• REMOVAL TO FORDHAM.

In the spring of 1846, Edgar, fearing the effects of the prostrating summer heat in the city upon his wife's shattered health, determined to remove to the country, and the pretty little village of Fordham was chosen as their place of residence. Their home here was a tiny cottage, situated on the top of a picturesque hill, and half buried in fruit trees. It was a romantic and beautiful spot, quiet and very retired, well suited in many ways for their abode. The cottage was small, having only four rooms-two above and two belowbut it was cool and sheltered, and far away from the heat and bustle and vexations of New York. The parlour was used by Poe as his study, and here he wrote 66 Ulalume," "Eureka," and other productions of his "lonesome latter years." The room was poorly furnished, but was very neat and clean. The floor was covered with red and white matting; four or five cane-seated chairs, a light table, a set of hanging book-shelves, and two or three fine engravings completed the furniture.

Some charming descriptions of Poe's life at Fordham have been given by his contemporaries.

One of these, writing of his first visit there, says of the place and its inmates :

"We found him and his wife and his wife's mother, who was his aunt, living in a little cottage at the top of a hill.

"There was an acre or two of greensward fenced in about the house, as smooth as velvet and as clean as the best kept carpet. There were some grand old cherry trees in the yard, that threw a massive shade around them.

"Poe had somehow caught a full-grown bobolink. He had put him in a cage, which he had hung on a nail driven into the trunk of a cherry tree. The poor bird was as unfit

to live in a cage as his captor was to live in the world. He was as restless as his jailer, and sprang continually, in a fierce, frightened way, from one side of the cage to the other. I pitied him; but Poe was bent on training him. There he stood, with his arms crossed, before the tormented bird, his sublime trust in attaining the impossible apparent in his whole self. So handsome, so impassive in his wonderful intellectual beauty, so proud and reserved, and yet so confidentially communicative, so entirely a gentleman, upon all occasions that I ever saw him, so tasteful, so good a talker, was Poe, that he impressed himself and his wishes, almost without words, upon those with whom he spoke. His voice was melody itself.

"On this occasion I was introduced to the young wife of the poet, and to the mother, then more than sixty years of age. She was a tall, dignified old lady, with a most lady-like manner, and her black dress, old and much worn, looked really elegant on her. She seemed hale and strong, and appeared to be a sort of universal Providence for her strange children.

"Mrs. Poe looked very young; she had large black eyes and a pearly whiteness of complexion which was a perfect pallor. Her pale face, her brilliant eyes, and her raven hair gave her an unearthly look.

"One felt that she was almost a dissolved spirit; and when she coughed, it was made certain that she was rapidly passing away.

"The cottage had an air of taste and gentility that must have been lent to it by the presence of its inmates.

"So neat, so poor, so unfurnished, and yet so charming a dwelling I never saw. The sitting-room was laid with check matting; four chairs, a light stand, and a hanging bookshelf completed its furniture.

"There were pretty presentation copies of books on the little shelves, and the Brownings had a post of honour on the stand. With quiet exultation Poe drew from his side-pocket a letter that he had recently received from Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He read it to us. It was very flattering.

...

"He was at this time greatly depressed. Their extreme poverty, the sickness of his wife, and his own inability to write, sufficiently accounted for this. We strolled away into the woods, and had a very cheerful time, till some one proposed a game at leaping; I think it must have been Poe, as he was expert in the exercise. Two or three gentlemen agreed to leap with him, and though one of them was tall, and had been a hunter in times past, Poe still distanced them all."

In contrast to this testimony of Poe's active manliness, is the statement of another near friend who writes "that Poe was so effeminately sensitive as to be seriously disturbed by the rustle of a silk dress, and would plead with his lady friends to wear stuff that would hang in graceful drapery and make no noise."

Of a later visit, the author from whom we have previously quoted writes: "The autumn came, and Mrs. Poe sank rapidly in consumption, and I saw her in her bed-chamber. The weather was cold, and the sick lady had the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic fever of consumption.

"She lay on the straw bed, wrapped in her husband's great coat, with a large tortoise-shell cat in her bosom. The wonderful cat seemed conscious of her great usefulness. The coat and the cat were the sufferer's only means of warmth, except as her husband held her hands and her mother her feet.

"Mrs. Clemm was passionately fond of her daughter, and her distress on account of her illness and poverty and misery was dreadful to see.

“As soon as I was made aware of these painful facts, I came to New York and enlisted the sympathies and services of a lady whose heart and hand were ever open to the poor and the miserable.

“The lady headed dollars the next week.

a subscription, and carried them sixty From the day this kind lady1 first

1 Mrs Estelle Lewis.

saw the suffering family of the poet she watched over them as a mother.

"She saw them often, and ministered to the comfort of the dying and the living. Poe,” this writer adds, in concluding his impressions and reminiscences, "has been called a bad man. He was his own enemy, it is true, but he was a gentleman and a scholar. If the scribblers who have snapped like curs at his remains had seen him, as his friends saw him, in his dire necessity and his great temptation, they would have been worse than they deem him to have written as they have concerning a man of whom they really knew next to nothing."

Griswold, with great cruelty, states that "his habits of frequent intoxication, and his inattention to the means of support, had reduced him to much more than common destitution;" when he must have known, or could have readily ascertained from Mrs. Clemm, that his health had been broken by his incessant watching with his sick wife, and he had been unable to get opportunity to make new literary engagements.

The writer from whose reminiscences we have quoted, took the well-meant liberty of making Poe's necessities public without, of course, the poet's knowledge.

The following paragraph announcing Poe's distress appeared shortly afterwards in The New York Express:

"We regret to learn that Edgar A. Poe and his wife are both dangerously ill with the consumption, and that the hand of misfortune lies heavy upon their temporal affairs. We are sorry to mention the fact that they are so far reduced as to be barely able to obtain the necessaries of life. This is, indeed, a hard lot, and we hope that the friends and admirers of Mr. Poe will come promptly to his assistance in his bitterest hour of need." This appeal called forth many sympathetic words, some substantial help, which showed that Poe was not without true friends.

Willis also made a general appeal in The Home Journal on behalf of his friend.

THE WINTER OF 1847.

And now the year had dawned wherein the dark shadow, which so long had hung over Poe's life, deepened, never to rise again. As the January of 1847 advanced, the health of his loved Virginia still more rapidly declined. For some time the sickness of his wife and his own ill health had incapacitated Poe from literary work-his sole source of income-and the family were therefore reduced to the direst straits, wanting even the commonest necessaries of life.

The weather was very, very cold, and Virginia suffered severely. Her bed was of straw, and was covered only with a "spread" and sheets; she had no blanket. It was thus the dying lady lay in her last hours, still wrapped in her husband's overcoat, and with the large tortoise-shell cat still nestling in her bosom to keep her warm. The cat and the coat afforded the only warmth that the poor sufferer could obtain in that bitter January weather, except the comfort imparted by her mother chafing her feet, and her husband rubbing her hands. The chills that follow the hectic fever of consumption made the bitter cold still worse, and, at last, on the 30th January, the gentle spirit fled. Her death-bed was indeed a scene of sad and bitter anguish. Poe was so prostrated that for some weeks he was deprived of all power of thought or action.

Night after night he would arise from his sleepless pillow and wander down to his lost wife's grave, and there, in the snow and rain, he would throw himself upon the cold mound and weep bitterly for hours at a time, calling upon her in words of devoted love.