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In the year and a half that followed, all Foe's weaknesses were accentuated, and a new weakness, which is comprehensible, but not pleasant to contemplate, was added, in his abject appeal for the sympathy and sometimes for the hand of one woman after another. Yet his intellect and genius shone out at intervals almost more brightly than before. During this time he wrote * Eureka' and * The Bells,' the strange and wonderful lyric <For Annie,' and ' Annabel Lee' - the last certainly a reminiscence of bis child-wife Virginia. He became engaged to Sarah Helen Whitman, a poetess of extreme romantic temperament, his first meeting with whom is described in the second < To Helen ; ' but the engagement was broken through the efforts of her friends. Her loyal defence of Foe against his critics after his death is to be remembered. Foe was in Richmond in 1848, and again in 1849, hoping to get help there for the establishment of the new magazine which he was still planning; he found there the Mrs. Shelton who, as Miss Royster, had been his first love, and who was now a widow. He became eneaged to her, his friends in Richmond raised a fund to help him start anew in life, and he left Richmond on Sep- tember 90, to return to New York and settle up bis affairs. It will never be known wbat bappened on tbe following days, but be was found, October 3, in the back room of a saloon in Baltimore whicb was being used as a polling place. It bas been suggested that he was drugged by an electioneering gang and made to serve as a repeater; and also that he had been drugged by robbers, for his money was gone. He was taken to a hospital, and died there, four days later, on Sunday, October 7, without having recovered consciousness. The attending physician testified that he was not under the mfluence of liquor, but this does not seem to be important, though it may refute the repeated statement that his death was caused by delirium tremens.

Passage source: The Chief American Poet : Selected Poems by Bryant, Poe, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, Whitman and Lanier, published 1905.

Longf>ellow's life was that of a simple, faithful, true man and gentleman, kindly and home-loving. And that is what he has put into his verse. He has been well called ' the laureate of the common human heart.' He is first and most of all the poet of the home. There is not an aspect of home life that he has not touched and beautified. If much of his poetry is mere commonplace, it is always the making beautiful of the commonplace. Bryant's poetry often - as in the well-^own lines from ' The Battle-Field/ - and Emerson's still oftener, are the making noble of the commonplace. Whittier's is the simple and true rendering of it. Whitman's is the apotheosis of it. Poe is the only one of our chief elder poets who is not commonplace, who detests and despises the commonplace.

Passage source: The Chief American Poet : Selected Poems by Bryant, Poe, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, Whitman and Lanier, published 1905.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on Whitman Town - 42,154 words on its settlement, mills, schools and churches.