arrier seemed to melt
between us, and I felt that we were no longer strangers....

While upon this subject, I venture, though with great hesitation, to
say a word in relation to Poe's own marriage with his cousin, Virginia
Clemm. I am aware that there exists with the public but one view of
this union, and that so lovely and touching in itself, that to mar the
picture with even a shadow inspires almost a feeling of remorse. Yet
since in the biography of a distinguished man of genius truth is above
all things desirable, and since in this instance the facts do not
redound to the discredit of any party concerned, I may be allowed to
state what I have been assured is truth.

Poets are proverbial for uncongenial marriages, and to this Poe can
scarcely be classed as an exception. From the time when as a youth of
nineteen he became a tutor to his sweet and gentle little cousin of
six years old, he loved her with the protective tenderness of an elder
brother. As years passed he became the subject of successive fancies
or passions for various charming women; but she gradually budding into
early womanhood experienced but one attachment--an absorbing devotion
to her handsome, talented, and fascinating cousin. So intense was this
passion that her health and spirits became seriously affected, and
her mother, aroused to painful solicitude, spoke to Edgar about it.
This was just as he was preparing to leave her house, which had been
for some years his home, and enter the world of business. The idea of
this separation was insupportable to Virginia. The result was that
Poe, at that time a young man of twenty-eight, married his little,
penniless, and delicate child-cousin of fourteen or fifteen, and thus
unselfishly secured her own and her mother's happiness. In his wife he
had ever the most tender and devoted of companions; but it was his own
declaration that he ever missed in her a certain intellectual and
spiritual sympathy necessary to perfect happiness in such an union....
He was never a deliberately unkind husband, and toward the close of
Mrs. Poe's life he was assiduous in his tender care and attention. Yet
his own declaration to an intimate friend of his youth was that his
marriage "had not been a congenial one;" and I repeatedly heard the
match ascribed to Mrs. Clemm, by those who were well acquainted with
the family and the circumstances. In thus alluding to a subject so
delicate, I have not lightly done so, or unadvisedly made