“Take Courage”

“Take Courage” is a two-word message Augustus Landor leaves for Edgar Allan Poe, first as a private gesture of encouragement and later as a clue that helps expose a connection between Landor and Leroy Fry. Its force lies in the distance between what Landor hopes the words might do and what the note ultimately does: it offers no assured comfort, cannot relieve the writer’s guilt, and returns in Poe’s hands as evidence.

The Message and Its Intended Recipient

On December 12, Landor writes “TAKE COURAGE” on the back of a trade bill and leaves it beneath the rock he and Poe share as a secret hiding place in Kosciusko’s Garden. The message is deliberately spare: an imperative that asks Poe to summon courage without explaining what he should face or promising how matters will turn out. Landor chooses the only place where he believes he can be sure Poe will find it, making the note a purposeful communication rather than an abandoned scrap.

The circumstances of its writing give the short phrase a weight that its length alone might conceal. After leaving it, Landor lingers in the garden, sits on a stone bench, looks across the Hudson, and listens to the spring bubbling in its basin. Instead of settling into confidence about his gesture, he questions what he meant by sending the message and why Poe should heed anything he said. He also wonders whether two words could possibly perform the heavy labor he is asking of them. The scene sets the note’s confident imperative against the writer’s uncertainty about his own intention and authority.

A Gesture Compromised by Guilt

Landor’s later account makes the gap between the note’s encouraging words and its emotional purpose explicit: it was a message written to ease his conscience, though he knew that conscience could not be eased. The phrase thus carries more than one burden. It addresses Poe, but Landor’s own questions turn it back toward its author, who cannot be certain whether he is offering genuine support or trying to relieve himself through the act of writing.

The physical placement sharpens that tension. The note is hidden under a shared secret rock, a private arrangement that depends on Poe knowing where to look; yet its survival means that a confidential gesture can outlast the moment and return in a new context. In the garden, Landor’s attention breaks into fragments of the scene around him: the stone, the water, and a distant peak. Against that unsettled recollection, “Take Courage” is not a resolution. It is an attempted act whose meaning Landor himself cannot confidently settle.

Poe’s Recovery of the Note

When Poe confronts Landor, he places two scraps side by side on a table. One is the note found in Leroy Fry’s hand; the other is the message Landor had left beneath the secret rock. Poe identifies the second as Landor’s and recalls its hiding place, turning the garden’s private exchange into an object of scrutiny. What had been left for Poe to find is now something Poe can use to question Landor.

Poe directs attention to the handwriting rather than treating the message only as a sentiment. Pointing between the two papers, he identifies the capital letters A, R, G, and E as virtually identical in the two notes. The comparison makes “Take Courage” consequential in a new way: its wording remains an appeal, but its letter forms become a possible link to Fry’s note. The resemblance does not, by itself, explain why the notes are connected; instead, it sharpens the mystery of why Landor might have corresponded with Fry and how that might relate to Landor’s daughter.

From Encouragement to Evidence

Poe presents the comparison as a discovery that astonishes him, even as the scene’s details invite attention to how he stages that discovery. His brows draw together as though he were encountering the implication for the first time, and he frames the connection through a sequence of questions about the writer, the possible correspondence, and Landor’s daughter. The note therefore operates both as material evidence and as a prompt for inquiry: the matching forms raise questions whose answers are not contained in the two scraps alone.

The contrast between the notes’ first and later uses gives the expression its narrative significance. Landor hides an encouragement in a place associated with Poe and privately doubts that it can accomplish what he wants. Poe recovers it, compares its capitals with those on the paper found with Fry, and pursues the connection by asking Patsy what she knows about Mattie. The two words do not resolve Landor’s guilt or disclose the whole history between him and Fry. Instead, they cross the boundary between a personal message and investigative evidence, exposing how a gesture intended to ease a conscience can become part of the reckoning it cannot prevent.