eagerly sought after by publishers. The prospect lay bright before him ; he abandoned for awhile the vices which so fearfully beset him; he was living quietly in a pleasant rural neighbourhood in Westchester, near the city, with his delicate wife and her mother, and a brilliant future appeared to be in store for him. But he could never keep clear from magazine editing, and he joined Mr. C. F. Briggs in publishing the "Broadway Journal," a literary weekly periodical; but the inevitable quarrel ensued, and this project was abandoned at the end of a year. It was while editing the "Broadway Journal" that he engaged in furious onslaught upon Longfellow, whom he accused of plagiarising from his poems, and, at the same time, involved himself in numberless disputes and quarrels with other authors. But he also gained the affection and admiration of many estimable literary people, some of whom he alienated by appearing before them when in a state of intoxication. He delivered a lecture on poetry, but attracted no hearers, and he was so chagrined by his disappointment, that he fell again into his old habits, and disgusted his new friends by his gross misconduct; he involved himself in another quarrel with some of the literati of Boston, and to show his contempt for them, went there and delivered a poem in public, which he pretended to have written in his tenth. year. On his return to New York he was again reduced to great straits; and in 1848 he advertised a series of lectures, in order to raise sufficient means to put into execution his longcherished plan of a magazine; but he delivered only one lecture on the Cosmogony of the Universe, which was afterwards published under the title of "Eureka, a Prose Poem." His wife had died the year previously, and during her illness he was reduced to such extremities that public appeals, which were generously responded to, were made in his behalf by the papers of New York. Not long after the death of his wife he formed an intimacy with an accomplished literary lady of Rhode Island, a widow, and was engaged to be married to her. It was to her that he addressed the poem "Annabel Lee;" the day was appointed for their marriage; but he had, in the meantime, formed other plans; and, to disentangle himself from this engagement, he visited the house of his affianced bride, where he conducted himself with such indecent violence that the aid of the police had to be called in to expel him. This, of course, put an end to the engagement. In a short time after he went to Richmond, and there gained the confidence and affections of a lady of good family and considerable fortune. The day was appointed for their marriage, and he left Virginia to return to New York to fulfil some literary arrangements previous to the consummation of this new engagement. He had written to his friends that he had, at last, a prospect of happiness. The Lost Lenore was found. He arrived in Baltimore on his way to the north, and gave his baggage into the charge of a porter, intending to leave in an hour for Philadelphia. Stepping into an hotel to obtain some refreshments, he met some of his former companions, who invited him to drink with them. In a few moments all was over with him. He spent the night in revelry, wandered out into the street in a state of insanity, and was found in the morning literally dying from exposure, and a single night's excesses. He was taken to a hospital, and, on the 7th October, 1849, at the age of thirty-eight, he closed his troubled life. Three days before he had left his newly-affianced bride to prepare for their nuptials. He lies in a burying-ground in Baltimore, his native city, without a stone to mark the place of his last rest. In person Edgar Allan Poe was slight, and hardly of the medium height; his motions were quick and nervous, his air was abstracted, and his countenance generally serious and pale. He never laughed, and rarely smiled; but in conversation he was vivacious, earnest, and respectful; and though he appeared generally under restraint, as though guarding against a half-subdued passion, yet his manners were engaging, and he never failed to win the confidence and kind feelings of those with whom he conversed for the first time; and there were a few who knew him long and intimately who could never believe that he was ever otherwise than the pleasant, intelligent, respectful, and earnest companion he appeared to them. Though he was at times so reckless and profligate in his conduct, and so indifferent to external proprieties, he was generally scrupulously exact in everything he did. He dressed with extreme neatness and perfectly good taste, avoiding all ornaments and everything of a bizarre appearance. He was painfully alive to all imperfections of art; and a false rhyme, an ambiguous sentence, or xxix even a typographical error, threw him into an ecstasy of passion. It was this sensitiveness to all artistic imperfections, rather than any malignity of feeling, which made his criticisms so severe, and procured him a host of enemies among persons towards whom he never entertained any personal ill-will. He criticised his own productions with the same severity that he exercised towards the writings of others; and all his poems, though he sometimes represented them as offsprings of a sudden inspiration, were the work of elaborate study. His handwriting was always neat and singularly uniform, and his manuscripts were invariably on long slips of paper about four inches wide, which he never folded, but always made into a roll. Nothing he ever did had the appearance of haste or slovenliness, and he preserved with religious care every scrap he had ever written, and every letter he ever received, so that he left behind him the amplest materials for the composition of his literary life. At his own request these remnants of his existence were entrusted to Doctor Griswold, a gentleman with whom he had quarrelled, and had lampooned in his lectures; Doctor Griswold, in a generous spirit, accepted the charge, and produced from the papers entrusted to him, the best biography of the strange being that has been published, which was appended to the collection of his works in four volumes issued in New York. June, 1857. |