Text: Killis Campbell, “Marginalia on Longfellow, Lowell and Poe,” Modern Language Notes (Baltimore, MD), vol. 42, no. 8, December 1927, pp. 516-521

[page 516:]

1. M. Paul Morin in his valuable study of Longfellow's origins, Les Sources de L’Oeuvre de Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Paris, 1913), calls attention to the possible indebtedness of Longfellow's “Midnight Mass for the Dying Year” to Tennyson's “The Death of the Old Year”;(1) but he makes no mention of the obvious echoing of Tennyson's “ the days that are no more”(2) in the “Prelude” to Part III of the Tales of a Wayside Inn(3) and again in “Three Friends of Mine,”(4) nor of the fairly evident approximation in tone and diction to “Locksley Hall” exhibited by certain passages in Hiawatha, notably in the following:

2. It has been plausibly held that the original of Lowell's Parson Wilbur in the Biglow Papers was, in part at least, the Rev. Barzillai Frost,(6) with whom the poet spent the six weeks of his rustication at Concord in 1838. The name Wilbur, on the other hand, was probably suggested by that of a Massachusetts clergyman, the Rev. H. Wilbur, who, indeed, protested at one time against what he supposed to be the poet's use of his name.(7) There was, however, another Wilbur who figured in the educational life of New England at the time of the publication of the first series of the Biglow Papers, and who may have influenced Lowell in some measure, — namely, a Dr. H. B. Wilbur, principal of a school for defectives at Barre, Worcester Co., Massachusetts, with whose activities Lowell may be assumed to have been acquainted.(8) The name Sawin was in all likelihood suggested by some one of the poet's fellow-townsmen of that name, of whom there were five listed in the directory of Boston for 1846-7 and nine in the directory for 1847-8, and at least two in each number of the directory of Cambridge from its first issue in 1848. [page 518:]

3. The original suggestion of the name of his hero and of some of the puns in “The Unhappy Lot of Mr. Knott,” Lowell may have owed to a piece of doggerel embodied by William Leete Stone in his Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman (New York, 1836),(9) each stanza of which ends with a pun on the word Nott. The closing line of the opening stanza,

and of the final stanza,

will suffice for illustration.

4. In its issue of August 4, 1832, the Baltimore Saturday Visiter published the following editorial paragraph touching a sheaf of Poe's stories which had been placed in the hands of the editor:

This comment, which is, so far as I know, the earliest critical comment on Poe's tales to find its way into print, doubtless proceeded from Lambert A. Wilmer, literary editor of the Visiter at the time.(11) The sheaf of tales to which Wilmer refers may have been merely the five tales which were published in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier in 1832,(12) but it is probable that it contained still other stories, since, as Dr. J. C. French has shown,(13) Poe was to announce as ready for publication a volume of tales in the fall of 1833. This paragraph also has the effect of strengthening the supposition that Poe was making his home in Baltimore in 1832.(14)

5. The fantastic detail with which Poe ends his “Bon-Bon”(15) perhaps had its origin in a passage in the fourth chapter of Pantagruel in which Rabelais tells of Lucifer's having broken his chains on one occasion “by reason of a cholic . . . taken with eating a serjeant's soul fried for his breakfast.”(16) In Poe's story Satan is represented as feeding on the souls of his victims, but as balking at the soul of Monsieur Bon-Bon, who proposes, while in his cups, that his soul be served up in the form of a fricassée. That Poe was acquainted with Rabelais is established by several citations from him in his collected writings.(17)

6. For the word nare as employed by Poe in the thirty-second paragraph of “King Pest” (“the incomparable qualities and nare of those inestimable treasures of the palate, the wines, ales, and liqueurs,” etc.)(18) Griswold, the earliest editor of Poe substituted the reading nature, and he has been followed by several later editors. But that the reading nare was intended by Poe — although [page 520:] he gave to the word a figurative twist for which the dictionaries record no parallel — is indicated both by the fact that it appears in each of the variant texts of Poe's story, and by his later employment of the word in “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences” (“what constitutes the essence, the nare, the principle of diddling,” etc.)(19) and in his essay on “Byron and Miss Chaworth” (“whatever of warmth, . . . whatever of the truer nare and essentiality of romance,” etc.).(20) Another example of Griswold's recklessness as editor is seen in his transformation of the word sameness into saneness in a passage in “Morella”: “That identity which is termed personal, Mr. Locke, I think, truly defines to consist in the sameness of a rational being.”(21) Poe quotes the phrase “ sameness of a rational being” directly from Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk. 11, chap. xxvii, § 9.

7. The dénouement of Poe's tale “A Descent into the Maelström “ turns upon the pseudo-physical principle “ a cylinder, swimming in a vortex, offers more resistance to its suction, and [is] drawn in with greater difficulty than any equally bulky body, of any form whatever.”(22) This principle Poe attributes to Archimedes, and he cites specifically as his source Archimedes, De Incidentibus in Fluido, Bk. II (meaning, I take it, his De Insidentibus in Humido). There is, so far as I can make out, nothing in any of the ten propositions that comprise Book II of this work that quite answers to the principle enunciated by Poe, though the treatise of Archimedes has to do throughout with the conduct of bodies, mainly paraboloids, floating in water. Poe appears to have indulged in something of fiction in the interest of verisimilitude — in which, I feel, he was quite within his rights as a creative artist, — but it is interesting, to say the least, that he should have approximated the truth, as nearly as he did. His inaccurate citation of the title of his alleged authority is entirely in character.

