The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1428]
With high respect and esteem,
Edgar A. Poe.
Laughton Osborn to Edgar Allan Poe — August 16, 1845
219, Eighth Avenue,
Saturday Morng (morning) Aug 16, ‘45
My Dear Sir,
This very instant I have rec’d & read yr. Letter, and if you knew with what delight I sit down, on the very impulse of the moment, to reply to it, without waiting to weigh its contents & read it a second time, as is usual with me before answering a letter, you would see that you could not be half so ready to proffer your friendship as I to accept it. Yet you are far more generous than I; for you have hundreds of friends, some of whom certainly must not only love you but be well worthy of being loved, while I, as I have told you, am absolutely alone. To me therefore yr. friendsp. (friendship) would be all in all, while to you mine could only be the overflowing of a cup already full to the brim . — But it must be my endeavor to make this superfluity so acceptable, that you will not feel it to be such.
I need not repeat the assurance that I did not suppose for one moment that you were the author of that flippant sentence; for if so I could not have felt sorrow but disgust, recollecting the flattering opinions you had in person been so amiable as to express to me; but it is a great relief to know that you did not even sanction the insertion of anything so offensive. And here you must allow me, by the way, in justice to myself, to explain the sort of offense which such an attack gave me for the moment. Had I read in the Journal a long & able review of yours, in your severest manner, showing the inequality & occasional weakness (the critic’s “water”) of the vision, & urging that the author had carried rather too far the license of satire, seeming to prefer the rude scurrility of the old comedy to the more polished yet not less deadly sarcasms of a better, at least a more civil time, I should never have objected: “erat quod tollere velles”: who knows that better than I? But to accuse me in one little sentence not only of want of nerve (not certainly my commonest fault) & of borrowing from or imitating the Dunciad (the most ignorant & the most reckless of charges) but also of vulgarity or blackguardism in letters — for such it is, indelicacy & even indecency being a very different thing; the latter I may have fallen into, & my yet, — those who pretend to the humorous in writing have sometimes very great difficulty to keep out of the indiscretion; but the former loathsome fault — vice, I hold it to be absolutely impossible for me ever, under any circumstances, to descend to, & the poet Wordsworth himself shall do it sooner (indeed he has come very near it?) than simple & obscure Laughton Osborn. As my first effort in painting was the heads of Homer’s heroes, & not a hog or a kitchen; as the beautiful is with me & ever has been not merely a passion, but a necessity, the food of my better being; so do I hold it to be utterly impossible that I should ever be that in poetry (however unworthy or little, otherwise) which the Chatham-St lawyer is in real life; and to accuse me of this was to touch me in my tenderest point — or to level at my most vital part. With these feelings, & this self-opinion, you will readily see, my dear sir, why, supposing that you had given yr. high sanction to such an outrage, I should have been obliged to deny myself the solace, the happiness, the honor of yr. friendship.
I have ventured this explanation, because I could not bear to have you of all men think my soul to be one of the kind that may be “extinguished by an article.”
And now let me have the satisfact. (satisfaction) of reading your letter again & deliberately, — though I fear it may deprive us of the chance of this day’s post.
Passing yr. honor-giving compliments on the Confessions though I assure you,