Chapter VI
With Paulding, Drake, and Halleck

IN the summer of 1797, a tall, well-built lad with a face showing just a suggestion of melancholy, landed from the weekly market sloop and walked along the streets of New York for the first time. He was a country boy, well versed in trees and brooks and used to pathless hills and rough country roads, and his first impression of New York was that the dwellers there were great lumpkins. He could not imagine why they pointed at him and nodded at him and laughed as he walked in the middle of the street, quite disregarding the paved walk. He stopped, from time to time, to ask his way, until he came to a little square brick house in Vesey Street, below Church, bearing the number 43, the home of William Irving. There he went in and was given a good hug by Mrs. Irving. The boy was James Kirke Paulding, and she who welcomed him was his sister, with whom he was to live until he should get a start in the ways and work of the city.

William Irving lived in a house delightfully situated, though no one would think so now when the spot is jammed with merchants' warehouses, and sounds of trade fill the air. When Paulding came to town, it was beyond the ken of the business section, and there were not so many houses about but that he could enjoy an inviting view. From the front door he looked straight before him over the grounds of Columbia College, and to the left across green gardens to the river. From his little window in the upper story he saw the city to the south, and to the east St. Paul's Chapel, with the steeple that came to be so gray with age looking then so new, for it had just been added to the church. Beyond the graveyard and across Broadway, he had a good view of the park with its three buildings—the Bridewell, the Almshouse, and the Prison,—and across the park could see the Park Theatre and the Brick Church. He could catch a glimpse of Broadway winding over a hill toward the Stone Bridge at Canal Street, and other roads leading into the country towards the north, where level stretches led past rude farmhouses and quaint inns.

The first few years of Paulding in the city, when he was clerk in the United States Loan Office, were years of hard work. But there were relaxations, too, for his relationship to William Irving brought him in contact with the other members of the family—young Washington Irving and Dr. Peter Irving. When, in a few years, Dr. Irving published his newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, Paulding wrote bits of prose and verse for it. So his first writings appeared in the same publication and at the same time as the first writings of Washington Irving, and it was the interchange of thought in the Vesey Street house and the opportunities afforded by the Morning Chronicle that led Paulding's thoughts towards writing as a profession.

Meantime there was much going on in the way of improvement. The new City Hall was erected in the park; the first free schoolhouse was opened; and Fulton's Clermont sailed up the Hudson, the first successful steamboat. A commission had been appointed, too, with the object of directing the course of the streets, which up to that time had grown out of the paths left by the cows in their wanderings to pasture. The commissioners did their work so that, as time went on, the highways were laid out to form a city of strict right angles. The cows certainly did their part in a manner that left far more picturesque twists and turns than were to be found in the upper part laid out by the commissioners in such a scientifically uninteresting way.

Paulding lived with William Irving in the Vesey Street house for nine years, and then the Irvings moved a few blocks the other side of Columbia College, to 287 Greenwich Street, and Paulding went with them. Here began the meetings of a literary set, which in a few months developed into the "Ancient Club of New York," with Washington, Peter, and William Irving, Paulding, Henry Brevoort, and Gouverneur Kemble leading members. Kemble owned some land in New Jersey, on which was located Salmagundi's Cockloft Hall, and on this account was called "The Patroon." From one of the informal meetings of the Ancient Club, Washington Irving, his brother William, and Paulding went secretly to Irving's house in Ann Street to discuss details of Salmagundi. Paulding wrote his share of Salmagundi on the upper floor of the Greenwich Street house, while the lower floor was the mill of Pindar Cockloft, conducted by William Irving.

From this house on many an evening the friends went to dine at Dyde's, the fascinating eating-house near the Park Theatre, then beginning a long career with the founders of Salmagundi as a foundation for the memories that were to cluster around its doors, to be passed over, years later, to Windust's still more famous resort on almost the same spot.

Paulding was still living with the Irving family when, in 1807, they went to live at No. 17 in aristocratic State Street, at the corner of Pearl, facing the Battery Park. Here, overlooking the blue waters of the bay dotted with sailboats and rowboats, and beyond to the stretches of Jersey shore, Paulding wrote his contributions to the Analectic Magazine, edited by Washington Irving from his home little more than a stone's throw away across the Bowling Green; also, The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan. Here, too, replying to an attack on his country, he wrote, The United States and England, a pamphlet that attracted the notice of President Madison, who summoned Paulding to Washington for eight years as Secretary of the Board of Navy Commissioners. During those eight years he wrote The Backwoodsman his longest poem and the one which he liked best of all, a liking not generally shared by his readers; the second series of Salmagundi; and Koningsmarke.

Having married Gertrude, the sister of his friend and companion Gouverneur Kemble, his days were moving smoothly along when the death of his wife's father took him again to New York and he went to live in what had long been the home of "The Patroon." This was a mansion of solid type in Whitehall Street, corner of Stone, set in the midst of a wide-spreading garden, a site blurred out in later days by the Produce Exchange. Here he lived during the fourteen years he acted as Navy Agent at New York, devoting his evenings to literary work, writing his most successful book, The Dutchman's Fireside, also John Bull in America, Tales of the Good Woman, and Westward Ho! In the evening he went often to the Park Theatre, and came to know James H. Hackett, the greatest Falstaff America had seen, writing for him The Lion of the West, which Hackett acted for many years. And then after fifteen years in this house he left it, and with his family went to Washington as Secretary of the Navy.

Once more, in 1841, he returned to New York, to live in Beach Street, then the fashionable St. John's Park neighborhood. But, his wife dying before he was really settled, he soon left New York and passed the last days of his life in Dutchess County, the region of his birth.

At about the time Paulding moved into the State Street house two young men met one afternoon at the home of a mutual friend. One was studying medicine and beginning to see something more in life than a struggle for mere existence. He was Joseph Rodman Drake. The other, Fitz-Greene Halleck, was a bookkeeper and had but just come from his birthplace in Guilford, Connecticut. He had read much poetry and had written some stray verse. A few days after their meeting, the two came together again in the rooms where Halleck boarded in Greenwich Street, not half a dozen houses from the place where Washington Irving was living with Mrs. Brandish. The second meeting was the real start of an inseparable friendship which has caused them to be looked upon as the Orestes and Pylades of American poets.

