"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."
The home in the suburbs where he lived in the last days of his wife's
life is described as a story-and-a-half house at the top of Fordham
Hill. Within on the ground floor were two small apartments,--a kitchen
and sitting-room,--and above, up a narrow stairway, two others, one
Poe's room,--a low, cramped chamber lighted by little square windows
like port-holes,--the other a diminutive closet of a bedroom, hardly
large enough to lie down in. The furnishing was of the scantiest, but
everything faultlessly neat.
"Mrs. Clemm, now over sixty, in her worn black dress made upon all
who saw her an impression of dignity, refinement, and deep motherly
devotion to her children. Virginia, at the age of twenty-five,
retained her beauty, but the large black eyes and raven hair
contrasted sadly with the pallor of her face. Poe himself, poor,
proud, and ill, anticipating grief and nursing the bitterness that
springs from helplessness in the sight of suffering borne by those
dear to us, was restless and variable, the creature of
contradictory impulses."
Virginia now failed rapidly, Poe was ill, and the household was reduced
almost to the starving-point. Winter was upon them; and when at last a
sympathizing friend found them she thus describes the situation:--
"There was no clothing upon the bed, which was only straw, but a
snow-white counterpane and sheets. 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."
This friend at once interested some benevolent people in the case, and
poor Virginia's last days were made comfortable by their aid. Poe's
heart seemed filled with inexpressible gratitude to all who aided him in
this sorest crisis of his life; and although he was much broken by his
loss, he rallied once more and was sober and industrious for a time.
Mrs. Clemm stood faithfully by him, and even watched over him through
some of the fearful seasons of delirium which followed his complete
giving up to the habits of drinking and of taking opium.
Of the final scenes of this unhappy life it is needless to write. They
have been often described, and though the accounts vary, the sum and
substance are the same. Poe was attacked with delirium-tremens in
Baltimore, and died in a hospital in that city in October, 1849.
Beautiful, gifted, and sensitive, proud, ambitious, and daring, endowed
with a subtle charm of manner as well as of person, amiable and
generous in his home life, loyal and devoted to his family, a very
pleasing picture is presented of the man if we look but on this side.
Could he have overcome the fatal fascination of drink, we might never
have seen the reverse side of all this. As it is, let us cover his
follies with our mantle of charity and dwell only upon his genius and
his virtues.
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