Edgar Allan Poe
Today we do not think of Edgar Allan Poe as the church-going type. There is a humorous account of Poe attending a service in New York City after taking the train 14 miles from his cottage in Fordham, New York. Poe even told how he thought he would make a good priest.
On Christmas Eve 1847, Marie Louise Shew (nurse to Edgar and Virginia prior to her death in January of that year) coaxed Poe into attending a midnight service conducted by Reverend William Augustus Muhlenberg at his protestant episcopal church. The church was located at the corner of Sixth and Twentieth Streets in New York City. Shew recounted the service and Poe’s nervousness while listening along with Shew’s unnamed “lady friend.” I believe the lady friend was Frances Osgood.
Poe came: "to town to go to a midnight service with a Lady friend and myself. He went with us, followed the service like a ‘churchman,’ looking directly towards the chancel, and holding one side of my prayer book, sang the psalms with us, and to my astonishment struck up a tenor to our sopranos and, got along nicely during the first part of the sermon, which was on the subject of the sympathies of our Lord, to our wants. The passage being often repeated, ‘He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.’ He begged me to stay quiet that he would wait for me outside, and he rushed out, too excited to stay. I knew he would not leave us to return home alone, (altho’ my friend thought it doubtful), and so after the sermon as I began to feel anxious (as we were in a strange church) I looked back and saw his pale face, and as the congregation rose to sing the Hymn, ‘Jesus Saviour of my soul,’ he appeared at my side, and sang the Hymn, without looking at the book, in a fine clear tenor. He looked inspired! And no wonder. He imagined he would have made a successful orator, and priest — I did not dare to ask him why he left, but he mentioned after we got home, that the subject ‘was marvelously handled, and ought to have melted many hard hearts’ and ever after this he never passed Doctor Muhlenberg’s 20th St. Free Church without going in, if the doors were open. He considered Dr. M. a wonderful man, ‘with a large heart for his kind, superlatively so!’ as he proved to be, as we owe St. Luke’s Hospital, to his influence and many other charities!!!”
#EdgarAllanPoe #MariaShew "StLukesHospital
No comments:
Post a Comment