urning health, he could
resume his labors and his unmortified sense of independence. He must
either apply to individual friends--(a resource to which death is
sometimes almost preferable)--or _suffer down_ to the level where Charity
receives claimants, but where Rags and Humiliation are the only
recognized Ushers to her presence. Is this right? Should there not be, in
all highly civilized communities, an Institution designed expressly for
educated and refined objects of charity--a hospital, a retreat, a home of
seclusion and comfort, the sufficient claims to which would be such
susceptibilities as are violated by the above mentioned appeal in a daily
newspaper."

The entire article from which this paragraph is taken, was an ingenious
apology for Mr. Poe's infirmities; but it was conceived and executed in a
generous spirit, and it had a quick effect in various contributions,
which relieved the poet from pecuniary embarrassments. The next week he
published the following letter:

"_My Dear Willis_:--The paragraph which has been put in circulation
respecting my wife's illness, my own, my poverty, etc., is now lying
before me; together with the beautiful lines by Mrs. Locke and those by
Mrs. ----, to which the paragraph has given rise, as well as your kind
and manly comments in _The Home Journal_. The motive of the paragraph I
leave to the conscience of him or her who wrote it or suggested it. Since
the thing is done, however, and since the concerns of my family are thus
pitilessly thrust before the public, I perceive no mode of escape from a
public statement of what is true and what erroneous in the report alluded
to. That my wife is ill, then, is true; and you may imagine with what
feelings I add that this illness, hopeless from the first, has been
heightened and precipitated by her reception at two different periods, of
anonymous letters,--one inclosing the paragraph now in question; the
other, those published calumnies of Messrs. ----, for which I yet hope to
find redress in a court of justice.

"Of the facts, that I myself have been long and dangerously ill, and that
my illness has been a well-understood thing among my brethren of the
press, the best evidence is afforded by the innumerable paragraphs of
personal and literary abuse with which I have been latterly assailed.
This matter, however, will remedy itself. At the very first blush of my
new prosperity, the gentlemen who toadied me in the old, will recollect
the