Halleck had begun his work for Jacob Barker. The warehouse where he was employed stands yet and can easily be found by walking down John Street to Burling Slip, and so on around the corner into South Street by the waterside. Drake ofttimes took that walk and sat there by the side of his friend's desk. Often, too, in the late afternoon, Halleck walked from there to the green that since has been called the City Hall Park, and sat until Drake came from his studies in the nearby College of Physicians and Surgeons. The college was part of Columbia, which lay to the west of the green. In time the city overgrew the college grounds so completely that those interested in remembering where they had been set up a tablet at West Broadway and Murray Street, as a reminder that they should not be entirely forgotten. From the park it was the wont of the youthful poets to walk along Broadway below Trinity Church—then the fashionable promenade,—and so on to the Battery, past where Irving had lived by the Bowling Green, past where Paulding was then living.

The time came when Drake was graduated, and then there were the long evenings together back of his office in the store numbered 121 Bowery, just above Hester Street. From this house the friends made their long excursions across the Harlem River, far beyond the town, into the romantic Bronx of which Drake sang so often and so well.

One night, starting from the Bowery shop, Drake took Halleck down Broadway into Thames Street, and there, back of the City Hotel, dined him in a dingy little public house, the first of many pleasant evenings there. It was the ale-house kept by William Reynolds, a genial, red-faced man who had been a grave-digger in the nearby Trinity Churchyard.

The tavern remained a place of entertainment for close upon a hundred years, most of the time known as "Old Tom's," from Reynolds's successor. It came to be a landmark for the curious, but as the curious always stood outside and never by any chance went in to buy of what was on sale there, it went the way of all old places. To-day, if you turn into Thames Street, from busy Broadway, you come upon a mass of buildings in perpetual shade, and with a decidedly provincial air not at all in keeping with the up-to-date city. A walk of half a block brings you to Temple Street—a thoroughfare leading nowhere in particular, but which wise chroniclers have quarrelled over, some urging that it came by its name because of being close by Trinity Church, which is a temple of worship, and others quite as vigorously contending that it took its name from Charlotte Temple, who lived nearby. Here you find Reynolds's tavern metamorphosed into a modern place of business, and though the street is still quaint-appearing, every suggestion of romance has vanished from the tavern. Nevertheless the curious, who in its days of need regarded it from afar, love to sit in it, surrounded by modern conveniences, and tell what it was like "in Drake's time."

Drake prospered, and after a time set up his pharmacy in the busiest part of town, that later grew to be the core of Newspaper Row. When Drake lived in Park Row, the second door from Beekman Street, he and Halleck hit upon the idea of the "Croaker Papers," a series of satires in verse, printed in the Evening Post, in which the poets sailed into the public characters of the day. This was the house where Halleck went to read his Fanny to Drake, and made some corrections at his friend's suggestion before he gave it to the world.

The Shakespeare Tavern

Around the corner from the Park Row shop, the Shakespeare Tavern was conducted by Thomas Hawkins Hodgkinson, the actor; a resort for the actors, the artists, the writers, the talkers of the town; a popular rendezvous quite in contrast to Reynolds's quiet inn. It stood at the southwest corner of Fulton and Nassau streets, a double house of brick, having for its sign a bust of the great poet over the door. In after years a tablet was set to mark the spot. Halleck tells of a meeting here with James Lawson, the journalist, who came to write the Tales and Sketches of a Cosmopolite.

On a night when Drake and Paulding and some others gathered for a friendly evening there arose a discussion, argued for and against by all the company, as to whether or not the rivers of America were rich enough in legend and romance to lend themselves to poetic treatment. And after the talk had lengthened into the morning hours, Drake went to the room over his Park Row shop to put his view of the subject into writing. In a few days he read to Halleck the poem on which his fame chiefly rests, The Culprit Fay—a poetic fantasy illumining the Highlands of the Hudson.

In the year 1820, Halleck sat in the Park Row house by the bedside of his friend, who was dying of consumption, and here, at the age of twenty-five, Joseph Rodman Drake passed away. Halleck followed the coffin to that beautiful spot beyond the Harlem that they both loved so well, and there by the side of the Bronx streamlet the poet Drake was buried. In the depth of his grief Halleck wrote the lines:

And now after more than three quarters of a century the words still murmur their message of friendship and sorrow above Drake's grave. The city has sped on far beyond the little graveyard, and harsh sounds throb where once was only the singing of birds; but the consecrated spot remains, cared for year by year as well as may be in despite of relic-hunting vandals.

Halleck outlived his friend by many long years. He gave up bookkeeping for Jacob Barker, and during eighteen years was the confidential manager of the affairs of John Jacob Astor. But he never failed to regret the comrade of his youth, losing with him much of his inspiration.

The Jumel Mansion

Half an hour's journey from Drake's grave, on the western side of the Harlem River, there stands, at One Hundred and Sixtieth Street and Edgecombe Avenue, a house on a bluff so high above the river that it can be seen from afar—white in the sunlight. This is the Morris house, where Mary Philipse lived after she became the wife of Roger Morris; where Washington had his headquarters; where Madame Jumel lived, and where she married Aaron Burr. To the one who strolls in the footsteps of littérateurs of a bygone day, it is, more than all, the house where Halleck visited, and where he wrote Marco Bozzaris. Although this was his most widely known poem, and though it was written five years after the death of Drake, the memory of his friend was like a fresh sorrow to him while he wrote. During forty odd years from that time he continued the gently courteous, witty talker, the dignified life of each gathering he attended. But, as he knew so well, his Muse was sorely wounded when Drake died, and the fuller poetic life that might have been his was buried on the green slope of the Bronx with his friend.

Chapter VII
Cooper and His Friends

IN that cheerless precinct of New York City to which still clings the name St. John's Park, though there has been no park there this half-century,—in Beach Street, a dozen or perhaps twenty steps from Hudson Street, there stands a house that could not fail to attract the attention of an observant passer-by. A brick building, its architectural features suggest roomy attractiveness—a condition little sought after in these days when the value of every inch of ground calls for compactness regardless of beauty of appearance. One looking at this building and given to sentiment might argue that it is strongly reminiscent of a human being who had once been vigorous and had made a considerable show in the world of fashion and pride, but who had sunk to poverty and decrepitude. For the carved window-cases are hacked and beaten away, the wrought-iron railings are twisted and rusty, the marble steps are cracked and crumbling, the high ceilings with their heavy and ornate mouldings are seamed and discolored, and the massive oaken doors are cracked by many a rusty nail driven into them, holding ragged and worn-out garments. Yet even in its age and neglect are found traces of its primal sturdy and artistic proportions.

