“You ask me, my friend, to write for you my reminiscences of Edgar Poe.  For you, who knew and understood my affectionate interest in him, and my frank acknowledgment of that interest to all who had a claim upon my confidence, for you, I will willingly do so.  I think no one could know him—­no one has known him personally—­certainly no woman-without feeling the same interest.  I can sincerely say, that although I have frequently heard of aberrations on his part from the ’straight and narrow path,’ I have never seen him otherwise than gentle, generous, well-bred, and fastidiously refined.  To a sensitive and delicately-nurtured woman, there was a peculiar and irresistible charm in the chivalric, graceful, and almost tender reverence with which he invariably approached all women who won his respect.  It was this which first commanded and always retained my regard for him.

“I have been told, that when his sorrows and pecuniary embarrassments had driven him to the use of stimulants, which a less delicate organization might have borne without injury, he was in the habit of speaking disrespectfully of the ladies of his acquaintance.  It is difficult for me to believe this; for to me, to whom he came during the year of our acquaintance for counsel and kindness in all his many anxieties and griefs, he never spoke irreverently of any woman save one, and then only in my defense; and though I rebuked him for his momentary forgetfulness of the respect due to himself and to me, I could not but forgive the offense for the sake of the generous impulse which prompted it.  Yet even were these sad rumors true of him, the wise and well-informed knew how to regard, as they would the impetuous anger of a spoiled infant, balked of its capricious will, the equally harmless and unmeaning phrensy of that stray child of Poetry and Passion.  For the few unwomanly and slander-loving gossips who have injured him and themselves only by repeating his ravings, when in such moods they have accepted his society.  I have only to vouchsafe my wonder and my pity.  They cannot surely harm the true and pure, who, reverencing his genius, and pitying his misfortunes and his errors, endeavored, by their timely kindness and sympathy, to soothe his sad career.

“It was in his own simple yet poetical home, that to me the character of Edgar Poe appeared in its most beautiful light.  Playful, affectionate, witty, alternately docile and wayward as a petted child-for his young, gentle, and idolized wife, and for all who came, he had, even in the midst of his most harassing literary duties, a kind word, a pleasant smile, a graceful and courteous attention.  At his desk, beneath the romantic picture of his loved and lost Lenore, he would sit, hour after hour, patient, assiduous, and uncomplaining, tracing, in an exquisitely clear chirography, and with almost superhuman swiftness, the lightning thoughts—­the ‘rare and radiant’ fancies as they flashed through