woman, who considered herself injured by him, he was cruelly beaten, blow upon blow, by a ruffian who knew of no better mode of avenging supposed injuries. It is well known that a brain fever followed; his friends hurried him away, and he reached his native city only to breathe his last.
Mr. Poe, near the close of his life, lived in a little band–box of a house at Fordham, and there his wife died. The Brothers of the Jesuits’ College, in that place, contrary to their wont, gave him free access to their groves and gardens, and there he unquestionably passed the happiest years of his life. His simplicity of manners and studious habits endeared him to the good Brothers, who often saw him at midnight as they passed to their vigils, moving silently under the lofty trees, too absorbed in meditation to notice their presence.
I have more than once sat spell-bound under the Shakesperean illusion of Edwin Booth as Hamlet, and always in the grove scene I thought of Poe. The same deep thoughtfulness — the profound expression of sadness — the weird silence and gloom which harmonize so wonderfully with the character of the shadowy Dane, served to reproduce the image of Edgar Poe.
