that time Poe was finally dismissed. While holding his precarious place at Richmond, and with a very scanty income, he had married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, an amiable and beautiful girl, but quite devoid of that firmness of character which was requisite in the wife of such a man.

He went from Richmond to Baltimore, and thence to Philadelphia and New York, trusting for support to his chances of success as a magazine writer and newspaper correspondent. In May, 1839, he became editor of the Gentleman's Magazine of Philadelphia, and made a vigorous effort to begin a regular life. But moral stamina was entirely wanting, and before the close of summer he relapsed into his former courses, ' and for weeks was regardless of everything but a morbid and insatiable appetite for the means of intoxication.' The magazine was conducted in the most irregular way; its proprietor on several occasions returning from some days' absence from home, after the day of publication was past, to find the magazine unfinished and Poe senselessly drunk.

The story of Poe's connexion with several other periodicals might be told in the same words. In the autumn of 1844 he removed to New York. It was during his residence in Philadelphia that Mr. Griswold became acquainted with him. He says:

Poe's manner, except during his fits of intoxication, was very quiet and gentlemanly; he was usually dressed with simplicity and elegance; and when once he sent for me to visit him, during a period of illness caused by a protracted and anxious watching at the side of his sick wife, I was impressed by the singular neatness and the air of refinement in his home. It was in a

small house, in one of the pleasant and silent neighbourhoods far from the centre of the town, and though slightly and cheaply furnished, everything in it was so tasteful, and so fitly disposed, that it seemed altogether suitable for a man of genius. For this, and for most of the comforts he enjoyed in his brightest as in his darkest years, he was chiefly indebted to his mother-in-law, who loved him with more than maternal devotion and constancy.

Poe arrived at New York with a high literary reputation. He had by this time written his most successful tales; and soon after coming to New York he published his remarkable poem, The Raven, of which Mr. Willis has said, that

It is the most effective single example of fugitive poetry ever published in this country, and is unsurpassed in English poetry for subtle conception, masterly ingenuity of versification, and consistent sustaining of imaginative lift.

About this time he also wrote his well-known story entitled The Facts in the case of M. Valdemar, in which he gives a shockingly circumstantial and minute description of the use of mesmerism in the case of a dying man. This piece was translated into many languages, and caused much curious speculation in the philosophical world.

In October, 1845, he became the proprietor and editor of the New York Broadway Journal. His irregular habits rendered him quite unfit for such a position; and the last number of the journal was published at the close of the same year. He made some engagements to deliver public lectures, one to read a poem before the Boston Lyceum; but he was generally drunk when the period for fulfilling these

engagements arrived. We have some curious specimens of the tone in which literary criticism is conducted in America, in a controversy into which Poe got at this time with a certain Dr. Dunn English. Poe had published, as one of a series of sketches called The Literati of New York City, an article reviewing the career of Dr. English, which Mr. Griswold admits was entirely false in what purported to be its facts.' Dr. English retorted by publishing an account of Poe's life and character, very much to the disadvantage of the latter; and wound up his article by a declaration that upon several occasions he had given Poe a sound horse-whipping. Poe returned to the charge in a paper which a New York journal was found willing to publish, in which, among other elegances of phrase, he describes Dr. English's attack upon himself as oozing from the filthy lips of which a lie is the only natural language!'

But Poe was now sinking fast into lower depths of infamy. Witness the following:

On one occasion he borrowed fifty dollars from a distinguished literary woman of South Carolina, promising to return it in a few days. When he failed to do so, and was asked for a written acknowledgment of the debt that might be exhibited to the husband of the friend who had thus served him, he denied all knowledge of it, and threatened to exhibit a correspondence which he said would make the woman infamous, if she said anything more on the subject. Of course there never had been any such correspondence. But when Poe heard that a brother of the slandered party was in quest of him for the purpose of taking satisfaction, he sent for Dr. Francis, and induced him to carry to that gentleman his retractation and apology, with a statement, which seemed true enough at the moment, that Poe was out of his head.

And Mr. Griswold tells us that those familiar with Poe's career can recal too many similar anecdotes.

In the autumn of 1846 the New York Express contained an appeal to the public on behalf of Poe and his wife, who were now at Fordham, some miles from the city, in want of the common necessaries of life. Mr. N. P. Willis seconded this appeal by a generous paper in the Home Journal; and the contributions which flowed in relieved Poe's necessities for the time. His wife died a few weeks later; and magazine writing, as before, occupied him till the beginning of 1848. Early in that year he delivered, before a brilliant auditory at New York, his extraordinary discourse upon the Cosmogony of the Universe, which he called Eureka, a Prose Poem. He utterly denied in it the value of the inductive philosophy, and proposed to construct a theory of nature which should be dictated merely by that divinest instinct, the sense of beauty.' His views, we need hardly say, in so far as they can be reduced to comprehensibility, are the most preposterous rubbish.

In August, 1849, Poe went from New York to Philadelphia. Here, for several days, he abandoned himself to excesses so shocking that his biographer leaves them to be imagined. Reduced to actual beggary, he asked in charity the means of leaving the city, and proceeded to Richmond, in Virginia. Here he seems to have awakened to the degradation of his position; and he made a last desperate effort to begin a new life. He joined a teetotal society, and for several weeks conducted himself with perfect propriety. He delivered

two lectures in several of the towns of Virginia. He became engaged to marry a lady whom he had known in his youth, and who certainly evinced much greater courage than discretion in forming an engagement so perilous; and he wrote to his friends that he was about to settle for the remainder of his days amid the scenes where he had passed his youth. We give the conclusion of the miserable history in Mr. Griswold's words :

On Thursday, the 4th of October, he set out for New York to fulfil a literary engagement, and to prepare for his marriage. Arriving in Baltimore, he gave his trunk to a porter, with directions to convey it to the cars which were to start in an hour or two for Philadelphia, and went into a tavern to obtain some refreshment. Here he met acquaintances who invited him to drink; all his resolutions and duties were forgotten; in a few hours he was in such a state as is commonly induced only by long-continued intoxication. After a night of insanity and exposure he was carried to an hospital, and there, on the evening of Sunday, the 7th of October, 1849, he died, at the age of thirty-eight years.

Thus perished one of the most singular geniuses which America has produced. From the very beginning of his career there seems to have been some insane infatuation upon him. He was the very ideal of a black sheep. He was bad and wretched throughout. Through his whole life there never was a time when, for more than two or three weeks, he promised to become anything better. His sky never brightened. We feel that it would have been his salvation to have been put under some external control; he was not fit to be his own master. His will was in complete abeyance. Still, his genius ought not to be suffered to blind