Mr. Allan was childless and wealthy, and, it would seem, injudiciously indulgent to the boy, yielding quite too much to his arrogance, and far too lenient to his outbreaks of temper. But it must be borne in mind that the young Edgar was living in a society in which spirit was ranked as the test of manliness, where coercion was reserved, like the whip, for the slave only, and where the assertion that “he who ruleth himself is greater than he who taketh a city,” is a musty, old-fogy view, unbecoming a gentleman.
At length Mr. Allan, tired of the caprices and outrages of the boy–genius, and having married a, second time, and now become a father, turns him out of doors, without a cent in the world; and so this child of genius, reared in luxury, after having been born in the hot–bed of excitement, with his keen, precocious intellect and sensitive nerves, is a houseless beggar.
Mr. Allan died, as rich men can, peacefully in his bed; and men praise him as the “patron” of Edgar Poe. To my eyes he committed a grievous wrong. When he had once assumed the responsibility of this boy, it was his duty to carry it through, and to see how the world went with him. After he had denuded him by his indulgence, it was the height of cruelty for him to cast him, defenseless as he was, upon the hard bosses of the world. It must be borne in mind that he was but a boy of sixteen, and if this youth had become such a monster, he had been ripened under the very eye of his guardian. Where was the fault?
At the time when he was associated in Richmond with the excellent and simple-hearted Mr. White, as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, he was but nineteen. Thus, three years after having been turned adrift in the world by his guardian, he is of sound mind enough and respectable enough in appearance to be taken into the family of Mr. White as assistant editor.
Even then he had written much, not only in prose but verse also — had written great quantities of the latter before his guardian abandoned him. […]
Before Mr. Poe came to New York, he traveled much, both at home and abroad; he had been partially educated at West Point, but his mind was neither mathematical, military, nor subordinate to soldierly discipline, as might have been conceived, and for this cause his relation therewith was dissolved, though he always retained the air inseparable from military training. It was said he made his way to Russia, and got into some difficulty there; be that as it may, he could not have sunk himself very low, for his looks and manner bore not the shadow of a trace of any irregularity.
If he did make the mistakes imputed to him, I can only say that Edgar Poe was right royally organized, when he could rise so above every vestige of disorder, as the lion shakes the clew from his mane.
While in Richmond he married his own cousin, and she a child of fourteen. Here was another error. But let us draw the vail over it, for it produced for him in the person of his aunt, and now mother-in-law, Mrs. Clem, one devoted, untiring, long-suffering friend, without whom his career would have been even sadder than it was.
It must have been in 1842 that Poe first came to reside permanently in New York. He was at once admitted into its literary circles, where his superior address and remarkable conversational powers at once attracted attention. Then there was more prestige attached to literature than at present exists. The field is now so over-filled, and the persons of marked genius so comparatively few, that the desire for companionship with literary persons is much less.