In the year 1821, this house was the home of James Fenimore Cooper. His first book, Precaution, had failed utterly. His second book, The Spy, had been prodigiously successful, when in this year he went to New York to live in what was then the fashionable district of St. John's Park. He was thirty-one years old, had lived at Cooperstown, studied at Yale, shipped as a sailor before the mast, made voyages to England and Spain, been appointed midshipman, and seen service on Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain, had resigned his commission, and had married Augusta de Lancey at Heathcote Hill Manor, Mamaroneck. After the birth of his daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, who became a writer of rural sketches, he settled down in Westchester County to live the life of a country gentleman. He might have remained there all his days but that one day he got hold of a particularly stupid book of English life, and was so bored by it that it forced from him the exclamation that he could write a better himself! Which remark being interpreted literally by his wife, there was nothing for the country gentleman but to make good his boast. So he wrote a dull and stupid story which even his friends had difficulty in reading to the end, and then, doubtless finding writing more agreeable than farming, wrote another that destined him evermore to a literary life.

This much of Cooper's life was behind him when he moved into the Beach Street house. In this home he wrote The Pioneers, first of the famous Leatherstocking Tales and, too, The Pilot.

In the New York of that day there was one place where he loved to go for a quiet dinner and discussion with the literary friends whom he quickly gathered around him. This was the chief hostelry of the day, the City Hotel, which stood close by where Wall Street runs into Broadway. It was at one of these dinners that he met James A. Hillhouse, who, though he had already written The Judgment and was recognized as a poet, was then engaged in mercantile pursuits in the city; but was very soon to make a home in New Haven and remain there during the rest of his life. Hillhouse was not a regular diner with Cooper, but he introduced there a friend who became much more regular in his attendance. Samuel Woodworth was even then shouldering aside adversity with intermittent success. It was his habit to walk briskly up from his printing office at the foot of Wall Street, very much in the manner of a man having an imperative appointment. Four years before Cooper came to town, on a very hot summer day, Woodworth had walked in this same eager manner to his house farther up-town in Duane Street, and there, drinking from a pump before his door, had said: "I'd like to have a drink to-day from the old bucket that hung in my father's well." Whereupon his kindly wife hinted that the old bucket of his remembrance would make a good subject for a poem—a hint that within the hour took the form of The Old Oaken Bucket, a pastoral poem well remembered and much sung, though many another of his, many an operetta, and even the historical romance, The Champion of Freedom, have faded from memory.

At these dinners, when Cooper sat with his friends, Woodworth and Morris held the first discussions of the plans for The Mirror, which was started in 1823, but from which the inconstant Woodworth soon retired.

On more than one occasion one of the dinner party was Richard Henry Dana, a founder of the North American Review and the friend of Bryant. The City Hotel was quite convenient for him, for he had made a sort of headquarters in the place of Wiley, the publisher, around the corner in Wall Street by New Street. At that time he issued from Wiley's shop The Idle Man, that literary publication which scarcely lived long enough to include his novels, Tom Thornton and Paul Felton, and some contributions from Washington Allston and Bryant.

Many a good idea came from the meetings at the City Hotel, but possibly none more felicitous than that of the Bread-and-Cheese Club. This remained so long in the germ that the realization seemed far off, but finally, in 1824, began the holding of its fortnightly meetings in Washington Hall—afterwards swept away to give place to the Stewart Building at Broadway and Reade Street. The club derived its name from Cooper's conceit of having candidates balloted for with bread and cheese, a bit of bread favoring election and cheese deciding against it.

Washington Hall

As Cooper had in the main originated the club, he was the leading spirit around whom gathered Halleck and Bryant, Percival, Professor Renwick, Dr. J.W. Francis, and all the writers of the day. An enthusiastic member was Philip Hone, who had just retired from business and bought a house at 235 Broadway opposite the park, a site considered a good way up-town for a residence. His diary, which in after years led him to be called the Pepys of America, was commenced in this house, but the greater part was written at his residence of later date, at the southwest corner of Broadway and Great Jones Street.

Gulian C. Verplanck was a member too. At the time he occupied a professorship in the General Theological Seminary. From one of the meetings he walked down Broadway and through Wall Street past the house, near Broad Street, where he was born, discussing with Bryant and Robert C. Sands an early suggestion of the Talisman magazine, which was not to ripen into an accomplished fact for a good three years. On this same walk, too, he took part while Bryant and Sands discussed plans for the Atlantic Monthly, which Sands established the next year.

But writers were not the only members of the Bread-and-Cheese Club. There were scholars and professional men, and often there were statesmen and men of national distinction as guests. But as Cooper was its leading spirit, when he left for his trip abroad the club went to pieces. He started in 1825 on his foreign travels, and at the time of his going was living at 345 Greenwich Street, where he had finished work on The Last of the Mohicans.

In the year after his going there was a gala night at the Lafayette Theatre, when The Spy was enacted. The Lafayette was the largest theatre then. Upon its site in West Broadway near Canal Street St. Alphonsus's Church now stands. To that performance came from up-State Enoch Crosby, who was said to be the original Spy, and when he appeared in a box with some friends the audience gave him a thunderous ovation.

Cooper returned from abroad in 1833, having added The Prairie, The Red Rover, The Water Witch, and The Bravo to his list of published books, and went to live in Bleecker Street, two blocks from Broadway, near Thompson Street. This was a select neighborhood then of pretty, irregular brick dwellings. The house is there yet, but the neighborhood is no longer elegant. Italian merchants, unkempt in appearance, carry on meagre and uncertain kinds of business, and Cooper's old house is so decorated with signs inside and out as to be picturesque only for its dinginess and disorder. Cooper did not live there long, for he soon moved to Broadway at Prince Street, into a house that later gave way to Niblo's Garden, and there he completed work on the volumes covering his stay in Europe, under the titles Sketches in Switzerland and Gleanings in Europe. But he made no very long stay on Broadway, for he moved again, this time to St. Mark's Place, a few doors from Third Avenue, into an unpretentious brick house of three stories that is there still. There he wrote Homeward Bound and began in earnest that fierce combat with his critics which was to last to the end of his days and leave many a regret that he had not been a more even-tempered man. From this house he went to Cooperstown, which became his final home.

