sical school, where he was prepared for college. He was described as
"self-willed, capricious, inclined to be imperious, and, though of
generous impulses, not steadily kind or even amiable." He was a facile
scholar and fond of Latin and English poetry. He was nearly always
alone, making few friends among his schoolmates, and was of a dignified
and reserved disposition and inclined to melancholy. He entered the
University of Virginia at the age of seventeen, and it was here that his
fatal habit of drinking was first formed. One of his schoolmates
writes:--

"Poe's passion for strong drink was as marked and peculiar as that
for cards. It was not the _taste_ of the beverage that influenced
him. Without a sip or smack of the mouth he would seize a full
glass, without water or sugar, and send it home at a single gulp.
This frequently used him up; but if not, he rarely returned to the
charge."

This, for a lad of seventeen, with an excitable temperament, was
sufficient to sow the seeds of all his future woe. The youthful brain
inflamed with alcohol never really recovers its normal condition, even
when abstinence follows, and Poe's life-long struggle with his adversary
began at this tender age. Dr. Day, long connected with the inebriate
asylum at Binghamton, N. Y., once had an opportunity to examine the
brain of a man who, after having been a drunkard, reformed and lived for
some years as a teetotaller. He found to his surprise that the globules
of the brain had not shrunk to their natural size. They did not exhibit
the inflammation of the drunkard's brain, but they were still enlarged,
and seemed ready on the instant to absorb the fumes of alcohol and
resume their former condition. He thought he saw in this morbid
condition of the brain the physical part of the reason why a man who has
once been habituated to liquor falls so easily under its sway again in
spite of every moral reason for refraining. Doubtless he was right, and
poor Poe was only one of a vast number of men of brilliant intellects
and kind hearts, who after a life-long struggle are defeated by the
enemy they have taken into their stomachs to destroy their brains.

It is not our purpose to trace the poet through all the devious windings
of his life, but to dwell for a little while upon the course of his
domestic life and give some of the striking points in his character. We
will pass over the close of his college career and the epi