Imagine Poe in the Republic! when he possesses none of its virtues; no Spartan, he. Each time he tilts the jug to greet the austere m, his sober friends relutly cur: "No man is safe who drinks before breakfast." Where is the black star of melancholy? Elsewhere; not here. Here it is always m; stern, democratic light scrubs apparitions off the streets down which his dangerous feet must go.
Perhaps. . . perhaps the black star of melancholy was hiding in the dark at the bottom of the jug all the time. . . it might be the whole thing is a little secret between the jug and himself. . .
He turns back to go and look; and the pitiless light of on day hits him full in the face like a blow from the eye of God. Struck, he reels. Where he hide, where there are no shadows? They split the Republi two, they halved the apple of knowledge, white light strikes the top half and leaves the rest in shadow; up here, up north, in the levelling latitudes, a man must make his own penumbra if he wants cealment because the massive, heroic light of the Republic admits of no ambiguities. Either you are a saint; or a stranger. He is a stranger, here, a gentleman up from Virginia somewhat down on his luck, and, alas, he may not ihe Prince of Darkness (always a perfect gentleman) in his cause since, of the absolute night which is the antithesis to these days of rectitude, there is no aristocracy.
Poe staggers uhe weight of the Declaration of Independence. People think he is drunk.
He is drunk.
The prin exile lurches through the new-found land.
So you say he overacts? Very well; he overacts. There is a past history of histrioni his family. His mother was, as they say, born in a trunk, grease-paint in her bloodstream, and made her first appearan any stage in her ninth summer in a hiss-the-villain melodrama entitled Mysteries of the Castle. On she skipped to sing a ballad clad in the pretty rags of a ballet gypsy.
It was the evening of the eighteenth tury.
At this hour, this very hour, far away in Paris, France, in the appalling dungeons of the Bastille, old Sade is jerking off. Grunt, groan, grunt, onto the prison floor. . . aaaagh! He seeds dragoh. Out of each ejaculation spring up a swarm of fully-armed, mad-eyed homunculi. Everything is about to succumb to delirium.
Heedless of all this, Poes future mother skipped on to a stage in the fresh-hatched Ameri republic to sing an old-world ballad clad in the pretty rags of a ballet gypsy. Her dancers grace, piping treble, dark curls, rosy cheeks -- cute kid! And eyes with something i, something appealing ihat struck directly to the heart so that the smoky auditorium broke out in raucous seal cheers for her and clapped its leather palms together with a will. A star was born that night in the rude firmament of fit-ups and dle-footlights, but she was to be a shooting star; she flickered briefly in the void, she tihe iable trajectory of the meteor, downward. She hit the boards and trod them.
But, well after puberty, she was still able, thanks to her low stature and slim build, to tio personate children, clever little ducks and prattlers of both sexes. Yet she was versatility personified; she could do you Ophelia, too.
She had a low, melodious voice of singular sweetness, an excellent thing in a woman. When crazed Ophelia handed round the rosemary and rue and sang: "He is dead and gone, lady," not a dry eye in the house, I assure you. She also tried her hand
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