At the time that Cooper lived in New York there walked along Broadway, between Canal Street and the Chapel of St. Paul's, on almost every pleasant afternoon, a man who in appearance was a veritable Hamlet. His garb was a customary suit of solemn black, and his eyes sought the ground as he moved with pensive step. This was McDonald Clarke, whose eccentric appearance and acts and whose melancholy verses gave him the name of The Mad Poet.

THE PARK THEATRE

If Broadway was his walk of an afternoon, Park Row was his haunt by night; and Windust's place, a door or two below the Park Theatre (literally below it, for it was beneath the sidewalk), was his centring point.

The resort of Edward Windust was not an old place, but a famous one. It was opened in 1824 and lasted only until 1837, when the proprietor thought himself cramped in space and opportunity and, moving away to seek a larger field, found failure. It was the actors' museum of the city. Its walls were lined with reminders of the stage: playbills, and swords that had seen the service of savage mimic wars; pictures, and frames of clippings, and bits of the wardrobes of kings and queens who had strutted their brief hour and passed away. It was the nightly gathering point of such actors as were in town, such writers, such wits, such gallant gentlemen. Edmund Kean and the Wallacks, Harry Placide and Cooper, Jack Scott, Mitchell, Brown, and Junius Brutus Booth were frequenters, with Fitz-Greene Halleck, Willis, Morris, and the rest, who nightly crowded the tier of stalls that ranged along one side of the room, making them resound with gay and brilliant talk.

In Windust's, too, sat McDonald Clarke in gloomy majesty night after night. There he formed among many others the acquaintance of Mordecai M. Noah, journalist and playwright, who had been Consul at Tunis and who in the years to come was to start several unsuccessful papers, until in 1843 he was to publish the Sunday Times and Messenger, which continued for more than half a century.

From Windust's McDonald Clarke often wandered out into the City Hall Park over the way, and sat there through many a long summer night dreaming over his Elixir of Moonshine, or, with the memory of his afternoon walks upon him, composing lines for his Afara, or the Belles of Broadway, and many another melancholy verse. Often he sat there until daybreak, then went on into Broadway again. He had a favorite early-morning stand on the Fulton Street side of St. Paul's Churchyard, and there, an hour before the town was stirring, soliloquized as he looked through the railings at the brown tombstones.

On these same mornings, but a few hours later, another writer looked down on the same faded tombstones, for Ray Palmer was the teacher of a young ladies' school down Fulton Street beyond Broadway. He was young then, in his twenty-second year, in ill-health, and suffering under discouragements that would have been unendurable to a weaker-dispositioned man. As he looked from the school window into the churchyard he wrote a hymn which remained in his desk for several years, until it was published in quite an accidental manner by Dr. Lowell Mason, when he needed material for a book of church music which he had compiled. In a few years this hymn, My Faith Looks Up to Thee, was to be sung oftener than any other American hymn.

The sights and the sounds of the busy city that were an inspiration to Ray Palmer always sent The Mad Poet in another direction,—on up Broadway to Leonard Street, turning down there two short blocks to Chapel Street, to the house where at that time he made his home. It was a dreary enough street and a dismal enough upper room, but there was a narrow window where the poet could look over the housetops in the midnight hour and watch the stars that he seemed ever to hold converse with. Or, if it was in the early evening, he had but to lean forward from his window to see the people going into the Italian Opera House on the next corner. The Italian Opera House had a great deal of attraction for The Mad Poet. Not that he went there often to attend the performances, but he liked to inspect it from his window height as though he caught a glimpse of the sorrows and disappointments connected with it. He had moved into the house in the year 1833—the year that the opera house was opened after it had been built for a company headed by Lorenzo Da Ponte.

This Da Ponte had come to America in 1805, having a record as an Italian dramatist, who had furnished libretti for Mozart's operas, Don Giovanni and Nozze di Figaro. He was professor in Columbia College when he matured an idea for establishing a home for Italian opera in New York, a plan which led to the building of the opera house near which The Mad Poet lived. It opened splendidly with the singers of the Cavalier di Rivafinoli, but a short season ended Lorenzo Da Ponte's hopes.

If The Mad Poet from his housetop could have seen what the next few years had in store, he would have beheld the aged dramatist dying at his home in Spring Street, close to Broadway, his body followed from there by his mourning friends—Halleck and Verplanck and Woodworth and some few others,—followed to the churchyard surrounding the nearby St. Patrick's Church; he would have seen the mark above the grave crumbling away, leaving nothing to point the spot where Da Ponte lay buried with his dreams and his hopes. But no inspiration hinted any of these things to McDonald Clarke, and once, in speaking of Da Ponte, he said that there at least was a man who had lived long unrewarded but had attained his ambition at last.

For nine years after The Mad Poet went to the Chapel Street house his Broadway walks continued, his dress each year growing more shabby, his eye more downcast, and his verse more melancholy. Then one day he was seen close by his favorite stand near the Churchyard of St. Paul's, acting so strangely that he was thought to be intoxicated. Next morning he awoke to find himself a prisoner in a vagrant cell, and the shock to his sensitive nature sent him, a madman indeed, to the Blackwell's Island Asylum, where in a few days he died.

Years after, the author of Glimpses of Home Life, Emma C. Embury, whose home was in Brooklyn, told of a knoll in Greenwood Cemetery by the side of a little lake where the oak-trees shaded a modest tomb on which there were some lines of verse. They were lines written by McDonald Clarke. The tomb is there yet, still shaded by oaks that have grown sturdier with the passing years, and the grave by the lake is the grave of The Mad Poet.

Chapter VIII
Those Who Gathered about Poe

WHEN New York was a much younger city than it is, when it was well within bounds on the lower part of the island of Manhattan, long before there was a thought that it would overspread the island, jump over a stream and go wandering up the mainland, overleap a river and go spreading over another island to the sea,—long before the time when these things came to be, there lay scattered in several directions on the island of Manhattan and dotting the rolling country land beyond, several tiny villages. These were Harlem, and Yorkville, and Odellville, and Bloomingdale, and Chelsea, and Greenwich. The last was the hamlet closest to the city. Quaint and curious, it spread its scattered way along the Hudson River where houses had been set up according to the needs and vagaries of men on roads natural and unplanned. When the city grew larger and finally swept around Greenwich Village, the roads becoming city streets, the village continued a labyrinthian way, where strangers wandered and were lost before they knew it.

