The personal side of Poe's life after his last breach with Mr. Allan, in 1834, is largely clouded by poverty and bitterness and a relaxing grip on his own powers. His marriage to his cousin, Virginia Clemm, in 1836 was unqualifiedly happy only until the undermining of her health, three years later, and from then on was the cause of a shattering succession of hopes and fears ending with her death in 1847. His relations to most other men and women were complicated by his erratic, jealous, and too often abusive behavior. Only those friendships endured which were built on the magnanimous tolerance or the insuperable amiability of his friends and associates. His nature, which was self-centered and excitable to begin with, became perverted by mishaps of his own making until the characterization of his latest colleague was wholly justified. Said C. F. Briggs to James Russell Lowell: He cannot conceive of anybody's doing anything, except for his own personal advantage; and he says, with perfect sincerity, and entire unconsciousness of the exposition which it makes of his own mind and heart, that he looks upon all reformers as madmen; and it is for this reason that he is so great an egoist.... Therefore, he attributes all the favor which Longfellow, yourself, or anybody else receives from the world as an evidence of the ignorance of the world, and the lack of that favor in himself he attributes to the world's malignity. Under the accumulating distresses of his last two years the decline of will-power and self-control terminated with his tragic death in Baltimore in 1849. The gossip which pursued him all his life has continued relentlessly, even to the point of coloring the prejudices of his biographers,--commonly classified as "malignants" and "amiables,"--but only such facts and reports have been mentioned here as have some legitimate bearing on his habits of mind as an author.