Mayne Reid: A Memoir of his Life

by Elizabeth Hyde Reid

“If I remember aright, the Quaker was a dealer in cereals. He was also Poe’s landlord; and, I think, rather looked down upon the poet—though not from any question of character, but simply from his being fool enough to figure as a scribbler and a poet.

“In this humble domicile I can say that I have spent some of the pleasantest hours of my life—certainly some of the most intellectual. They were passed in the company of the poet himself and his wife—a lady angelically beautiful in person and not less beautiful in spirit. No one who remembers that dark-eyed, dark-haired daughter of Virginia—her own name, if I rightly remember—her grace, her facial beauty, her demeanour, so modest as to be remarkable—no one who has ever spent an hour in her company but will endorse what I have above said. I remember how we, the friends of the poet, used to talk of her high qualities. And when we talked of her beauty, I well knew that the rose-tint upon her cheek was too bright, too pure to be of earth. It was consumption’s colour—that sadly-beautiful light which beckons to an early tomb.

“In the little lean-to, besides the poet and his interesting wife, there was but one other dweller. This was a woman of middle age, and almost masculine aspect. She had the size and figure of a man, with a countenance that, at first sight, seemed scarce feminine. A stranger would have been incredulous—surprised, as I was—when introduced to her as the mother of that angelic creature who had accepted Edgar Poe as the partner of her life.

“Such was the relationship; and when you came to know this woman better, the masculinity of her person disappeared before the truly feminine nature of her mind; and you saw before you a type of those grand American mothers—such as existed in the days when block-houses had to be defended, bullets run in red-hot saucepans, and guns loaded for sons and husbands to fire them. Just such a woman was the mother-in-law of the poet Poe. If not called upon to defend her home and family against the assaults of the Indian savage, she was against that as ruthless, as implacable, and almost as difficult to repel—poverty. She was the ever-vigilant guardian of the house, watching it against the silent but continuous sap of necessity, that appeared every day to be approaching closer and nearer. She was the sole servant, keeping everything clean: the sole messenger, doing the errands, making pilgrimages between the poet and his publishers, frequently bringing back such chilling responses as ‘The article not accepted,’ or, ‘The cheque not to be given until such and such a day’—often too late for his necessities.

“And she was also messenger to the market; from it bringing back, not the ‘delicacies of the season,’ but only such commodities as were called for by the dire exigencies of hunger.

“And yet were there some delicacies. I shall never forget how, when peaches were in season and cheap, a pottle of these, the choicest gifts of Pomona, were divested of their skins by the delicate fingers of the poet’s wife, and left to the ‘melting mood,’ to be amalgamated with Spring Garden cream and crystallised sugar, and then set before such guests as came in by chance.

“Reader! I know you will acknowledge this to be a picture of tranquil domestic happiness; and I think you will believe me, when I tell you it is truthful. But I know also you will ask, ‘What has it to do with the poet?’ since it seems to reflect all the credit on his wife, and the woman who called him her son-in-law. For all yet said it may seem so; but I am now to say that which may give it a different aspect.

“During two years of intimate personal association with Edgar Allan Poe, I found in him the following phases of character, accomplishment and disposition:

“First: I discovered rare genius; not at all of the poetic order, not even of the fanciful, but far more of a practical kind, shown in a power of analytic reasoning such as few men possess, and which would have made him the finest detective policeman in the world. Vidocq would have been a simpleton beside him.

“Secondly: I encountered a scholar of rare accomplishments—especially skilled in the lore of Northern Europe, and more imbued with it than with the southern and strictly classic. How he had drifted into this speciality I never knew. But he had it in a high degree, as is apparent throughout all his writings, some of which read like an echo of the Scandinavian ‘Sagas.’