Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/76

56 he laughed at himself." Indeed Poe's smile—it is not likely that he ever laughed boisterously—was a noticeable and memorable characteristic of his manner and expression. "I meet Mr. Poe very often at the receptions," wrote a friend to Mrs. Whitman, when Poe was living in New York. "He is the observed of all observers. His stories are thought wonderful, and to hear him repeat The Raven, which he does very quietly, is an event in one's life. People seem to think there is something uncanny about him, and the strangest stories are told, and, what is more, believed, about his mesmeric experiences, at the mention of which he always smiles. His smile is captivating."

Captivating, too, was the genial, affectionate, playful manner of Poe in the privacy of his own home. After 1842 there was, it is true, the deepening and saddening solicitude for Virginia's health; but there was also a love, a sympathy, an unselfishness that wrought expansively upon all who dwelt within. Mrs. Frances Sargent Osgood, the writer, knew Poe in the little home at 85 Amity Street, New York, and has left a sketch that should lay forever the specter of brooding and habitual melancholy that still parades itself as Edgar Allan Poe. On her deathbed, a few months after Poe's death, Mrs. Osgood wrote:

"It was in his own simple yet poetical home that to me the character of Edgar Poe appeared in its most