1843

 

__________

 

“Without wearing any mask we are conscious of,

we have a special face for each friend.”

 

Oliver Wendell Holmes

__________

Telegraph to the moon? 

Congress finally realizes that Samuel Morse (see 1837) is onto something, and sets aside money to build his electro-magnetic telegraph from Washington to Baltimore. (124/346) 

Mr. Morse had a model on exhibition at the Capitol, and the beaux and belles used to hold brief conversations over the mysterious wire. At last the House considered a bill appropriating twenty-five thousand dollars, to be expended in a series of experiments with the new invention.

 

In the brief debate on the bill, Mr. Cave Johnson undertook to ridicule the discovery by proposing that one-half of the proposed appropriation be devoted to experiments in mesmerism, while Mr. Houghton thought that Millerism (a religious craze then prevalent) should be included in the benefits of the appropriation…Men of character, men of erudition, men who, in ordinary affairs, had foresight, were wholly unable to forecast the future of the telegraph. Other motions disparaging to the invention were made, such as propositions to appropriate part of the sum to telegraph the moon.

 

The measure passed only 89-83. (Benjamin Perley Poole, Reminiscences; Volume 1, pp. 309-310.)

 

* 

William Miller predicts the end of the world. Thousands believe him and prepare for the end. It doesn’t happen.

Chart explaining his prediction.

 

* 

“The man who made it safe to murder.” 

Junius Brutus Booth is immensely popular in the Washington theater, particularly in his Shakespearean roles. “Booth at this time was more than ever a slave to intoxicating drink, so much so that he would often disappoint his audiences, sometimes wholly failing to appear, yet his popularity remained unabated.” (Benjamin Perley Poole, Reminiscences; Volume 1, p. 281.) 

Rufus Choate, a lawyer who went into politics, was a powerful debater. 

Wendell Phillips once said of Mr. Choate that he was “the man who made it safe to murder, and of whose health thieves asked about before they began to steal.” It may have been that in the excitement of pleading before a jury he may have occasionally been carried beyond the depth of logical argument which his judgment approved. But in the Senate he had no equal as an orator. His elaborate and brilliant speeches were listened to with earnest attention by the other Senators, who would now be convulsed with laughter and then flooded with tears. (Benjamin Perley Poole, Reminiscences; Volume 1, pp. 292-293.)

 

* 

“A little drink was poison in his veins.” 

Edgar Allan Poe publishes his most famous poem, The Raven. (Who knew an NFL team would someday choose its name based on that poem?) 

Halleck provides an outline of Poe’s life, noting that his grandfather, Daniel Poe, also a citizen of Baltimore, was a general in the American Revolution. 

An orphan before he was three years old, Poe was reared by Mr. and Mrs. John Allan of Richmond, Virginia. We are given a glimpse of the boy at the age of six, standing on a table, declaiming and drinking wine as a pledge to the health of the guests. If there was ever a child who ought never to have known the taste of wine, that child was Edgar Allan Poe. He could not touch one glass of it without losing moral and physical self-control. In 1815, at the close of the War of 1812, his foster parents went to England and took him with them. He was given a school reader and two spelling books with which to amuse himself during the long sailing voyage across the ocean. He was placed for five years in the Manor School House, a boarding school, at Stoke Newington, a suburb of London. Here, he could walk by the very house in which Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe. But nothing could make up to Poe the loss of a mother and home training during those five critical years. The headmaster said that Poe was clever, but spoiled by “an extravagant amount of pocket money.” The contrast between his school days and adult life should be noted. We shall never hear of his having too much money after he became an author.

 

(Here I should not that my version of Halleck includes the passages in italics, above, and below, dropping other details, for example, mention of the Defoe house. I have also made slight edits, for example, changing “to-day” to “today.”)

 

In 1820 the boy returned with the Allans to Richmond, where he prepared for college, and at the age of seventeen entered the University of Virginia. “Here,” his biographer says, “he divided his time, after the custom of undergraduates, between the recitation room, the punch bowl, the card-table, athletic sports, and pedestrianism.” (My version: here he yielded to the temptation of drinking and gambling, and he lost at the gaming table twenty-five hundred dollars in a few months.) Although Poe does not seem to have been censured by the faculty, Mr. Allan was displeased with his record, removed him from college, and placed him in his counting house. This act and other causes, which have never been fully ascertained, led Poe to leave Mr. Allan’s home.

 

Poe then went to Boston, where, at the age of eighteen, he published a thin volume entitled Tamerlane and Other Poems. Disappointed at not being able to live by his pen, he served two years in the army as a common soldier, giving both an assumed name and age. He finally secured an appointment to West Point after he was slightly beyond the legal age of entrance. The cadets said in a joking way that Poe had secured the appointment for his son, but that the father substituted himself after the boy died. Feeling an insatiable ambition to become an author, Poe neglected his duties at West Point, and he was, fortunately for literature, discharged at the age of twenty-two.