On Bloomingdale Road near 75th St. in Poe's time

In the very core of this old-time Greenwich section and at the very place where the streets are so tangled, so irregular, so crooked, so often no thoroughfare, so winding that they seem to be seeking out the old farmhouses which they led to in early days, there is a pretty little playground for children. This Hudson Park is an open spot with green lawns and marble walks and a tall iron fence surrounding it; quite a model park with everything about fresh, and new, and modern. It is so very new and so very neat and so very clean that one would not look there for old-time flavor. But curiously enough one thing about it seems out of tone. On the green lawn is a monument old and faded which, in an effort to match it with its natty surroundings, has been set upon a base of glistening white marble. The monument is a sort of key for the antiquarian, for without it this playground in its spick-and-span newness might not be readily identified as the old St. John's Burying-Ground, where once stood the accumulated tombstones of more than fourscore years, until they were swept away and buried as deep as those whose memories they marked. A new generation tramples in and romps over the new park, with no knowledge or thought of what is below the surface.

The graveyard of St. John's was a quiet, restful place in a quiet, restful locality in the year 1837, when Edgar Allan Poe had a habit of wandering through it. In that year Poe lived within a few steps of the burial-ground in a modest wooden house that was numbered 113 Carmine Street. He was then in his twenty-eighth year, had published three volumes of poems, and had written some short stories and criticisms. He had but just given up the editorship of the Southern Literary Messenger at Richmond, a position he had secured through the friendship of John P. Kennedy, who had been his friend in his early struggles in Baltimore and who was to continue a friend to him through all his life. In 1832 Poe had first met him, when Kennedy was writing Swallow Barn. Afterwards Kennedy wrote Horseshoe Robinson and other books before abandoning literature for politics and, in time, becoming Secretary of the Navy.

The House in Carmine Street

So Poe came to New York, and with him Virginia, his child wife, who was already marked a victim of consumption, and there in the Carmine Street house they lived. Sometimes she walked with her sombre-faced husband through the nearby burying-ground, but more often she sat at an upper window from which she could watch him on his ramble. In the same house lived William Gowans the bookseller of Nassau Street; and there Poe did work for the New York Quarterly Review; there also he finished The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

In another house, some little distance away but in a direct course up Carmine Street, in Sixth Avenue close by Waverley Place, Poe lived for a short time, but long enough to write The Fall of the House of Usher and some magazine work, when he went to Philadelphia to The Gentleman's Magazine, edited by William E. Burton, the famous comedian. Oddly enough, when Burton died years afterwards, he found a resting place in the obscure St. John's Burying-Ground.

writers

It was not until 1844 that Poe returned to New York, and during the years of his absence several writers with whom he was to become acquainted on his return had forged their literary way. There was Seba Smith, more generally known as "Major Jack Downing," from the humorous papers which he wrote under that name, and who about this time was writing the romance in verse called Powhatan. There was William Ross Wallace, the lawyer and magazine writer, who in after years was to be known through his poem of The Liberty Bell. There was the Congregational clergyman George B. Cheever making his way, having resigned his first pastorate, at Salem, Massachusetts, where he had been imprisoned for libel on account of his temperance sketch Deacon Giles's Distillery. There was Robert H. Messinger, known through his Horatian ode, Give Me the Old, his fame daily expanding in fashionable and literary circles. There was Edward Robinson, Professor in the Union Theological Seminary, just returned from a tour of exploration in Palestine with Rev. Eli Smith, publishing Biblical Researches in Palestine. And there was Isaac McLelland, whose verse was as good as his sportsmanship. These were some few of the men who were first to recognize the genius of the poet.

Poe returned to New York the wiser for his experience with The Gentleman's Magazine and with Graham's Magazine, but having failed to establish The Stylus, a proposed publication of his own, which during all his life was to be a vision of Tantalus, just beyond his grasp. He returned rich in experience, strong in adversity, poor in pocket. There was no glorious opening for him, and finally he accepted a sub-editorship on the Evening Mirror, grinding out copy for several hard-working hours each day.

The Evening Mirror was a newly started publication, but its interests were so entwined with others that its history stretched back something more than twenty years from the day when Poe first occupied a desk in the office. Going back these one and twenty years, the better to understand the atmosphere in which Poe worked, to the spring of 1823, the time is reached when George P. Morris and Samuel Woodworth joined forces and opened an office for the publication of the New York Mirror at 163 William Street. Morris was a young man then, but already gave strong evidence of the decided character he was to develop as an eminently practical printer and successful writer of songs—a man of such unusual personal magnetism that well-nigh every man who walked towards him a stranger walked away from him a friend. The eight years which followed the starting of the New York Mirror saw many changes; saw Morris becoming more and more popular as a writer of songs; saw him publishing the memorable Woodman, Spare that Tree, that was to make his name known over the land; saw Woodworth withdraw from the Mirror, and that publication strengthened and starting anew when Morris drew to the enterprise Theodore S. Fay and Nathaniel P. Willis; saw Fay going abroad in a few years as Secretary of Legation at Berlin, in which city he was to live out most of his life.

N.P. Willis was a young man, too, in those early days of his association with Morris. He had given up the American Monthly Magazine at Boston to devote his energies to the New York Mirror. In the year that he became associated with Morris, 1831, he went abroad at a salary of ten dollars a week, hoping to add strength and diversity to the paper by a series of letters. In London, poor and struggling, he managed to introduce himself into the fashionable set at that time presided over by Lady Blessington, and he came to be the adoration of all the sentimental young ladies in that set. There was a daintiness about his dress, a suggestion of foppishness in the arrangement of his blond hair, trifles about him which suggested the dandy and the idler; but withal there was a terrific capacity for work under the smooth outside. His letters to the Mirror and other papers did much for the refinement of literature and art, and, indirectly, for the manners of the times. He was in America again in 1836, bringing with him an English lady as a bride,—the Mary for whom the country place Glen Mary at Owego was named, where he wrote his delightful Letters from under a Bridge. He was again in Europe in 1839, soon starting The Corsair, and back to America in 1844, to join his friend Morris (the Mirror by this time being defunct) in the starting of a daily paper which took the name of the Evening Mirror. From this on Willis lived an active social-literary life, singing of Broadway with the same facileness as he sang of country scenes. He came to be a grave and patient invalid, living happily with his second wife as he had with his first, and ending his days at Idlewild,—his home on the Hudson.

