stage and married an actress, herself the daughter of an actress and a native of England.  Left an orphan by the early death of both parents, Poe was adopted by a Mr. Allan, a wealthy merchant of Richmond, Va.  He was educated partly at an English school, was student for a time in the University of Virginia, and afterward a cadet in the Military Academy at West Point.  His youth was wild and irregular; he gambled and drank, was proud, bitter, and perverse, finally quarreled with his guardian and adopted father—­by whom he was disowned—­and then betook himself to the life of a literary hack.  His brilliant but underpaid work for various periodicals soon brought him into notice, and he was given the editorship of the Southern Literary Messenger, published at Richmond, and subsequently of the Gentlemen’s—­afterward Graham’s—­Magazine in Philadelphia.  These and all other positions Poe forfeited through his dissipated habits and wayward temper, and finally, in 1844, he drifted to New York, where he found employment on the Evening Mirror and then on the Broadway Journal.  He died of delirium tremens at the Marine Hospital in Baltimore.  His life was one of the most wretched in literary history.  He was an extreme instance of what used to be called the “eccentricity of genius.”  He had the irritable vanity which is popularly supposed to accompany the poetic temperament, and was so insanely egotistic as to imagine that Longfellow and others were constantly plagiarizing from him.  The best side of Poe’s character came out in his domestic relations, in which he displayed great tenderness, patience, and fidelity.  His instincts were gentlemanly, and his manner and conversation were often winning.  In the place of moral feeling he had the artistic conscience.  In his critical papers, except where warped by passion or prejudice, he showed neither fear nor favor, denouncing bad work by the most illustrious hands and commending obscure merit.  The “impudent literary cliques” who puffed each other’s books; the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manufactured verses for the “Annuals;” and the twaddle of the “genial” incapables who praised them in flabby reviews—­all these Poe exposed with ferocious honesty.  Nor, though his writings are unmoral, can they be called in any sense immoral.  His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness as Bryant’s in its austerity.

By 1831 Poe had published three thin books of verse, none of which had attracted notice, although the latest contained the drafts of a few of his most perfect poems, such as Israfel, the Valley of Unrest, the City in the Sea, and one of the two pieces inscribed To Helen.  It was his habit to touch and retouch his work until it grew under his more practiced hand into a shape that satisfied his fastidious taste.  Hence the same poem frequently re-appears in different stages of development in successive editions.  Poe was a subtle artist in the realm