considered to have been always unjustly
treated. Everybody could see what his faults were, but few gave him
credit for his good qualities--his generous nature and kindly and
affectionate disposition, especially as exemplified in the harmony
always existing between himself and his wife and mother-in-law. While
giving the latter full credit for her devotion to Edgar, her impression
was that, except in the matter of his dissipation, her influence over
him had not been for good. Her mother and brother, John, believed that
the marriage with Virginia had been the greatest misfortune of his
life, and that he himself, while patiently resigning himself to his lot,
had come to regard it as such.

Some ten years after the death of Poe I received from Mrs. Clemm a
letter giving a pathetic account of her homelessness and poverty. But,
she added, she had been offered a home with her relatives at the South;
and she appealed to me, as a friend of her "Eddie," to assist her in
raising the money necessary to pay her expenses thither. A similar
appeal she made to other of Poe's former friends; but we heard of her
afterward as an inmate of the Church Home Infirmary in Baltimore, where
she died in 1871, having outlived her son-in-law some twenty-two years.
It is a curious coincidence that the building in which she died was the
same in which, as the Washington Hospital, Poe had breathed his last.

Her grave is in Westminster cemetery, and in sight of Poe's monument.

CHAPTER XXXII.

POE'S CHARACTER.

In order thoroughly to understand Poe, it is necessary that one should
recognize the dominant trait of his character--a trait which affected
and in a measure overruled all the rest--in a word, _weakness of will_.

"Unstable as water," is written upon Poe's every visage in characters
which all might read; in the weak falling away of the outline of the
jaw, the narrow, receding chin, and the sensitive, irresolute mouth.
Above the soul-lighted eyes and the magnificent temple of intellect
overshadowing them, we look in vain for the rising dome of _Firmness_,
which, like the keystone of the arch, should strengthen and bind
together the rest. Lacking this, the arch must be ever tottering to a
fall.

To this weakness of will we may trace nearly every other defect in Poe's
character, together with most of the disappointments and failures in
whatsoever he undertook. He lacked the resolution and persistence
necessary to battle against obst