It was with the newly started Evening Mirror that Poe became connected on his return from Philadelphia, and it would seem that if he ever had prospects bright to look forward to it was with the fair-minded, business-like Morris and the gentle-hearted Willis. But when Poe had continued with them a brief six months even that gentle restraint proved too much. The Evening Mirror did not last long after his going, though this had little to do with its failure. Then the indefatigable Morris, with Willis, started the Home Journal at 107 Fulton Street, which continued into the twentieth century, and is now known under its changed title of Town and Country.

Where Poe wrote "The Raven"

While Poe was working on the Mirror he lived with his frail wife Virginia and her mother, Mrs. Clemm, in Bloomingdale Village. It was a village indeed then, and about the scattered houses were broad roads and shaded lanes and clustering trees. The house in which Poe lived was on a high bluff beside a country road which is now Eighty-fourth Street, the house standing (as the thoroughfares run now) between Broadway and West End Avenue. It was a plain, square, frame dwelling with brick chimneys reaching high above the pointed roof, kept by Mrs. Mary Brennan, and Poe rented rooms of her. Two windows faced towards the Hudson, and he could sit and looking through the trees catch a silvery glimpse of the river. Here he wrote The Raven and The Imp of the Perverse. From here he sent The Raven to the American Review at 118 Nassau Street, where it was published over the pen name of "Quarles"; and he was still living here when the poem was reprinted in the Evening Mirror, for the first time over his own name.

POE'S COTTAGE AT FORDHAM.

It had come to be the summer of 1845 when Poe left the Evening Mirror for the long black desk in lower Nassau Street where he helped Charles F. Briggs conduct the Broadway Journal. Briggs was the matter-of-fact "Harry Franco," a journalist of great ability who in another ten years was to edit Putnam's Magazine from 10 Park Place. More than one of Poe's friends said that the combination of Harry Franco and the poet must assuredly bring forth great literary results and financial success. But the partnership did not work at all well. In a very short time Poe bought out his partner's interest through an arrangement with Horace Greeley and moved the office of the paper into Clinton Hall. But the Broadway Journal under the management of Poe was less of a success than it had been under Briggs and Poe, and the poet retired from it in the first month of 1846.

This Clinton Hall in which Poe had his office was a substantial building at the southwest corner of Nassau and Beekman streets. Temple Court now stands on the site. A second and a third building of the name have arisen in Astor Place, the second having been remodelled in 1854 from the Astor Place Opera House, the scene of the Forrest-Macready riots. The present building, tall and heavy-looking, is the home of the Mercantile Library, as each Clinton Hall has been in its turn, and still retains the name first given to it in 1830, when Governor De Witt Clinton presented a History of England as a nucleus for the library.

About the time when Poe was with the Broadway Journal he moved into a house not a great many steps from Broadway, in Amity Street, since renamed West Third Street. Here amid surroundings marked by a simplicity due less to simple tastes than poverty Poe lived and wrote by the side of the delicate wife who was wasting away before his eyes. Here he penned the Philosophy of Composition, by which he would make it appear that The Raven was not a product of inspiration, but the work of calm reason and artistic construction,—a theory which no one seems to have accepted. Here, too, he wrote The Literati of New York, a series of papers that appeared in Godey's Lady's Book, and were the sensation of the hour in literary circles. Their criticisms were severe and impassioned, and one of the criticised, believing himself ill-treated and his writings unjustly abused, sought vindication. His answer entirely overlooked the libel laws and he was promptly sued for damages by Poe. This was Thomas Dunn English, a young man then twenty-four years old, who a few years before, in 1843, had been asked by N.P. Willis to write a poem for the New Mirror. The poem was written and sent to Willis with the suggestion that he either print it or tear it up as he thought best. Willis printed it, and though the writer came to be known as a poet, author, physician, lawyer, and statesman, the best known of his achievements were these verses of Ben Bolt.

In the spring of 1846, when the poet's wife grew more feeble, her brilliant eyes more brilliant, and her pallid look more unearthly, Poe moved out into the country to a little village called Fordham in Westchester County. This was then far out from the city, a secluded spot with rocky heights from which a view could be had of country lanes and broad sweeps of meadow where farmers worked in the fields. Since then the open landscape has given way to the regularity of city streets and buildings.

Not a great distance from the railroad station still stands the house where Poe lived; such a plain, low wooden building that those that have grown up around it seem to be shouldering it out of the way, and the widening and improving of streets have pushed it somewhat aside from its original position. But there the dingy little house still stands with its veranda, where Poe walked in the night just outside the sitting-room windows,—walked and dreamed out his Eureka. There are the door and the dwarf hallway. Inside, to the right, is the room, with its meagre furniture, much of which was purchased with the proceeds of the suit against Thomas Dunn English, where Poe received the friends who remembered him in his hours of illness, of poverty, and distress. In a room towards the front lay the dying wife on her straw bed, covered with the poet's coat and clasping the tortoise-shell cat closely to her wasted form. Up the stairs is the attic chamber, with its slanting roof, where Poe worked, with the cat at his elbow; where after his wife's death he penned a dirge for her in the exquisite Annabel Lee; where he wrote the first draught of The Bells, which he was to revise and complete while on his lecture trip to Lowell. Next to it is the room where slept Mrs. Clemm, his more than mother.

So many memories cling to this home of Poe that those who search for substantial literary reminders have made it a visiting shrine, much to the dismay of landowners who hold to the strong belief that historic old houses are well enough as curiosities, but are inconvenient things when they stand in the way of money-making improvements.

THE BATTERY IN 1830.

In the little wooden house at Fordham Poe lived, weak and lonely and poor, after the death of his wife, making daily visits to her nearby grave,—the grave that is there no longer. He was cared for by Virginia's mother for something more than two years. Then in the June of 1849 he left Fordham. Before the end of the year he was dead.

Chapter IX
At the Close of the Knickerbocker Days

To any one who knows the great metropolis of this twentieth century, it will seem remarkable that Hanover Square was the place where merchants and jobbers most did congregate, and that the business part of the city (and that really meant all the town in those times) lay all below Canal Street. Beyond that was the country, crossed by sand hills, watered by many rivulets, traversed by roads that led to the country places of the wealthy or to popular wayside taverns. The main thoroughfares looked wider than they do now, for they were far less crowded, although there were busses, and coaches, and drays, and many other vehicles of a variety that would look quite odd on the streets of this day, and in fact anywhere except in old prints, for they became extinct many a day ago. There were no surface roads, no elevated roads, no clanging electric cars, no bicycles, no motor carriages, no thousand and one conveniences of comfort and confusion that inventive genius and modern methods have called forth. To be sure the first street railroad in the world had just been projected and the cars were about to run through the streets, but this was not as yet established.

