The critical instinct, coupled with an impulsive temperament, high ideals of perfect performance and a powerful pen, is a fatal gift to any man. The path of such a one will be strewn with the tombs of friendships which he has stabbed, many and many a time unconsciously; his life will be haunted with vain regrets for words gone past recall, carrying with them consequences he did not reckon upon, hurting those he loves, missing those he aimed at. His way leads steadily through bitter animosities, bitterer remorse and, bitterest of all, isolation from his fellows, who shall clothe him with a character foreign, antagonistic and repulsive to his better nature. If he be not possessed of an o’ermastering will, a thick skin and a healthy, cheerful temper it leads to morbidness, gloom and despair. Poe was not of that will and temper. He was affectionate, sociable and supersensitive to coolness of manner in others. A rebuff was a stab to him, hatred a calamity. It is said his early life was clouded by the stigma put on him by his parents’ theatrical associations and his own dependence on charity; and that when a lad he wept many wild nights at the grave of a lady who had spoken kindly to him and become the confidante of his boyish sorrows and hopes. So with this nature and with his devastating pen in hand he traced that descent into the living tomb. If from its gloom he sometimes sought “respite and nepenthe” in drink it is not to be wondered at; he was often tempted to suicide. He once solemnly protested: “I have no pleasure in stimulants. It [indulgence in drink] has been in the _desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories—memories of wrong, and injustice and imputed dishonor_—from a _sense of insupportable loneliness_ and a dread of some strange impending gloom.” I fancy he tried to typify this unhappy mission that had come to blast his life in that poem in which he “wedded despair to harmony.” “The Raven” was a “grim, ghastly, ominous messenger from the night’s Plutonian shore” that settled on the bust of Pallas, goddess of wisdom, even as that critical impulse had settled upon his genius. His soul never was lifted from the shadow. He was himself, of that fell work, the —“Unhappy master, whom unmerciful disaster Followed fast and followed faster.”