“My brother took Poe to his own room, where he slept twelve hours and could hardly recall the evening’s work. This showed his mind was injured—nearly gone out for want of food and from disappointment. He had not been drinking and had only been a few hours from home. Evidently his vitality was low, and he was nearly insane. I called in Dr. Francis (the old man was odd but very skilful), who was one of our neighbors. His words were, ‘He has heart disease and will die early in life.’ We did not waken him, but let him sleep.” Since I began writing this paper I have heard recited in a company of literary people an account of Poe’s staggering into a stranger’s house at midnight, calling for a pen and dashing off “The Bells;” then falling into a drunken stupor on the library table. It was evidently believed by the narrator, despite Mrs. Shew’s circumstantial and more rational account. During these dark days, as indeed during all Poe’s adult life, Mrs. Clem was his guardian angel. The poet Willis touchingly draws this picture of devotion: “It was a hard fate that she was watching over. Mr. Poe wrote with fastidious difficulty, and in a style too much above the popular level to be well paid. He was always in pecuniary difficulty and, with his sick wife, frequently in want of the merest necessaries of life. Winter after winter, for years, the most touching sight to us in this whole city has been that tireless minister to genius, thinly and insufficiently clad, going from office to office with a poem or an article on some literary subject to sell—sometimes simply pleading in a broken voice that ‘he was ill,’ whatever might be the reason for his writing nothing—and never, amid all her tears and recitals of distress, suffering one syllable to escape her lips that would convey a doubt of him, or a complaint, or a lessening of pride in his genius and good intentions. Her daughter died a year and a half since, but she did not desert him. She continued his ministering angel, living with him, caring for him, guarding him against exposure, and when he was carried away by temptation, amid grief and the loneliness of feeling unreplied to, and awoke from his self-abandonment prostrated in destitution and suffering, begging for him still. If woman’s devotion, born with a first love and fed with human passion, hallows its object, as it is allowed to do, what does not a devotion like this—pure, disinterested and holy as the watch of an invisible spirit—say for him who inspired it.” By this test, Poe’s was always a pure nature, for he inspired respect, pity and regard in every woman he came in contact with. It was a reflex sentiment, for Poe revered woman, and there is not in all his writings an impure suggestion or an indelicate word.