that existed between his wife and himself, always delightfully apparent to me, in spite of the many little poetical episodes, in which the impassioned romance of his temperament impelled him to indulge; of this I cannot speak too earnestly—­too warmly.  I believe she was the only woman whom he ever truly loved; and this is evinced by the exquisite pathos of the little poem lately written, called Annabel Lee, of which she was the subject, and which is by far the most natural, simple, tender and touchingly beautiful of all his songs.  I have heard it said that it was intended to illustrate a late love affair of the author; but they who believe this, have in their dullness evidently misunderstood or missed the beautiful meaning latent in the most lovely of all its verses—­where he says,

  “’A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
   My beautiful Annabel Lee,
  So that her high-born kinsmen came,
   And bore her away from me.’

“There seems a strange and almost profane disregard of the sacred purity and spiritual tenderness of this delicious ballad, in thus overlooking the allusion to the kindred angels and the heavenly Father of the lost and loved and unforgotten wife.

“But it was in his conversations and his letters, far more than in his published poetry and prose writings, that the genius of Poe was most gloriously revealed.  His letters were divinely beautiful, and for hours I have listened to him, entranced by strains of such pure and almost celestial eloquence as I have never read or heard elsewhere.  Alas! in the thrilling words of Stoddard,

  “’He might have soared in the morning light,
  But he built his nest with the birds of night;
  But he lie in dust, and the stone is rolled
  Over the sepulcher dim and cold;
  He has canceled the ill he has done or said,
  And gone to the dear and holy dead. 
  Let us forget the path he trod,
  And leave him now to his Maker, God.’”

The influence of Mr. Poe’s aims and vicissitudes upon his literature, was more conspicuous in his later than in his earlier writings.  Nearly all that he wrote in the last two or three years—­including much of his best poetry,—­was in some sense biographical:  in draperies of his imagination, those who take the trouble to trace his steps, will perceive, but slightly concealed, the figure of himself.  The lineaments here disclosed, I think, are not different from those displayed in his biography, which is but a filling up of the picture.  Thus far the few criticisms of his life or works that I have ventured have been suggested by the immediate examination of the points to which they referred.  I add but a few words of more general description.

In person he was below the middle height, slenderly but compactly formed, and in his better moments he had in an eminent degree that air of gentlemanliness which men of a lower order seldom succeed in acquiring.