The architectural appearance of the city was more meagre, more uniform, far more picturesquely simple. There were wooden houses, squat and irregular, and there were brick houses, low and solid; there were no great towering structures to make one crane the neck to see the top. It was a city where provinciality stared out at every corner, a city which has been swept so entirely away that what is left of it lingers only in odd nooks and corners and back streets where even the oldest New Yorker has lost sight of it, and where visitors spend many hours seeking out old-time curiosities in the byways of the metropolis.

Museum at the north end of the Park, 1825

The larger buildings of those days, the ones to catch the eye of a stranger, are all memories now, and it is a difficult matter to say even where they stood with any degree of certainty. There was Masonic Hall in Broadway and Pearl Street, with its great chamber in imitation of the Chapel of Henry VIII., that was quite the pride of the town, and indeed looked upon as the most elegant reception-room in detail and appointment to be found in America. Close by, on the other side of the way, was Contoit's Garden, a delightful resort, where could be had the finest of ices and cakes. Farther on the Apollo dancing-rooms were a Mecca for the youth of the town. Opposite the lower end of City Hall Park was Scudder's, the first museum in the city, the forerunner of Barnum's, filled to overflowing with curiosities of earth and sea and air. Across the way, on the opposite side of the park, was the Park Theatre with its broad white front and its record as the chief playhouse of the city, although there were hosts of admirers and patrons of the Old Bowery, and of the National in Leonard Street, and of the Olympic in Broadway, where Mitchell was established as a great favorite. Out beyond the city was Niblo's Garden, newly established and a real rural retreat; near to it, over on the Bowery Road, was the old Vauxhall, fast losing caste as a place of outdoor amusement. In Nassau Street the Middle Dutch Church still stood, its silvery bell sounding over the city in which Sunday was a day set apart for religious observance and had not come to be a day of merrymaking.

THE APOLLO ROOMS IN 1830.

Niblo's Garden

It had come to be very near the end of the Knickerbocker days in this quiet city where brimstone matches and india-rubber overshoes had just been introduced,—indeed, it was close upon the year 1840,—when the Astor House was a new structure talked about all over the land as a wonderful palace. On the ground floor of this hotel John R. Bartlett kept a well stocked book-shop, and not a day but it was much visited by the literary folk of the town, for he was the friend of all bookish people. He himself was a quiet, scholarly man, and it was there in his shop, when his many friends left him leisure for work, that he arranged the greater part of his Dictionary of Americanisms, by which his name is remembered far better than by his historical records,—remembered when the fact that he was Secretary of State in Rhode Island is quite forgotten if it was ever widely known.

One of the familiar figures in Bartlett's book-shop was a keen-eyed, spectacled man who walked with quite a noticeable limp. This was Charles Fenno Hoffman, a notable man of his time, whose song, Sparkling and Bright, was on everybody's tongue. Thirty-four years of his life were behind him, years that were full to overflowing. He was a New Yorker in the full meaning of the term, and many of the events of his active life had centred about the little book-shop. His birthplace was only eight blocks away, there where the structure of the Elevated Road throws its shadow over Greenwich Street at its crossing with Rector. Those interested searchers who have visited the house where Washington Irving boarded close by this same corner will find the house where Hoffman was born nearby it. Thoughts of Irving and Hoffman entwine themselves naturally and closely, for Hoffman's half-sister was that Matilda who was affianced to Irving and whose early death shadowed his whole life.

Just around the corner from Bartlett's shop Hoffman went to school at Columbia College, where the present Park Place now wends its way from the river to Printing House Square. After leaving college he studied law, but soon gave up that profession to become the associate editor of the American as the commencement of a literary career. In 1833 he founded the Knickerbocker magazine, and while conducting it enjoyed the intimate fellowship of Harry Franco, William Cullen Bryant, Lewis Gaylord Clark, William L. Stone, the brothers Duyckinck, Frederick S. Cozzens, Park Benjamin, John L. Stephens, and a great many others in the same field of writing.

All this was behind him when he became a familiar figure in Bartlett's shop; and more, too, for he had worked with N.P. Willis on the Mirror, and had travelled far in the wild West despite an accident in his youth which had crushed his leg between a boat and the wharf, leaving him a life-long cripple. In this western journeying he gathered material for A Winter in the West and Wild Scenes in Forest and Prairie. He had already written Vanderlyn, and now in the book-shop was daily discussing his plans for Grayslaer. No hint came to the minds of those who listened to his witty talk in idle hours at the book-shop that in another ten years he would be taken from his last city home in Greene Street to live out the remaining thirty-four years of his life in the asylum at Harrisburg, Pa., a mental wreck.

It was Hoffman who introduced Lewis Gaylord Clark to the book-shop. Clark had been associated with him on the Knickerbocker magazine, and it was Clark who continued that publication for many years in the office on Broadway, just south of Cortlandt Street. To the office very often went his twin brother, Willis Gaylord Clark, editor of the Philadelphia Gazette, who contributed his now long-forgotten verse to his brother's magazine almost to the day of his death.

It was quite natural that John L. Stephens should make Bartlett's book-shop a headquarters while he was in town, for Bartlett and he were firm friends of years' standing, and their minds ran along in very much the same historical groove. Many a story the famous traveller recounted to his friend and to the others who were gathered there, and his presence was eagerly looked for. He had been to Egypt and had written from there letters that were published in the Knickerbocker when Hoffman was at its head. He had been to Arabia, to Poland, and to half a dozen other countries, and had written of his travels with a straightforward directness that was very much like his clear ringing talk. His visits to the book-shop happened years before he became interested in the Panama Railroad, for when this project came to his hand he devoted so much of himself to the building of the road across the Isthmus that he gave little time to writing.

Another man who lingered in the book-shop more than any of the others was a sort of protégé of Clark's, since Clark had in a great measure discovered him. His name was Frederick S. Cozzens, a wine merchant, and almost every afternoon he walked from his place around the next corner in Vesey Street, the second block below Broadway. It was Clark who recognized him as a humorist long before any one else appreciated him. His merry conversation was a delightful incident in the book-shop years and years before he moved to Yonkers and was then a great deal talked about as the author of the Sparrowgrass Papers.

