Still Poe did maintain his leading position among the scholars at that Virginian academy, and several still living have favored us with reminiscences of him.  His feats in swimming to which Colonel Preston has alluded, are quite a feature of his youthful career.  Colonel Mayo records one daring performance in natation which is thoroughly characteristic of the lad.  One day in mid-winter, when standing on the banks of the James River, Poe dared his comrade into jumping in, in order to swim to a certain point with him.  After floundering about in the nearly frozen stream for some time, they reached the piles upon which Mayo’s Bridge was then supported, and there attempted to rest and try to gain the shore by climbing up the log abutment to the bridge.  Upon reaching the bridge, however, they were dismayed to find that its plank flooring overlapped the abutment by several feet, and that it was impossible to ascend it.  Nothing remained for them but to let go their slippery hold and swim back to the shore.  Poe reached the bank in an exhausted and benumbed condition, whilst Mayo was rescued by a boat just as he was succumbing.  On getting ashore Poe was seized with a violent attack of vomiting, and both lads were ill for several weeks.

Alluding to another quite famous swimming feat of his own, the poet remarked, “Any ‘swimmer in the falls’ in my days would have swum the Hellespont, and thought nothing of the matter.  I swam from Ludlam’s Wharf to Warwick (six miles), in a hot June sun, against one of the strongest tides ever known in the river.  It would have been a feat comparatively easy to swim twenty miles in still water.  I would not think much,” Poe added in a strain of exaggeration not unusual with him, “of attempting to swim the British Channel from Dover to Calais.”  Colonel Mayo, who had tried to accompany him in this performance, had to stop on the way, and says that Poe, when he reached the goal, emerged from the water with neck, face, and back blistered.  The facts of this feat, which was undertaken for a wager, having been questioned, Poe, ever intolerant of contradiction, obtained and published the affidavits of several gentlemen who had witnessed it.  They also certified that Poe did not seem at all fatigued, and that he walked back to Richmond immediately after the performance.

The poet is generally remembered at this part of his career to have been slight in figure and person, but to have been well made, active, sinewy, and graceful.  Despite the fact that he was thus noted among his schoolfellows and indulged at home, he does not appear to have been in sympathy with his surroundings.  Already dowered with the “hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,” he appears to have made foes both among those who envied him and those whom, in the pride of intellectuality, he treated with pugnacious contempt.  Beneath the haughty exterior, however, was a warm and passionate heart, which only needed circumstance to call forth an almost fanatical intensity of affection.  A well-authenticated instance of this is thus related by Mrs. Whitman: