Page:Edgar Allan Poe - a centenary tribute.pdf/135

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A CENTENARY TRIBUTE.
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to the hospital at which he died, and had a talk with the doctor (J. J. Moran) who told him that Poe had not been drinking when brought to the hospital but was under the influence of a drug; he added that he suggested the use of stimulants, but that Mr. Poe positively declined taking any. Mr. Poe lived very quietly while here."

After his tired soul was at rest, Poe's magic voice still spoke in the sweetest of love ballads. Annabel Lee, which appeared in the New York Tribune October 9, 1849—the very day when his funeral cortege of six gentlemen followed him through the chill rain to his grave in the family lot at Westminster Burying Ground. In the same issue of the paper was the vindictive article by Rufus Griswold, signed "Ludwig." A month after Poe's death, the third and final version of "The Bells" was published in the November number of The Union Magazine, its development traced by the editor, John Sartain. A year later, October, 1850, "The Poetic Principle" appeared in the same magazine. The loveliest dream of a poet's home, "Lander s Cottage," was not given to the world until much later.

The mystery surrounding Poe's last days is long in finding solution. With his faults acknowledged by his friends, the extenuating conditions of his physical organization, heredity and disease reluctantly admitted by his enemies, prejudice sprung from malice and wilful turning from truth must disappear. All who possess the divine element of pity will unite in feeling that his sufferings were his expiation, an expiation not only in life but after death in the untruthful representations of his life and character.

Great as this has been, it has not robbed the world of