8. As has long been known to students of Poe, there are discrepancies between certain of Poe's letters as published by his literary executor, Rufus W. Griswold, and their originals as now preserved among the “Griswold Papers” in the Boston Public Library. The chief variations appear in the text of Poe's letters of February 24, [page 521:] and April 19, 1845, which as printed by Griswold in his “Memoir” of the poet,?(24) exhibit, besides several immaterial abridgments, sundry interpolated passages, all personal in nature and involving either commendation of Griswold or apology on the part of the poet for his own conduct toward him. On the face of things, these insertions would appear to have proceeded from Griswold. In an article published several years ago in which I attempted a fresh reviewal of the problem presented by Griswold's relations with Poe,?(25) I suggested(26) the possibility that these letters as published by Griswold were based upon rejected first drafts of the letters in question — what happened, as we know, in the case of a letter of Poe's to Mrs. Jane E. Locke as published in the “Memoir,”(27) Griswold, I felt, was entitled to any doubt that might exist in the premises. But I have lately come across a bit of evidence which seems to me to establish beyond peradventure that at least one of the inserted sentences was an invention of Griswold's. I refer to the closing sentence of the letter of April 19, 1845: “See my notice of C. F. Hoffman's (?) sketch of you.”(28) The reference is evidently to Poe's complimentary notice, in the Broadway Journal of May 17, 1845 (1, p. 316), of the biographical sketch of Griswold published in Graham's Magazine for June, 1845.(29) Poe in the course of his notice takes occasion to say that the sketch was probably the work of C. F. Hoffman. Griswold delivers himself up by embodying in a letter bearing the postmark April 19 [1845], mention of an article not then in existence, but first published some four weeks later. The revelation that this sentence is ungenuine obviously strengthens the suspicion that all the rest of the matter apparently interpolated by Griswold is ungenuine.

KILLIS CAMPBELL.

The University of Texas.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 516:]

1 Morin, p. 186.

2 Cf. the song “Tears, idle tears,” 1. 5, from The Princess.

3 Longfellow's Poems, Cambridge Edition, p. 263.

4 Ibid., p. 315.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 517:]

5 Cf. also the phrase “melancholy moorlands” (Canto V, 1. 242) and the line “So disasters come not singly” (Canto XIX, 1. 11). There is also a Tennysonian flavor in “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls,” and likewise, I have fancied, in certain lines of “Morituri Salutamus,” especially in ll. 142-43, 238, 272-76.

6 Hale, Lowell and his Friends, p. 45.

7 Scudder, Life of Lowell, I, p. 263.

8 See an editorial paragraph in praise of this school and of Dr. Wilbur. by Lowell's friend C. F. Briggs in Holden's Dollar Magazine for May, 1848 (1, p. 319). Lowell's parson editor, with his pedantic commentaries, did not appear in the Biglow Papers until the publication of the “First Series” in book form in the fall of 1848.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 518:]

9 See pp. 42-43. The lines were reproduced by Poe in his review of Stone's book in the Southern Literary Messenger for June, 1836 (II, p. 456). See also Poe's Works, ed. Harrison, IX, pp. 28-29.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 518, running to the bottom of page 519:]

10 An incomplete file of the Visiter for the years 1832-34 came several years ago into the possession of the Maryland Historical Society at Baltimore. Unhappily the largest gaps in the file are for the first half of the year 1832. I do not find there any other references to Poe during the year 1832; and I am disappointed not to find the reproachful lines to his “Baltimore Mary” that the poet is said to have contributed to a Baltimore paper about this time (cf. Harper's Monthly, LXXVIII, p. 638 (March, 1889)). There are, indeed, some lines “To Mary” in the issue of November 3, 1832, beginning

“Mary! within thy mind so fair

What holy, heavenly feelings dwell!”

but these are signed “H. T.”, are not reproachful, and are not, I think, in Poe's manner. Somewhat more in the manner of Poe, yet hardly his, [page 519:] are some verses entitled “The Gifted” published in the Visiter for September 29, 1832, and described as “From Mary's Album.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 519:]

11 Though he was shortly to be ousted from that post: see the Visiter of August 25, 1832.

12 See the Dial (Chicago) for February 17, 1916, p. 143.

13 Modern Language Notes, XXIII, p. 262 (May, 1918).

14 See The Dial, l. c., p. 143.

15 Poe's Works, ed. Harrison, II, pp. 145-146.

16 Works of Rabelais, tr. Urquhart and others and revised by Wallis, II, p. 25 (London, 1901).

17 See Poe's Works, ed. Harrison, IV, p. 227, X, p. 194, XIV, pp. 170, 217.

18 Poe's Works, ed. Harrison, II, p. 180.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 520:]

19 Ibid., V, p. 211.

20 Ibid., XIV, p. 151.

21 Ibid., II, p. 29.

22. Poe's Works, II, p. 246.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 521:]

23 Poe's Works, ed. Harrison, XVII, pp. 200f., 169f. The later of these two letters is without date, but is postmarked “Apr. 19,” and clearly belongs to 1845.

24 Poe's Works, ed. Griswold, New York, 1850, III, p. xxii.

25 Publications of the Modern Language Association, XXXIV, pp. 436-464 (September, 1919).

26 Ibid., p. 458.

27 Griswold, m1, pp. xlif.; Harrison, XVII, pp. 280 f.

28 Griswold, I, p. xxii; Harrison, XVII, p. 170.

29 Graham's Magazine, XXVII, pp. 241-243,