During his brief residence at the University of Virginia (1826), Poe maintained high scholarship in Latin and French, but lived the life of his companions, drinking (though apparently not to excess) and incurring gambling debts which his guardian repudiated. Set to work in the counting-room of Mr. Allan, the young man rebelled and ran away to Boston, probably under an assumed name, and without capital save a sheaf of immature poems. He soon enlisted as a private in the army, made his peace with his guardian, and was sent to West Point. Here again he proved a clever student; but, purposely neglecting the routine, in 1831 he was discharged. Obliged henceforth to depend on his own resources, Poe now approached almost to the point of starvation, when by his “Manuscript Found in a Bottle” (1833) he gained a prize of one hundred dollars offered by the Baltimore _Saturday Visiter_, and through John P. Kennedy, whom Poe called “the first true friend I ever had,” obtained temporary relief for his wants and help in getting literary work. He now became a contributor to, and soon the literary editor of, _The Southern Literary Messenger_. His numerous stories and criticisms did much to make the magazine successful and famous. In 1836 Poe married his beautiful cousin Virginia Clemm, who lacked three months of being fourteen years of age; but family ties could not prevent his morally weak nature from occasional indulgence in drugs and intoxicants, and his irregularities in January, 1837, brought about his dismissal from the editorial chair of the _Messenger_, for which, however, he continued to write. For a time the Poes now lived in New York, practically supported by Mrs. Clemm, who conducted a boarding-house. Here he completed and published his longest story, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” (1838), a tale of an Antarctic cruise as far south as the 84th parallel, based on Benjamin Morell’s “Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Seas and Pacific” (1832) with frequent dashes of Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner,” but full of such situations of blood-curdling horror and such highly imaginative landscape-painting as only the genius of Poe could produce. The years 1838-44 Poe spent in Philadelphia. In 1839 he collected and published his “Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque.” He wrote constantly for _Graham’s Magazine_, of which he was editor from 1840 till 1843; critiques, essays, and tales flowed from his pen. In imaginative story-telling, this was the period of his best work. His occasional lapses into intoxication are partly explained by the fits of insanity brought on by anxiety over the precarious condition of his wife, who in 1841 ruptured a blood-vessel while singing and who hovered between life and death for six years. The year 1844 found him back in New York, associated first with N. P. Willis on _The Evening Mirror_ and later with Charles F. Briggs on _The Broadway Journal_. The publication of “The Raven” in the _Mirror_ (January 29, 1845)