The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [872]
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
ELIZABETH FRIEZE ELLETT.
AMELIA WELBY.
BAYARD TAYLOR.
HENRY B. HIRST.
ROBERT WALSH.
SEBA SMITH.
MARGARET MILLER AND LUCRETIA MARIA DAVIDSON.
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING.
WILLIAM WALLACE.
ESTELLE ANNA LEWIS.
JOEL T. HEADLEY.
GEORGE P. MORRIS.
ROBERT M. BIRD.
CORNELIUS MATHEWS.
WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
MR. GRISWOLD AND THE POETS.
MR. LONGFELLOW AND OTHER PLAGIARISTS.
MR. LONGFELLOW, MR. WILLIS, AND THE DRAMA.
TORTESA, THE USURER.
SPANISH STUDENT
LONGFELLOW’S BALLADS.
FANCY AND IMAGINATION.
E. P. WHIPPLE AND OTHER CRITICS.
J. FENIMORE COOPER.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BARRETT.
R. H. HORNE
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY.
CHARLES LEVER
FRANCIS MARRYATT.
HENRY COCKTON.
CHARLES DICKENS.
MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR.
PREFACE.
HITHERTO I have not written or published a syllable upon the subject of Mr. POE’s life, character, or genius, since I was informed, some ten days after his death, of my appointment to be his literary executor. I did not suppose I was bebarred from the expression of any feelings or opinions in the case by the acceptance of this office, the duties of which I regarded as simply the collection of his works, and their publication, for the benefit of the rightful inheritors of his property, in a form and manner that would probably have been most agreeable to his own wishes. I would gladly have declined a trust imposing so much labor, for I had been compelled by ill health to solicit the indulgence of my publishers, who had many thousand dollars invested in an unfinished work under my direction; but when I was told by several of Mr. POE’s most intimate friends — among others by the family of S.D. LEWIS, Esq., to whom in his last years he was under greater obligations than to any or to all others — that he had long been in the habit of expressing a desire that in the event of his death I should be his editor, I yielded to the apparent necessity, and proceeded immediately with the preparation of the two volumes which have heretofore been published. But I had, at the request of the Editor of “The Tribune,” written hastily a few paragraphs about Mr. POE, which appeared in that paper with the telegraphic communication of his death; and two or three of these paragraphs having been quoted by Mr. N.P. WILLIS, in his Notice of Mr. POE, were as a part of that Notice unavoidably reprinted in the volume of the deceased author’s Tales. And my unconsidered and imperfect, but as every one who knew the subject readily perceived, very kind article, was now vehemently attacked. A writer under the signature of “GEORGE R. GRAHAM,” in a sophomorical and trashy but widely circulated Letter, denounced, it as “the fancy sketch of a jaundiced vision,” “an immortal infamy,” and its composition as a “breach of trust.” And to excuse his five months’ silence, and to induce a belief that he did not KNOW that what I had written was already published before I COULD have been advised that I was to be Mr. POE’s executor, (a condition upon which all the possible force of his Letter depends,) this silly and ambitious person, while represented as entertaining a friendship really passionate in its tenderness for the poor author, (of whom in four years of his extremest poverty he had not purchased for his magazine a single line,) is made to say that in half a year he had not seen so noticeable an article, — though within a week after Mr. POE’s death it appeared in “The Tribune,” in “The Home Journal,” in three of the daily papers of his own city, and in “The Saturday Evening Post,” of which he was or had been himself one of the chief proprietors and editors! And Mr. JOHN NEAL, too, who had never had even the slightest personal acquaintance with POE in his life, rushes from a sleep which the public had trusted was eternal, to declare that my characterization of POE (which he is pleased to describe as “poetry, exhalted poetry, poetry of astonishing and original strength”) is false and malicious, and that I am a “calumniator,