Mr. Poe spent his mornings in town, but in the evenings would generally drive out to Duncan Lodge with some of the Mackenzies. He liked the half-country neighborhood, and would sometimes join us in our sunset rambles in the romantic old Hermitage grounds. Those were pleasant evenings at Duncan Lodge and Talavera, with no lack of company at either place.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
A MORNING WITH POE AND "THE RAVEN."
(A Leaf from a Journal.)
One pleasant though slightly drizzly morning in the latter part of September I sat in our parlor at Talavera at a table on which were some new magazines and a vase of tea roses freshly gathered. Opposite me sat Mr. Poe. A basket of grapes—his favorite fruit—had been placed between us; and as we leisurely partook of them we chatted lightly.
He inquired at length what method I pursued in my writing. The idea was new to me, and on my replying that I wrote only on the impulse of a newly conceived idea, he proceeded to give me some needed advice. I must make a study of my poem, he said, line by line and word by word, and revise and correct it until it was as perfect as it could be made. It was in this way that he himself wrote. And then he spoke of The Raven.
He had before told me of the difficulties which he had experienced in writing this poem and of how it had lain for more than ten years in his desk unfinished, while he would at long intervals work on it, adding a few words or lines, altering, omitting and even changing the plan or idea of the poem in the endeavor to make of it something which would satisfy himself.
His first intention, he said, had been to write a short poem only, based upon the incident of an Owl—a night-bird, the bird of wisdom—with its ghostly presence and inscrutable gaze entering the window of a vault or chamber where he sat beside the bier of the lost Lenore. Then he had exchanged the Owl for the Raven, for sake of the latter's "Nevermore"; and the poem, despite himself, had grown beyond the length originally intended.