genius who was intimate with the Poes, and whose noble affection dictated some of the warmest words in Mrs. Frances Sargent Osgood. seven months after Poe's death,

defence of the poet· On her death-bed,

she wrote:1

no one has

"I think no one could know him known him personally certainly no woman without feeling the same interest [as I did]. I can sincerely say, that I have frequently heard of aberrations on his part from the straight and narrow path.' I have never seen him otherwise than gentle, generous, well bred, and fastidiously refined. To a sensitive and delicately nurtured woman, there was a peculiar and irresistible charm in the chivalric, graceful, and almost tender reverence with which he invariably approached all women who won his respect. It was this which first commanded and always retained my regard for him.

ance.

"I have been told that when his sorrows and pecuniary embarrassments had driven him to the use of stimulants, which a less delicate organization might have borne without injury, he was in the habit of speaking disrespectfully of the ladies of his acquaintIt is difficult for me to believe this; for to me, to whom he came during the year of our acquaintance for counsel and kindness in all his many anxieties and griefs, he never spoke irreverently of any woman save one, and then only in my defence; and though I rebuked him for his momentary forgetfulness of the respect due to himself and to me, I could not but forgive the offence for the sake of the generous impulse which prompted it. Yet, even were these sad rumors true of him, the wise and well-informed knew how to regard, as they would the impetuous anger of a spoiled 1 Mrs. Osgood to Griswold, from the Griswold Memoirs of Poc.

infant, baulked of its capricious will, the equally harmless and unmeaning phrensy of that stray child of Poetry and Passion. For the few unwomanly and slander-loving gossips who have injured him and themselves only by repeating his ravings, when in such moods they have accepted his society, I have only to vouchsafe my wonder and my pity. They cannot surely harm the true and pure, who, reverencing his genius and pitying his misfortunes and his errors, endeavored by their timely kindness and sympathy, to soothe his sad career.

"It was in his own simple yet poetical home, that to me the character of Edgar Poe appeared in its most beautiful light. Playful, affectionate, witty, alternately docile and wayward as a petted childfor his young, gentle, and idolized wife, and for all who came, he had, even in the midst of his most harassing duties, a kind word, a pleasant smile, a graceful and courteous attention. At his desk, beneath the romantic picture of his loved and lost Lenore, he would sit, hour after hour, patient, assiduous, and uncomplaining, tracing in an exquisitely clear chirography, and with almost superhuman swiftness, the lightning thoughts- the rare and radiant' fancies as they flashed through his wonderful and ever-wakeful brain."

The woman referred to in Mrs. Osgood's recollections was a certain Mrs. Ellet, who made herself notorious by meddling in Poe's private affairs and following him with relentless persecution when he denounced her. It seems that on a certain occasion she saw a letter of Mrs. Osgood's to Poe lying open on a table, read it, and immediately got up a committee of ladies, with Margaret Fuller at their head, to call on the offending poet at Fordham, and remon

strate. Poe, who detested both Mrs. Ellet and Margaret Fuller, though in his "Literati" he did full justice to the genius of the latter, denounced the Paul Pry, and angrily said she had better look after her own correspondence. This brought down on the poet a personal difficulty with the woman's family and resulted in a world of slanders, lies, and abuse heaped on his devoted head.

In a letter only lately accessible through the publication of the Griswold Correspondence (p. 256), Mrs. Osgood in a letter referring to these slanders and the whole painful episode of her correspondence with and friendship for Poe, writes to Griswold in 1850:

"I trust you will write that life of Poe [she never saw the Life after it was written!]. I will do as you wished I will write, as far as is proper, in a letter to you, my reminiscences of that year [apparently 184647], and try to make it interesting and dignified, and you in introducing it by one single sentence can put down at once my envious calumniators. You have the proof in Mrs. Poe's letter to me, and in his to Mrs. Ellet, either of which would fully establish my innocence in a court of justice. certainly hers would. Neither of them, as you know, were persons likely to take much trouble to prove a woman's innocence, and it was only because she felt that I had been cruelly and shamefully wronged by her mother and Mrs. E. that she impulsively rendered me that justice. She, Mrs. Poe, felt grieved that she herself had drawn me into the snare by imploring me to be kind to Edgar to grant him my society and to write to him, because, she said, I was the only woman he knew who influenced him for his good, or, indeed, who had any lasting influence over him. I wish the simple truth to

be known, that he sought me, not I him. It is too cruel that I, the only one of those literary women who did not seek his acquaintance, for Mrs. Ellet asked an introduction to him, and followed him everywhere, Miss Lynch begged me to bring him there and called upon him at his lodgings, Mrs. Whitman besieged him with valentines and letters long before he wrote or took any notice of her, and all the others wrote poetry and letters to him, it is too cruel that I should be singled out after his death as the only victim to suffer from the slanders of his mother. I never thought of him till he sent me his 'Raven' and asked Willis to introduce him to me, and immediately after I went to Albany, and afterwards to Boston and Providence to avoid him, and he followed me to each of those places and wrote to me, imploring me to love him, many a letter which I did not reply to until his wife added her entreaties to his and said that I might save him from infamy, and her from death, by showing an affectionate interest in him."

Stung to the quick by the slanders growing out of her Platonic correspondence with Poe, who never ceased to be devoted to her, Mrs. Osgood penned this self-contradictory communication to Griswold; which did not prevent her from addressing an impassioned dirge to the poet's memory as the last poem in the volume of verse published just before her death in May, 1850:

"The hand that swept the sounding lyre

With more than mortal skill,

The lightning eye, the heart of fire,

The fervent lips are still!

No more, in rapture or in woe,

With melody to thrill,

Ah! Nevermore!"

"STELLA."

ances

DURING the Whitman episode and while he was travelling to and fro between New York, Providence, and Lowell, where he lectured in August on "The Poetic Principle," he made some valuable acquaintthe Richmonds, of Westford — who became attached and life-long friends to himself and Mrs. Clemm. We find him soon after in Richmond, Va., and on intimate terms with the poet John R. Thompson, editor of "The Southern Literary Messenger," for which he was furnishing new instalments of

Marginalia." Thompson became extremely fond of Poe, and wrote, after his death, a lecture on him which, it is greatly to be regretted, has seemingly perished. "When in Richmond," reports Mr. Thompson," he made the office of the Messenger' a place of frequent resort. His conversation was always attractive, and at times very brilliant. Among modern authors his favorite was Tennyson, and he delighted to recite from The Princess' the song Tears, idle tears' and a fragment of which,

‹‹‹ when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square,'

he pronounced unsurpassed by any image expressed in writing."