“The feeling we have long entertained on this subject, has been freshened by a recent paragraph in the Express, announcing that Mr. Edgar A. Poe and his wife were both dangerously ill, and suffering for want of the common necessaries of life.  Here is one of the finest scholars, one of the most original men of genius, and one of the most industrious of the literary profession of our country, whose temporary suspension of labor, from bodily illness, drops him immediately to a level with the common objects of public charity.  There was no intermediate stopping-place-no respectful shelter where, with the delicacy due to genius and culture, he might secure aid, unadvertised, till, with returning health, he could resume his labors and his unmortified sense of independence.  He must either apply to individual friends—­(a resource to which death is sometimes almost preferable)—­or suffer down to the level where Charity receives claimants, but where Rags and Humiliation are the only recognized Ushers to her presence.  Is this right?  Should there not be, in all highly civilized communities, an Institution designed expressly for educated and refined objects of charity—­a hospital, a retreat, a home of seclusion and comfort, the sufficient claims to which would be such susceptibilities as are violated by the above mentioned appeal in a daily newspaper.”

The entire article from which this paragraph is taken, was an ingenious apology for Mr. Poe’s infirmities; but it was conceived and executed in a generous spirit, and it had a quick effect in various contributions, which relieved the poet from pecuniary embarrassments.  The next week he published the following letter: 

“My Dear Willis:—­The paragraph which has been put in circulation respecting my wife’s illness, my own, my poverty, etc., is now lying before me; together with the beautiful lines by Mrs. Locke and those by Mrs. ——­, to which the paragraph has given rise, as well as your kind and manly comments in The Home Journal.  The motive of the paragraph I leave to the conscience of him or her who wrote it or suggested it.  Since the thing is done, however, and since the concerns of my family are thus pitilessly thrust before the public, I perceive no mode of escape from a public statement of what is true and what erroneous in the report alluded to.  That my wife is ill, then, is true; and you may imagine with what feelings I add that this illness, hopeless from the first, has been heightened and precipitated by her reception at two different periods, of anonymous letters,—­one inclosing the paragraph now in question; the other, those published calumnies of Messrs. ——­, for which I yet hope to find redress in a court of justice.