CHAPTER XVI.

1849.

LAST DAYS IN RICHMOND.

THE last days in Richmond have fortunately been painted for us by a sympathetic and artistic hand in a picture to which we can add a few important unprinted details gathered from still living contemporaries of the poet.

In his return a prodigal to the beautiful old city of his youth where so many innocent and happy hours had been spent, fishing, hunting, swimming in the ancient yellow Jeems," running the flowerbespangled woods, acting in the Thespian Club, verse-capping at old Burke's Academy, the city where his mother lay in a nameless and unknown grave, Poe found for a brief two months and a half a renewal of the eagle-like strength of his earlier years. The city had of course grown immensely since his youth; the Mexican War, with its wave of excitement, had passed over the land and brought the great Virginians, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott prominently before the public; the streets swarmed with new faces; new literary figures had appeared on the scene; but it was, fundamentally, the same dear old Richmond, social, hospitable, sunshiny, richly read in eighteenth century literature, a trifle pedantic in its culture, but full of winsome women and cultivated men who had watched the career of this extraordinary "cosmopolite" (as the

1

novelist Virginian Cooke, called him) and were ready to welcome the wanderer back to what many of them thought was his native town.

The Mackenzies and Cabells, the Mayos and Sullys, the Sheltons and Carters and Thomases were still there, friends of his youth, ready to kill the fatted calf in honor of the return, and their houses were thrown wide open to the gifted and distinguished stranger. Poe, like Chaucer in his famous "I am a Sotherne man," continually referred to Virginia as his home. and shrank from the hyperborean clime and criticism of certain latitudes in the north-east, albeit deriving from thence many an auroral beam of true and lasting friendship. In his own Virginia-consecrated, to him, by the tenderest of names he felt perfectly at home; and here he felt, too, that his " Stylus project might grow into a real thing. Friends flocked around him; offers of subscriptions and of subscribers were freely made; and he delivered several lectures in the parlors of the old Exchange Hotel, where, a little later, the Prince of Wales (now King Edward VII.) was entertained in 1860.

Poe put up at the old "Swan Tavern," which is referred to, among other interesting matters, in the following letter to the author:

RICHMOND, Nov. 26th, 1900.

DEAR SIR, Your letter of November twenty-fifth received, in which you state I might know something of the poet, Edgar Poe, and his visit to Richmond in eighteen forty-nine. My impression is he was a resident at that time of this city, and boarded at the old "Swan Tavern,” on Broad Street, between Eighth and Ninth. Dr. George Rawlins, an intimate friend of mine, told me he attended him there in an attack of "delirium tremens,"

and before he had ceased to visit him, he left the tavern, and when next heard from, was in Baltimore, where he renewed his frolic, and died in a few days.

I had no personal acquaintance with Poe, but have often seen him. The only time I ever heard him speak was the summer of eighteen forty-eight in the Exchange Concert-room in this city. The inspiration of the lecture was no doubt need of money. In elucidating his subject — "The Poetic Principle he recited excerpts from some of his poems" Annabelle Lee," "Tintinnabulations of the Bells," etc. ; and in conclusion repeated "The Raven" with all the rhythm and pathos of which he was capable. All this before an audience of about twenty persons. The occasion to this day I recall with pleasure. I have heard that at times his necessities were so urgent he would write a poem and sell it to an acquaintance for the paltry sum of one dollar. He was said to be moody and peevish, but always recognized by his school-fellows as a boy of true courage. On one occasion a friend found him lying on the wayside intoxicated. As he approached him he exclaimed : Why, Edgar Poe!" when Poe looked at him and replied: "No; poor Edgar," showing he always retained his wits. The Swan Tavern " is still in existence, but hardly recognizable, having been converted into offices, lodging-rooms, and so on. Miss Jane McKenzie, who adopted Miss Rosalie Poe about the time Mr. Allan took Edgar Poe, is, of course, long since dead - in fact every member of her family, so far as I know, is dead. I had a slight acquaintance with Mrs. Shelton, to whom he was said to be engaged, but of her family I can tell you nothing.

It may be emphasized, in connection with one matter referred to in this letter, that Richmond has for fifty years past been divided into two antagonistic camps on the Poe question," the minority holding the delirium tremens theory of his irregularities, the ma

jority taking the more humane and charitable view of Mrs. Susan Archer Weiss, in her "Last Days of Edgar A. Poe." The occurrences undoubtedly occurred

to use an expressive tautology; but the explanation of them is a purely pathological one: morbid conditions existed which overpowered any will-power that may have been left, honeycombed as this power had become by a string and concatenation of disasters unparalleled in the history of any literary man on record. Schiller, in the Wallenstein," mercifully keeps the murder of the hero out of sight; Poe is presented to us by his biographers undergoing all the torments of the damned before the gaping eyes of the audience.

This little visit shed an Indian summer glow over the life of the poet that lingers still in the memory of some who saw him. He hunted up his old haunts, made new friends, recited his "Raven" and other poems in the parlors of his intimates, stayed at Duncan's Lodge with the Mackenzies, met his eccentric sister, Rosalie Poe, once more, and above all renewed the acquaintance with the old flame of his University and Academy days, Miss Royster (now Mrs. Shelton, widow of a prosperous merchant - a lady whom the author, living in the same town with her in 1871-76, used to hear familiarly called "Poe's Lenore"). Poe had come down from New York to Richmond in 1848 and had then, it is said, renewed the suit begun more than twenty years before, a period during which both had become widowed. Mrs. Weiss asserts that the engagement was renewed, but that it was broken off when Mrs. Shelton learned that it was purely mercenary that it was the " Stylus," not herself, that

1 Scribner's Montbly, March, 1878.

Poe was in pursuit of. That Poe's affections for women were intense but fleeting, is a part of the universal record of him; and in the case of Mrs. Shelton it may well have been a momentary recrudescence of the old feeling mixed with new elements of self-interest. The lady herself believed she was engaged to Poe, and so asserted by pen and mouth to Dr. J. J. Moran, the physician who attended Poe in his last illness. 1 In the Ingram correspondence (" Appleton's Journal," May, 1878) she thus describes their meeting in the summer of 1849, describing their relation, however, as a partial understanding" only:

"I was ready to go to church, when a servant entered and told me that a gentleman in the parlor wished to see me. I went down and was amazed at seeing him [Poe], but knew him instantly. He came up to me in the most enthusiastic manner, and said: Oh! Elmira, is it you?' I told him I was going

to church, that I never let anything interfere with that, and that he must call again.

"When he did call again, he renewed his addresses. I laughed; he looked away serious, and said he was in earnest, and had been thinking about it for a long time. When I found out that he was very serious, I became serious also, and told him that, if he would not take a positive denial, he must give me time to consider. He answered, 'A love that hesitated was not a love for him.' . . . But he stayed a long time, and was very pleasant and cheerful. He came to visit me frequently. . . . I went with him to the Exchange Concert-Room,' and heard him read. . . . When he was going away, he begged me to marry him, and prom

1 A Defence of Edgar Allan Poe. Washington, 1885.

By Jno. J. Moran, M.D.: