In the following spring Edgar Poe and Virginia Clemm were, strange as it
may seem, principals in another wedding. The months intervening between
the two ceremonies had been teeming with interest to them both--filled
with work and with happiness just short of that perfect
satisfaction--that completeness--that unattainable which it is part of
being a mortal with an immortal mind and soul to be continually striving
after, and missing, and will be until the half-light of this world is
merged into the light ineffable of the one to come.
The Dreamer had returned from his brief visit to Baltimore a new man.
The blue devils were gone. The heart and mind which they had made their
dwelling-place were swept clean of every vestige of them and were filled
to overflowing with a sweet and rare presence--the presence of her who
lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by him; for he
felt that her spirit was with him at every moment of the day, though her
fair body was other whither. The consciousness of the secret he carried
in his heart flooded his nature with sunshine. Because of it he carried
his head more proudly--wore a new dignity which his friends attributed
entirely to the success of his work upon the magazine. He was filled
with peace and good will to all the world. He was happy and wanted
everybody else to be happy--it was apparent in himself and in his work.
In his dreamy moods his fancy spread a broader, a stronger wing, and
soared with new daring to heights unexplored before. When Edgar
Goodfellow was in the ascendency he threw himself with unwonted zest
into the pleasures that were "like poppies spread" in the way of the
successful author and editor--the literary lion of the town.
He had always been an enthusiastic and graceful dancer and now nothing
else seemed to give him so natural a vent for the happiness that was
beating in his veins. His feet seemed like his pen, to be inspired. He
felt that he could dance till Doomsday and all the prettiest, most
bewitching girls let him see how pleased they were to have him for a
partner. In the brief, glowing rests between the dances he rewarded them
with charming talk, and verses in praise of their loveliness which
seemed to fall without the slightest effort from his tongue into their
pretty, delighted ears or from his pencil into their albums.
There was at least one fair damsel--a slight, willowy creature with
violet eyes and flaxen ringlets, who treasured the graceful lines he
dedicated to her with a feeling warmer than friendship. She was pretty
Eliza White, the daughter of his employer, the owner of the _Southern
Literary Messenger_. She was herself a lover of poetry and romance, and
a dreamer of dreams, all of which had erelong merged into one sweet
dream so secret, so sacred that she scarce dared own it to her own inner
self, and its central figure was her father's handsome assistant editor,
who rested in blissful ignorance of the havoc he was making in her
maiden heart, engrossed as he was in his own secret--his own romance.
New energy, new zest, new life seemed to have entered his blood. He had
endless capacity for work as well as for pleasure and could write all
day and dance half the night and then lie awake star-gazing the other
half and rise ready and eager for the day's work in the morning. Such a
tonic--such a stimulant did his love for his faraway bride and his
consciousness of her love for him prove.
He was happy--very, very happy, but he desired to be happier still. The
simple, beautiful words of the old, old rite uttered in the dim, empty
church had woven an invisible bond between him and the maiden whom he
loved to call in his heart his wife though the time when he could claim
her before the world was not yet.
The miracle that this bond wrought in him was a revelation to him. Was
the priest a wizard? Did the words of the ancient rite possess any
intrinsic power of enchantment undreamed of by the uninitiated?
He had not believed it possible for mortal to love more wholly--more
madly than he had loved the little Virginia before that sacred ceremony,
but after it he knew there were heights of love of which he had not
hitherto had a glimpse. Just the right to say to his heart "She is my
own--my wife--" made her tenfold more precious than she had ever been
before, but it also made the separation tenfold harder to bear--made it
beyond his power to bear!
The Valley of the Many-Colored Grass had been dissolved--the spell that
had brought it into being broken, by the separation, and he longed with
a longing that was as hunger and thirst to reconstruct this magical
world in which he and his Virginia dwelt apart with her who was mother
to them both, in Richmond. And so, poor as he was, he arranged to bring
Virginia and Mother Clemm to Richmond and establish them in a boarding
house where he could see them often and wait with better grace the still
happier day of making his marriage public.
The day came more speedily than they had let themselves hope. The
popularity of the _Messenger_ and the fame of its assistant editor had
grown with leaps and bounds. The new year brought the welcome gift of
promotion to full editorship, with an increase of salary. With the
opening spring began plans for the divulging of the great secret--for
public acknowledgment of the marriage. But how was it to be done?--That
was the question! Edgar Poe knew too well the disapproval with which the
world regarded secret marriages--with which he himself regarded them,
ordinarily. His sense of refinement of fitness, of the sacredness of the
marriage tie, revolted from the very idea.
In what fashion then, could he and his little bride proclaim their
secret that would not do violence to their own taste or set a buzz of
gossip going? That the horrid lips of gossip should so much as breathe
the name of his Virginia--that Mrs. Grundy should dare shrug her
decorous shoulders, if ever so slightly, at mention of that sacred
name--. The bare suggestion was intolerable!
At last a solution offered itself to his mind. Not for an instant did he
regret the sacred ceremony in Christ Church, Baltimore. Not for worlds
would he have cut short for one moment of time the duration of the
beautiful spiritual marriage when he had been able to say to himself:
"She whose presence fills my heart and my life--whose spirit I can feel
near me at my work, in my hours of recreation and in my dreams, is my
wife." But of this exquisite, this inexpressibly dear union the world
was in utter ignorance. It was known only to the Mother, the priest and
the aged sexton. To these witnesses always, as to themselves, their
marriage would date from the moment when the blessing was invoked above
their bowed heads in Christ Church, but to the world--why not let it
date from the day in which they would claim each other before the world,
in Richmond?
The thing was most simple! A second ceremony in the presence of a few
friends--a brief announcement in next day's paper--and their life would
be begun with the dignity, the prestige, of public marriage.
* * * * *
The sixteenth of May was the day chosen for the event which was more
like a wedding in Arcady than in latter-day society. As at the secret
ceremony, the customary preparations for a wedding were conspicuously
absent; yet was not the whole town gala with sunshine and verdure and
May-bloom and bird-song?
Edgar Poe looked every inch a bridegroom as, with his girl-wife upon his
arm, he stepped forth from Mrs. Yarrington's boarding-house, opposite
the green slopes of Capitol Square. A bridegroom indeed!--plainly, but
perfectly apparelled--handsome, proud, fearless--his great eyes luminous
with solemn joy.
The simplest of white frocks became Virginia's innocence and beauty more
than costly bridal array and the nosegay of white violets above her
chaste bosom was her only ornament.
With this sweet pair came the happy mother and a little train of close
friends. It was late afternoon. The sunshine was mellow and the air was
filled with the delicious insense which in mid-May the majestic
paulonia tree drops from its purple bells and which is the very breath
of the warm-natured South.
No line of carriages stood at the door. No awning shut the picture they
made from admiring eyes, but happily the little party chatted together
as they strolled under over-arching greenery to the corner of Main and
Seventh Streets, where in the prim parlor of the Presbyterian minister,
the words were pronounced which told the world that Edgar Poe and
Virginia Clemm were one.
Upon the return of the party to Mrs. Yarrington's, a cake was cut, the
health and happiness of the bride and groom were drunk in wine of
"Muddie's" own make, and the modest festival was over.
* * * * *
How happy the young lovers and dreamers were in their home-making! Their
housekeeping and furnishings were the simplest, but love made everything
beautiful and sufficient. They had a garden in which they planted all
their favorite flowers and to which came the birds--the birds with whom
they had discovered a sudden kinship, for they too, were nesting--and
filled it with music. And they sang and chatted as happily as the birds
themselves as the pretty business progressed.
How delightful it was to receive their friends, together, in their own
home and at their own board--Eddie's old friends, especially. Rob
Stanard, now a prosperous lawyer, and Rob Sully whose reputation as an
artist was growing, were the first to call and present their compliments
to the bride and groom; and how cordial they were! How affectionate to
Eddie--how warm in their expressions of friendship for the girl-wife!
Virginia found it the greatest fun imaginable to go to market with
"Muddie," with a basket hanging from her pretty arm. The market men and
women began to daily watch for the sweet face and tripping step of the
exquisite child whom it seemed so comical to address as "_Mrs._ Poe,"
and who rewarded their open admiration with the loveliest smile, the
prettiest words of greeting and interest, the merriest rippling laugh
that rang through the market place and waked echoes in many a heart that
had believed itself a stranger to joy.
And the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass was reconstructed in even more
than its old beauty. The flowers of love and contentment and innocent
pleasure that besprinkled its green carpet had never been so many or so
gay, the dream-mountains that shut it in from the rest of the world were
as fair as sunset clouds, and the peace that flowed through it as a
river broke into singing as it flowed.
* * * * *
Meantime Edgar Poe worked--and worked--and worked.
Every number of the _Messenger_ contained page after page of the
brilliantly conceived and artistically worded product of his brain and
pen. His heart--his imagination satisfied and at rest in the love and
comradeship of a woman who fulfilled his ideal of beauty, of character,
and of charm, whose mind he himself had taught and trained to appreciate
and to love the things that meant most to him, whose sympathy responded
to his every mood, whose voice soothed his tired nerves with the music
that was one of the necessities of his temperament, a woman, withal, who
lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by him--his
harassing devils cast out by this true heartsease, Edgar Poe's industry
and his power of mental production were almost past belief.
As he worked a dream that had long been half-formed in his brain took
definite shape and became the moving influence of the intellectual side
of his life. His literary conscience had always been strict--even
exacting--with him, making him push the quest for the right word in
which to express his idea--just the right word, no other--to its
farthest limit. Urged by this conscience, he could rarely ever feel that
his work was finished, but kept revising, polishing and republishing it
in improved form, even after it had been once given to the world. He had
in his youth contemplated serving his country as a soldier. He now began
to dream of serving her as a captain of literature, as it were--as a
defender of purity of style; for this dream which became the most
serious purpose of his life was of raising the standard of American
letters to the ideal perfection after which he strove in his own
writings.
For his campaign a trusty weapon was at hand in the editorial department
of the _Southern Literary Messenger_, which he turned into a sword of
fearless, merciless criticism.
Literary criticism (so called) in America had been hitherto mere
puffery--puffery for the most part of weak, prolix, commonplace
scribblings of little would-be authors and poets. A reformation in
criticism, therefore, Edgar Poe conceived to be the only remedy for the
prevalent mediocrity in writing that was vitiating the taste of the day,
the only hope of placing American literature upon a footing of equality
with that of England--in a word, for bringing about anything approaching
the perfection of which he dreamed.
The new kind of criticism to which he introduced his readers created a
sensation by reason of its very novelty. His brilliant, but withering
critiques were more eagerly looked for than the most thrilling of his
stories, and though the little, namby-pamby authors whom the gleaming
sword mowed down by tens were his and the _Messenger's_ enemies for
life, the interested readers that were gathered in by hundreds were loud
in their praise of the progressiveness of the magazine and the genius of
the man who was making it.
In the North as well as the South the name of Edgar Poe was now on many
lips and serious attention began to be paid to the opinion of the
_Southern Literary Messenger_.