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.
(From a drawing by C.W. Mielatz, by permission.)
Copyright, 1899, by The Society of Iconophiles.
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.