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.