ut the country.

But who will not sympathize with Poe and admit that, considering the
disappointments to which he was continually subject, and the constant
humiliation and drawback of the poverty which met him on every hand,
balking each movement and design--together with the ill-health from
which he was now destined to be a constant sufferer--his faults and
failures should not be treated with every possible allowance? If he were
naturally weak, and lacking in the strength and firmness of will to
determinately resist obstacles and discouragements, we see in it the
effect of the heredity, apparent in his sister; and consequently so much
greater is his claim to be leniently judged.

CHAPTER XVIII.

VIRGINIA's ILLNESS.

In all this time of which we have spoken, embracing a period of several
years, Mrs. Clemm and her daughter continued their quiet life at the
cottage, the former doing what she could toward the support and comfort
of the family. But a great affliction was to befall them, in the
dangerous illness of Virginia, now in her twenty-first year, who had the
misfortune, while singing, to break a small blood-vessel. She had
already developed signs of consumption, and from this time forth
remained more or less an invalid, subject to occasional hemorrhages,
but, from all accounts, losing none of her characteristic cheerfulness
and light-heartedness.

Poe was at this time still engaged in the editorship _of Graham's
Magazine_, and it is now that we begin to hear of him in the character
of "a devoted husband, watching beside the sick bed of an idolized
wife," with which the world is familiar. Certainly the condition of the
helpless creature who so clung to him, and the real danger which
threatened her, was calculated to awaken all the tenderness of his
nature.

"She could not bear the slightest exposure," wrote Mr. Harris in _Hearth
and Home_, "all needed the utmost care and all those conveniences as to
apartment and surroundings which are so important in the case of an
invalid. And yet the room where she lay for weeks, hardly able to
breathe except as she was fanned, was a little place with the ceiling so
low over the narrow bed that her head almost touched it."

Mr. Graham tells how he saw Poe "hovering around his wife's couch with
fond fear and tender anxiety, _shuddering visibly_ at her slightest
cough;" and mentions his driving out with them one summer day, and of
the husband's "watchful eyes eagerly