While in Richmond, with an income of but five hundred dollars a year, he had married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, a very amiable and lovely girl, who was as poor as himself, and little fitted, except by her gentle temper, to be tho wife of such a person.  He went from Richmond to Baltimore; and after a short time, to Philadelphia, and to New York.  A slight acquaintance with Dr. Hawks had led that acute and powerful writer to invite his contributions to the “New York Review,” and he had furnished for the second number of it (for October, 1837) an elaborate but not very remarkable article upon Stephens’s then recently published “Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrea, and the Holy Land.”  His abilities were not of the kind demanded for such work, and he never wrote another paper for this or for any other Review of the same class.  He had commenced in the “Literary Messenger,” a story of the sea under the title of “Arthur Gordon Pym"[A], and upon the recommendation of Mr. Paulding and others, it was printed by the Harpers.  It is his longest work, and is not without some sort of merit, but it received little attention.  The publishers sent one hundred copies to England, and being mistaken at first for a narrative of real experiences it was advertised to be reprinted, but a discovery of its character, I believe, prevented such a result.  An attempt is made in it, by simplicity of style, minuteness of nautical descriptions, and circumstantiality of narration, to give it that air of truth which constitutes the principal attraction of Sir Edward Seaward’s narrative, and Robinson Cursoe; but it has none of the pleasing interest of these tales; it is as full of wonders as Munchausen, has as many atrocities as the Book of Pirates, and as liberal an array of paining and revolting horrors as ever was invented by Anne Radcliffe or George Walker.  Thus far a tendency to extravagance had been the most striking infirmity of his genius.  He had been more anxious to be intense than to be natural; and some of his bizarreries had been mistaken for satire, and admired for that quality.  Afterward he was more judicious, and if his outlines were incredible it was commonly forgotten in the simplicity of his details and their cohesive cumulation.

[Footnote A:  THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM, OF NANTUCKET; comprising the Details of a Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on board the American Brig Grampus, on her way to the South Seas—­with an account of the Re-capture of the Vessel by the Survivors; their Shipwreck, and subsequent Horrible Sufferings from Famine; their Deliverance by means of the British schooner Jane Gray; the brief Cruise of this latter Vessel in the Antarctic ocean; her Capture, and the Massacre of the Crew among a Group of Islands in the 84th parallel of southern latitude; together with the incredible Adventures and Discoveries still further South, to which that distressing calamity gave rise.—­I vol. 12mo. pp. 198 New-York, Harper & Brothers, 1838.]