He came back to pass his last days in an America torn by the agonies of the Civil War. He was a Democrat by force of inertia, and had written a campaign biography of the genial and bibulous President Pierce. He had no understanding of the war, nor of the new America which was to be born from it. In these last pathetic days he reminds us of the poor old Tory, Sir Walter Scott, facing the Reform Bill and the Chartist riots and “the country mined below our feet.” I plead with artists to step ahead of the procession in their youth, so that in their old age. they may not be left so pitifully far behind. CHAPTER LXXIX THE ANGEL ISRAFEL The Puritans who settled Massachusetts believed that happiness was to be found in the repressing of the “carnal nature.” The Cavaliers who settled Maryland and Virginia believed in enjoyment, and rode their passions at a gallop. It was appropriate that these Cavaliers should give to America an artist who taught that sensuous beauty is a mystic revelation of God, and that poetry must be music, to the exclusion of intellect and moral sense. A Maryland general’s son ran away and married a young actress, and these two lived a wretched, hand-to-mouth existence, and died in a garret, leaving three infants. One of the three was named Edgar Poe, and our first glimpse of him shows a nurse feeding him upon a “sugar-tit” soaked in gin. A little later we find him adopted by a sentimental lady named Allan, and made into a kind of drawing-room pet, taught to pledge toasts in drink. He was an exquisite little fellow, proud, sensitive and self-willed; and in his early training we note the seeds of all his later misery. He began writing poetry in childhood, and we still read verses which he composed in his ’teens. He was sent to the University of Virginia, where along with rich men’s sons he gambled and drank. He deserted the University, quarreled with his benefactors, and enlisted in the army. They got him out and sent him to West Point, which is famous for having graduated a number of soldiers, and for having failed to graduate two artists, Edgar Allan Poe and James McNeill Whistler. Poe wrote verses and drank brandy with his room-mates, and finally set about to get himself expelled from a life which he hated. So here he was at the age of twenty-two, a poet, a rebel and a drunkard. He had eighteen years more to live, and during that time his life was one long agony of struggle. He had brilliant gifts, his work found recognition, and he got many editorial positions, but could not keep them. He wandered from city to city, quarreled with both enemies and friends, and exhibited all those forms of evasion and dishonesty for which alcohol and opium are responsible.... “How much shall I say about the great curse of the South?” asks Ogi. “Say it all,” says his wife.