From Col. Du Solle, editor of "Noah's New York Sunday Times," who as a resident of Philadelphia about that time knew Poe well, I gained some information concerning him. His dissipation, the Colonel said, was too notorious to be denied; and that for days, and even weeks at a time, he would be sharing the bachelor life and quarters of his associates, who were not aware that he was a married man. He would, on some evenings when sober, come to the rooms occupied by himself and some other writers for the press and, producing the manuscript of The Raven, read to them the last additions to it, asking their opinion and suggestions. He seemed to be having difficulty with it, said Col. Du Solle, and to be very doubtful as to its merits as a poem. The general opinion of these critics was against it.
The irregular habits of this summer resulted in the fall (1839) in a severe illness, the first of the peculiar attacks to which Poe during the rest of his life was at intervals subject. On recovering, he devoted himself to the realization of a plan for establishing a magazine of his own, to be called "The Penn Magazine," and wrote to Mr. Snodgrass that his "prospects were glorious," and that he intended to give it the reputation of using no article except from the best writers, and that in criticism it was to be sternly, absolutely just with both friends and foe, independent of the medium of a publisher's will." In these last words we read the whole secret of his past dissatisfaction and of his future aspiration as an editor.
The Penn Magazine was advertised to appear on January 1, 1841, but this scheme was balked by a financial depression which at that time occurred throughout the country.
But who will not sympathize with Poe and admit that, considering the disappointments to which he was continually subject, and the constant humiliation and drawback of the poverty which met him on every hand, balking each movement and design—together with the ill-health from which he was now destined to be a constant sufferer—his faults and failures should not be treated with every possible allowance? If he were naturally weak, and lacking in the strength and firmness of will to determinately resist obstacles and discouragements, we see in it the effect of the heredity, apparent in his sister; and consequently so much greater is his claim to be leniently judged.
CHAPTER XVIII.
VIRGINIA's ILLNESS.
In all this time of which we have spoken, embracing a period of several years, Mrs. Clemm and her daughter continued their quiet life at the cottage, the former doing what she could toward the support and comfort of the family. But a great affliction was to befall them, in the dangerous illness of Virginia, now in her twenty-first year, who had the misfortune, while singing, to break a small blood-vessel. She had already developed signs of consumption, and from this time forth remained more or less an invalid, subject to occasional hemorrhages, but, from all accounts, losing none of her characteristic cheerfulness and light-heartedness.
Poe was at this time still engaged in the editorship of Graham's Magazine, and it is now that we begin to hear of him in the character of "a devoted husband, watching beside the sick bed of an idolized wife," with which the world is familiar. Certainly the condition of the helpless creature who so clung to him, and the real danger which threatened her, was calculated to awaken all the tenderness of his nature.