a beloved one through a lingering illness, in the illuminated pages of "Ligeia," "Morella" and "Eleonora lit by sepulchral lamps, wherein every footfall of the approach of The Conqueror Worm" is delineated with muffled yet magical detail; every one to whose soul have penetrated the melodious dirges of "Ulalume," " Lenore," and "The Raven," which assume in their writhings almost the agonizing grace of the Laocoön, must realize, faintly indeed yet sympathetically, the abysmal grief into which this death must have plunged the greatest Artist of Death whom the world has ever seen, the man who most keenly and most wonderfully has conjured up its horrors before the quailing imagination and made them stand, instinct with their own quivering and hideous life, before the recoiling eye of the mind. The half-frantic mood of the time may be read in the mystic interlineations of "Ulalume," peeping between the lines of this mad yet most musical autobiographic poem that is wreathed with the opiate vapors of frenzy.

"Deprived of the companionship and sympathy of his child-wife," writes a friendly biographer, "the poet suffered what to him was the exquisite agony of utter loneliness. Night after night he would arise from his sleepless pillow, and, dressing himself, wander to the grave of his lost one, and throwing himself down upon the cold ground, weep bitterly for hours at a time.

"The same haunting dread which we have ventured to ascribe to him at the time of his writing The Raven,' possessed him now, and to such a degree that he found it impossible to sleep without the presence of some friend by his bedside. Mrs. Clemm, his ever

1 W. F. Gill, Chatto and Windus, London, 1878.

devoted friend and comforter, more frequently fulfilled the office of watcher. The poet, after retiring, would summon her, and while she stroked his broad brow, he would indulge his wild flights of fancy to the Aidenn of his dreams. He never spoke nor moved in these moments, unless the hand was withdrawn from his forehead; then he would say, with childish naïveté, No, no, not yet!' while he lay with

half-closed eyes.

"The mother, or friend, would stay by him until he was fairly asleep, then gently leave him."

The excesses to which the ruptured throat of his wife had impelled him in Philadelphia, and all through the five years preceding her death, with their alternations of hope and despair, now ended in a settled gloom that threatened his reason: henceforth Poe was a broken man, an unstrung harp wildly and wistfully singing of things long gone by, a "seraph-harper Israfel" that had lost his harp or sat discrowned and disconsolate among the asphodels. A few uneven things, a few weird and beautiful threnodies, and the great prose-poem "Eureka," were practically all that Death and Grief had left him to utter, now that the inspiration of his life had gone and the home of his heart was built up against her tomb. A radiant joy indeed broke fitfully on the poet late in these latter years, but this, too, was doomed to extinction, and soon hung, like his trembling Astarte, directly over a grave. The excesses, brought on by extreme anguish and straitened circumstances, were only too real though never habitual, never bacchanalia of mere maudlin sensuality such as one reads of in the annals of drunken Elizabethans: they were the ups and downs, the uneven tight-rope walking of a nature trying to balance

itself amid impossible conditions and morbid neurotic states, wrung from its natural rectitude by overpowering temptation to seek relief in stimulants-coffee, wine, drugs, opium, anything that would soothe the intense malaise. Alas, how full of Verlaines and de Mussets and Baudelaires the world has been - men like Poe, endowed with preternaturally sensitive nerves, unable to grapple with the coarse flesh-and-blood around them, pierced on all sides by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and succumbing at last to the superincumbent mass of misery.

Poor little Virginia lay for many years in the borrowed tomb, but now at last rests beside her husband in Westminster Church grave-yard, Baltimore, underneath the Poe monument.

CHAPTER XIII.

1848.

"EUREKA."

OWING to Mrs. Shew's untiring efforts, Poe's friends (including General Winfield Scott) raised about $100 and helped to pay the debts incurred by long illness. He himself seems to have been desperately ill and unnerved for a long time after Virginia's death and never really recovered from the shock. A famous New York physician (Dr. Mott) diagnosed the case, apparently agreeing with Mrs. Shew (who had been medically educated and was a doctor's only daughter), that Poe was suffering from a lesion of one side of the brain which would not permit him to use stimulants or tonics without producing insanity.

"I did not feel much hope," says the lady in her diary," that he could be raised up from brain fever brought on by extreme suffering of mind and body— actual want and hunger, and cold having been borne by this heroic husband in order to supply food, medicine, and comforts to his dying wife until exhaustion and lifelessness were so near at every reaction of the fever, that even sedatives had to be administered with extreme caution."

He clung pathetically to the little Dutch cottage, went out little and wrote less; and yet this year of trouble

1 Ingram, II., 115.

men

itself amid impossible conditions and morbid neurotic states, wrung from its natural rectitude by overpowering temptation to seek relief in stimulants - coffee, wine, drugs, opium, anything that would soothe the intense malaise. Alas, how full of Verlaines and de Mussets and Baudelaires the world has been like Poe, endowed with preternaturally sensitive nerves, unable to grapple with the coarse flesh-and-blood around them, pierced on all sides by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and succumbing at last to the superincumbent mass of misery.

Poor little Virginia lay for many years in the borrowed tomb, but now at last rests beside her husband in Westminster Church grave-yard, Baltimore, underneath the Poe monument.