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[page 241, column 2, continued:]
A LITTLE book entitled New Glimpses of Poe, by Prof. James A. Harrison (New York, Mansfield & Co.), is
“the outgrowth of a movement among the students and professors of the University of Virginia to do honour to Poe, its most famous alumnus, and remove from his memory the slanders of Griswold and others.”
It contains the Constitution of the Poe Memorial, Association, which was founded to that end in 1897, and of which Prof. Harrison is secretary; some excellent platinotype reproductions of the bust by Mr. G. J. Zolnay, which was presented by the Association to the University of Virginia; facsimiles of Poe's marriage certificate and of his name in the university register; and several reminiscences of Poe by his contemporaries. The book [column 3:] hardly pretends to throw any new light on Poe's memory, though it adds something to the biographers’ accounts of his college career, but it is an agreeable falsification of the adage that a prophet has no honour in his own university. The librarian of the university thus records his solitary evening in Poe's rooms: —
“It was a cold night in December, and his fire having gore pretty nearly out, by the aid of some tallow candles and the fragments of a small table which he broke up for the purpose, he soon rekindled it.”
This was highly characteristic. It seems that the current stories of Poe's disgrace at college are void of foundation. “Among the professors he had the reputation of being a sober, quiet, and orderly young man.” A recent investigator assures us that, “from the Proctor's point of view, his record is clean of all college dishonour.” Lowell was wrong in supposing that he was ever rusticated, so far as the university records show. Here are two sketches of the poet as he looked to his contemporaries: —
“A poetical figure. if ever there was one, clad in black as was the fashion them — slender — erect — the subtle lines of his face fixed in meditation. I thought him wonderfully handsome, the mouth being the only weak point.”
“A compact, well-set man about five feet six inches high, straight as an arrow, easy-gaited, with white linen coat and trousers, black velvet vest and broad Panama hat, features sad, yet finely cut, shapely head, and eyes that were strangely magnetic as you looked into them — this is the image of Edgar Allan Poe most vivid to my mind as I saw him one warm day in Richmond in 1849.”
It is curious to learn that Poe attended the lectures of George Long, the famous translator of Marcus Aurelius and historian of the Roman Republic, from whom he may have derived his first attraction
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
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Notes:
This short review appears in a section with the title “Our Library Table.”
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[S:0 - AUK, 1902] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - A Poe Bookshelf - Review of New Glimpses of Poe (Anonymous, 1902)