egathering of feeble pleasures and phantasmagoric pains.
With me this is not so. In childhood I must have felt with the energy
of a man what I now find stamped upon memory in lines as vivid, as
deep; and as durable as the _exergues_ of the Carthaginian medals. Yet
the fact--in the fact of the world's view-how little was there to
remember. The morning's awakening, the nightly summons to bed; the
connings, the recitations; the periodical half-holidays and
perambulations; the playground, with its broils, its pastimes, its
intrigues; these, by a mental sorcery long forgotten, were made to
involve a wilderness of sensation, a world of rich incident, an
universe of varied emotion, of excitement the most passionate and
spirit-stirring. '_Oh, le bon temps, que se siecle de fer!_'"

In 1822, he returned to the United States, and after passing a few
months at an academy in Richmond, he entered the University at
Charlottesville, where he led a very dissipated life; the manners which
then prevailed there were extremely dissolute, and he was known as the
wildest and most reckless student of his class; but his unusual
opportunities, and the remarkable ease with which he mastered the most
difficult studies, kept him all the while in the first rank for
scholarship, and he would have graduated with the highest honors, had
not his gambling, intemperance, and other vices, induced his expulsion
from the university.

At this period he was noted for feats of hardihood, strength, and
activity; and on one occasion, in a hot day of June, he swam from
Richmond to Warwick, seven miles and a half, against a tide running
probably from two to three miles an hour.[A] He was expert at fence, had
some skill in drawing, and was a ready and eloquent conversationist and
declaimer.

[Footnote A: This statement was first printed during Mr. Poe's lifetime,
and its truth being questioned in some of the journals, the following
certificate was published by a distinguished gentleman of Virginia:

"I was one of several who witnessed this swimming feat. We accompanied
Mr. Poe in boats. Messrs. Robert Stannard, John Lyle, (since dead) Robert
Saunders, John Munford, I think, and one or two others, were also of the
party. Mr. P. did not seem at all fatigued, and _walked_ back to Richmond
immediately after the feat--which was undertaken for a wager.

"ROBERT G. CABELL."]

His allowance of money while at Charlottesville had been liberal,