This, for a lad of seventeen, with an excitable temperament, was sufficient to sow the seeds of all his future woe. The youthful brain inflamed with alcohol never really recovers its normal condition, even when abstinence follows, and Poe's life-long struggle with his adversary began at this tender age. Dr. Day, long connected with the inebriate asylum at Binghamton, N. Y., once had an opportunity to examine the brain of a man who, after having been a drunkard, reformed and lived for some years as a teetotaller. He found to his surprise that the globules of the brain had not shrunk to their natural size. They did not exhibit the inflammation of the drunkard's brain, but they were still enlarged, and seemed ready on the instant to absorb the fumes of alcohol and resume their former condition. He thought he saw in this morbid condition of the brain the physical part of the reason why a man who has once been habituated to liquor falls so easily under its sway again in spite of every moral reason for refraining. Doubtless he was right, and poor Poe was only one of a vast number of men of brilliant intellects and kind hearts, who after a life-long struggle are defeated by the enemy they have taken into their stomachs to destroy their brains. It is not our purpose to trace the poet through all the devious windings of his life, but to dwell for a little while upon the course of his domestic life and give some of the striking points in his character. We will pass over the close of his college career and the episode at West Point, as well as the publication of his earliest volume of poems, and look at him as we find him in the summer of 1833, living in Baltimore. He had a home here with his father's widowed sister, Mrs. Clemm, who with her daughter Virginia lived in a very humble way in that city. The little Poe could earn--for he was then at one of his lowest financial periods--went into the common stock, and the three struggled along together. Virginia was a child of eleven, beautiful, delicate, refined; and Mrs. Clemm was then, as always thereafter, the best and kindest of friends to the poet. She had little to offer him, save kindness and motherly love; but she gave these most abundantly, and they were of priceless value to Poe. For many months he kept himself from his besetting sin, and worked faithfully at whatever literary work he could get to do. But he was poor to the point of destitution, and the mental strain upon him was great, with his extraordinary pride and sensitiveness. He had been well reared, with fine and delicate tastes, and accustomed to money; and privation was very bitter to him. He was naturally an aristocrat, too, and found in the associations to which he was almost compelled by poverty a heavy cross. At the end of two years he felt himself forced to leave Baltimore, and thought he could obtain employment in Richmond. He had become greatly attached to Virginia, and