 

HIS GREAT STRUGGLE. Soon after leaving West Point, Poe went to his kindred in Baltimore. In a garret in that southern city, he first discovered his power in writing prose tales. In 1833 his story, MS. Found in a Bottle, won a prize of one hundred dollars offered by a Baltimore paper. In 1834 Mr. Allan died without mentioning Poe in his will; and in spite of his utmost literary efforts, Poe had to borrow money to keep from starving.

 

After struggling for four years in Baltimore, he went to Richmond and became editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. He worked very hard in this position, sometimes contributing to a single number as much as forty pages of matter, mostly editorials and criticisms of books. In Baltimore he had tested his power of writing short stories, but in Richmond his work laid the foundation of his reputation as a literary critic. While here, he married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, but even his affection for her did not enable him to withstand the conviviality of the place. A little drink was poison in his veins, unfitting him for work. Perhaps it was irregular habits that caused him to lose the profitable editorship of the Messenger soon after he married. Let us remember, however, that his mother-in-law was charitable enough not to unveil his weakness. “At home,” she said, “he was as simple and affectionate as a child.”

 

The principal part of the rest of his life was passed in Philadelphia and New York, where he served as editor of various periodicals and wrote stories and poems. In the former city, he wrote most of the tales for which he is today famous. With the publication of his poem, The Raven, in New York in 1845, he reached the summit of his fame. In that year he wrote to a friend, “The Raven has had a great ‘run’ – but I wrote it for the express purpose of running – just as I did The Gold Bug, you know. The bird beat the bug, though, all hollow.” And yet, in spite of his fame, he said in the same year, “I have made no money. I am as poor now as ever I was in my life.”

 

The truth was that it would then have been difficult for the most successful author to live even in the North without a salaried position, and conditions were worse in the South. Like Hawthorne, Poe tried to get a position in a customhouse, but failed.

 

He moved to an inexpensive cottage in Fordham, a short distance from New York City, where he, his wife, and mother-in-law found themselves in 1846 in absolute want of food and warmth. The saddest scene in which any great American author figured was witnessed in that cottage in “the bleak December,” when his wife, Virginia, lay dying in the bitter cold. Because there was insufficient bed clothing to keep her warm, Poe gave her his coat and placed the family cat upon her to add its warmth.

 

Her death made him almost completely irresponsible. The stunning effect of the blow may be seen in the wandering lines of Ulalume (1847). The end came to him in Baltimore in 1849, the same year in which he wrote the beautiful dirge of Annabel Lee for his dead wife. He was only forty when he died. This greatest literary genius of the South was buried in Baltimore in a grave that remained unmarked for twenty-six years.

 

In anticipation of his end, he had written the lines:

 

   “And oh! of all tortures,—
     That torture the worst
   Has abated—the terrible
     Torture of thirst
   For the napthaline river
     Of Passion accurst:—
   I have drank of a water
     That quenches all thirst.”

 

* 

We add here, the lines from one of his other famous poems, written in memory of his wife. She was only 13 years old in 1836, when they married, and 24 when she died.

 

Annabel Lee 

It was many and many a year ago,

   In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

   By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

   Than to love and be loved by me.

 

I was a child and she was a child,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

But we loved with a love that was more than love—

   I and my Annabel Lee—

With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven

   Coveted her and me.

 

And this was the reason that, long ago,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

   My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her highborn kinsmen came

   And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulchre

   In this kingdom by the sea.

 

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,

   Went envying her and me—

Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,

   In this kingdom by the sea)

That the wind came out of the cloud by night,

   Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

 

But our love it was stronger by far than the love

   Of those who were older than we—

   Of many far wiser than we—

And neither the angels in Heaven above

   Nor the demons down under the sea

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

 

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

   Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

   In her sepulchre there by the sea—

   In her tomb by the sounding sea.

 

* 

Ruth Finley notes that Sarah Hale had been a patron of Poe, and he had been paid well, he felt, for his submissions to Godey’s. 

A tribute to the poet ends with these four lines: 

So worn and tempest-riven!

    Be all his faults forgiven!

Calm be his rest in heaven,

    Whose soul was love!

 

Hale had recognized his “gentleness of heart,” Finley writes. “To appear in Godey’s Lady’s Book was to be ‘made,’” said one editor in 1928. (113/252)

 

* 

The horde of office-seekers which bedeviled President Tyler reminded Benjamin Perley Poore of a saying of John Randolph, when told that the patronage of the federal government was overrated. “‘I know,’ said the sarcastic Virginian, ‘that it may be overrated; I know that we cannot give to those who apply office equal to their expectations; and I also know that with one bone I can call five hundred dogs.’” (Poole, Reminiscences; Volume 1, 355)