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. moments all was over with him. In a few 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 of October, 1849, at the age of thirty-eight, he closed his troubled life. Three days before, he had left his newlyaffianced 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 even a typographical error, threw him into an ecstacy of passion. It was this sensitiveness to all artistic imperfections, rather than any malignity of feeling, which made his criticism so severe, and procured him a host of enemies among persons towards whom he never enter tained 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 that 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 |