The “TAKE COURAGE” note

The “TAKE COURAGE” note is a short message Augustus Landor leaves for Edgar Allan Poe beneath their secret rock in Kosciusko's Garden. Landor intends it as encouragement, though he cannot settle whether he hopes to move Poe or merely ease his own conscience. When Poe later places it beside the note found in Leroy Fry's hand, its distinctive capital letters turn the private gesture into evidence connecting Landor to the investigation's most incriminating written clue.

The Message and Its Placement

Dated December 12, the message consists of the two words “TAKE COURAGE.” Landor writes them on the back of a trade bill, choosing the secret rock in Kosciusko's Garden as the place where Poe is sure to find them. The hidden location belongs to their shared understanding, so the note is not simply a message left in a public place: it is addressed through a familiar private landmark, one that makes the act of reaching Poe depend on knowledge they hold in common.

Landor's account dwells less on the wording than on the uncertainty behind it. After leaving the note, he lingers on a stone bench overlooking the Hudson, listening to the spring in its basin. He asks himself what he meant by the message and why Poe should heed anything he said. Even his most charitable explanation—that he is trying to clear his conscience—seems inadequate to him; he doubts that two words can do such heavy moral work. The note's brevity is therefore part of its meaning: its clear imperative offers courage, but Landor's hesitation makes it impossible to mistake that offer for a settled reconciliation or an explanation.

A Gesture Complicated by Conscience

Landor does not present the note as a confident attempt to direct Poe's actions. His reflections reveal uncertainty about both its purpose and its likely effect. He may want Poe to take courage, but he also recognizes that the message cannot undo whatever burdens his conscience. The note occupies that uneasy space between care for another person and a wish to relieve oneself: its encouraging language is plain, while the motive behind it remains unsettled.

That gap between message and motive gives the object a double function. For Poe, the words can initially read as a noble sentiment left by someone who knows him well. For Landor, they are also an act he cannot make morally sufficient simply by performing it. The note thus carries more than its literal instruction, but the text does not resolve the uncertainty into a single declared intention. It records Landor's attempt to reach Poe and his simultaneous doubt that the attempt can accomplish what he needs.

Poe's Handwriting Comparison

The note's significance changes when Poe produces it during his confrontation with Landor. He lays it beside the note found in Leroy Fry's hand and identifies the former as a message Landor had left for him. The comparison is graphic and specific: Poe moves his finger between the two scraps and points to the capital letters A, R, G, and E, which he finds virtually identical. He observes that capital letters, like lower-case ones, can be distinctive enough to implicate their writer.

The force of the clue comes from the collision between the note's intimate purpose and its material form. Landor had left it as a private encouragement, but the handwriting survives that intention and can be examined independently of the words. Poe's comparison gives the scrap a second audience and a second meaning: what Landor meant Poe to read as reassurance also supplies a pattern of letterforms Poe can compare with Fry's note. The message does not itself explain why Landor would correspond with Fry, or establish the full circumstances behind the other note; instead, its resemblance sharpens those questions and makes Landor's connection to the writing difficult to dismiss.

Discovery and Narrative Significance

Poe says that he found the note only recently, beneath the secret rock where Landor had placed it. He has also retained the note found in Fry's hand, and brings both scraps to the table. The physical pairing matters: the inference emerges not from the encouraging words alone but from the juxtaposition of two separate pieces of writing. Poe's initial astonishment at the possibility that the same person wrote both keeps the comparison framed as a discovery, while his attention to the letter shapes makes the evidence concrete.

Poe's discovery immediately broadens the questions raised by the note. If Landor wrote both messages, Poe asks, why would he correspond with Fry, and how could the connection relate to Landor's daughter, Mattie? The note therefore helps shift Poe's attention from an apparent message of kindness to a possible link between Landor and the case. Its evidentiary significance rests on resemblance, not on a confession written into its words: the note does not state what Landor did, but places his handwriting beside a message associated with Fry and invites the reader to reconsider the hand that wrote it. Its final irony is that the gesture meant to encourage Poe becomes one of the traces by which Poe uncovers what Landor has concealed.