This book-shop was a veritable treasury of literary secrets, for if there was to be anything new in the literary world it was sure to be spoken of there before it was rumored about anywhere else. In this way the book-shop was first to hear of the publication of that journal of books and opinions, Arcturus, for Evert A. Duyckinck was one of the habitués there. This is the author who, seven years later, with his brother George was to start the publication of The Literary World; and these are the brothers Duyckinck who while editing this publication collected material and wrote their Encyclopædia of American Literature, which gave them fame long after both were dead.

The publication of literary periodicals was in the air that year of 1840, and the little book-shop, being a literary world unto itself, heard of all of them in turn before public announcement was made. James Aldrich, who four years before had given up a prosperous business for a writer's career, projected his Literary Gazette, in which most of his poems afterwards appeared; and Park Benjamin, rather a newcomer in the town, it having been only three years since he transferred his New England Magazine to New York under the title of the American Monthly Magazine, the same year established Our New World. He was a pleasant, affable man, and his companions at Bartlett's place thought much of the author of The Old Sexton.

William Cullen Bryant lived in New York through these last days of Knickerbocker life and still lived there when these times were looked back upon as a period of great good-fellowship. He arrived in the city a young man, scarcely known, but he lived to be old, still a citizen, so entwined with the literary, social, and business interests that innumerable places can be pointed out to-day as bearing closely upon the poet's life and suggesting many reminders of himself and his work.

In the far down-town, in Broadway at the Pine Street corner, these memories start. At that corner, in a building long gone now, when Bryant was quite a stranger in the city, he edited the New York Review and Athenæum, in which his own poem, Death of the Flowers, was published, and in which Halleck's Marco Bozzaris first appeared. In his office there Bryant often talked with Percival and with Hillhouse, and there he discussed with Verplanck and Sands what manner of verse he would contribute to the newly started Talisman magazine.

Up Broadway a little farther, at the Fulton Street corner, is the publication office of the Evening Post, a building which more than any other in New York should call forth thoughts of Bryant, for he was the editor of that newspaper for two-and-fifty years. When he joined the staff in 1826, in two years succeeding Coleman as editor and remaining so until his death, the Evening Post had its office in William Street, near Pine. But Bryant spent many years of his editorial life in the Broadway building, and one of its attractions, now pointed out to all visitors, is the poet's window on an upper floor where he sat at his desk, that was always stacked high and negligently with all manner of useless papers and rejected manuscripts, and looked over the city to the south as he worked.

WILLIAM STREET

Standing beside this window there are memories of other men than Bryant to be called up, for here remembrance of many of his associates comes vividly to mind. There was William Leggett, the poet's friend and business companion, the brilliant journalist who wrote Tales of a Country Schoolmaster, and who worked beside Bryant from 1829 to 1836. With thoughts of him come those of Parke Godwin, who joined the Evening Post staff the year after Leggett left it, who as long as the poet lived was his close friend, and who, marrying Bryant's daughter Fanny, wove closer year by year the relations that bound them. There are memories, too, of John Bigelow, who occupied an editorial chair on the Post for a dozen years after 1849.

Going still farther up Broadway in search of Bryant reminders, you walk past the Post-Office and over the stretch of pavement made historic by the personal encounter between the poet and William L. Stone. This happened in 1831, and Stone, then editor of the Commercial Advertiser, was not at all friendly to Bryant. The two met there on the parkside, just opposite where Philip Hone lived, and Hone, looking from his window, saw the encounter. Sitting down he immediately wrote of it in the diary which is such a perfect reflection of the city's history during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Those were the days when Stone was collecting his information concerning the Indians which he afterwards utilized to such advantage in The Life of Joseph Brant, The Life of Red Jacket, and kindred books.

Keeping on up Broadway to Leonard Street, thence over across town three blocks west to 92 Hudson Street, the stroller comes to a warehouse that has been reared above the home where Bryant lived when he became editor of the Evening Post and from which he often walked around the corner to 345 Greenwich Street to make an evening call on his near neighbor and friend J. Fenimore Cooper.

On a little farther, up Varick Street this time, past the old Chapel of St. John's, lingering in its stately age quiet and dignified amid the unwholesome neighbors that have grown up around it. On the very next block, close by Canal Street, there is a red brick house with stone steps, and here Bryant lived after his removal from Hudson Street.

This same Varick Street leads straight north for half a mile until it touches Carmine Street, and in the second block of that thoroughfare is the house of age-worn brick that was the poet's "home in Carmine Street," of which he spoke so often and so affectionately.

From this point, a walk due east straight across town to the Bowery is as direct a route as could be found to the house where Bryant boarded in Fourth Street near the Bowery. It was here he entertained the friendly Unitarian clergyman, Orville Dewey, and discussed poetry with him. Here too he began the acquaintance with his fellow-lodger, Parke Godwin, without a thought that Godwin would one day be his son-in-law, without a thought that they would walk side by side through a literary life for close upon half a century.

Still on up-town, this time to Union Square. Between that green spot and Irving Place in Fifteenth Street, you come upon the home of the Century Club in its early days, when it was the chief place in America for the entertainment of men of letters. This club, founded by Bryant, was presided over at various times by Bancroft, Verplanck, and men whose names are equally well remembered. Bryant was the president when he died. The club now has a sumptuous home in Forty-third Street near Fifth Avenue.

Last home of all of Bryant in New York is the brownstone house next to the College of St. Francis Xavier, in Sixteenth Street. Here he lived during the last years of his life when he was not passing the long spring and summer months at his well-beloved Cedarmere at Roslyn, Long Island, which had been his favorite abiding place since 1843. It was in this Sixteenth Street house that he wrote his last lines of verse—on the birthday of Washington; it was here that he died.

One more structure not a great distance away calls up strongly the memory of Bryant. In Fourth Avenue at Twentieth Street is picturesque All Souls' Church, which has been there since 1855. Built of brick trimmed with Caen stone, planned in the form of a Greek cross, it was the first example of the Byzantine style of architecture in America. It was to have a tall, square, tower-like steeple, but this was never built. To this church the body of Bryant was taken, and there in the presence of all literary New York, and while the whole city mourned, Dr. Bellows, who had been his long-time friend, preached his funeral sermon.