Our own impression of the nature of Edgar A. Poe, differs
      in some important degree, however, from that which has been
      generally conveyed in the notices of his death. Let us, before
      telling what we personally know of him, copy a graphic and highly
      finished portraiture, from the pen of Dr. Rufus W. Griswold,
      which appeared in a recent number of the “Tribune”:

      “Edgar Allen Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore on Sunday, October
      7th. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved
      by it. The poet was known, personally or by reputation, in all
      this country; he had readers in England and in several of the
      states of Continental Europe; but he had few or no friends; and
      the regrets for his death will be suggested principally by the
      consideration that in him literary art has lost one of its most
      brilliant but erratic stars. “His conversation was at times almost supramortal in its
      eloquence. His voice was modulated with astonishing skill, and
      his large and variably expressive eyes looked repose or shot
      fiery tumult into theirs who listened, while his own face glowed,
      or was changeless in pallor, as his imagination quickened his
      blood or drew it back frozen to his heart. His imagery was from
      the worlds which no mortals can see but with the vision of
      genius. Suddenly starting from a proposition, exactly and sharply
      defined, in terms of utmost simplicity and clearness, he rejected
      the forms of customary logic, and by a crystalline process of
      accretion, built up his ocular demonstrations in forms of
      gloomiest and ghastliest grandeur, or in those of the most airy
      and delicious beauty, so minutely and distinctly, yet so rapidly,
      that the attention which was yielded to him was chained till it
      stood among his wonderful creations, till he himself dissolved
      the spell, and brought his hearers back to common and base
      existence, by vulgar fancies or exhibitions of the ignoblest
      passion. “He was at all times a dreamer dwelling in ideal realms in heaven
      or hell peopled with the creatures and the accidents of his
      brain. He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips
      moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate
      prayer (never for himself, for he felt, or professed to feel,
      that he was already damned, but) for their happiness who at the
      moment were objects of his idolatry; or with his glances
      introverted to a heart gnawed with anguish, and with a face
      shrouded in gloom, he would brave the wildest storms, and all
      night, with drenched garments and arms beating the winds and
      rains, would speak as if the spirits that at such times only
      could be evoked by him from the Aidenn, close by whose portals
      his disturbed soul sought to forget the ills to which his
      constitution subjected him—close by the Aidenn where were those
      he loved—the Aidenn which he might never see, but in fitful
      glimpses, as its gates opened to receive the less fiery and more
      happy natures whose destiny to sin did not involve the doom of
      death. “He seemed, except when some fitful pursuit subjugated his will
      and engrossed his faculties, always to bear the memory of some
      controlling sorrow. The remarkable poem of ‘The Raven’ was
      probably much more nearly than has been supposed, even by those
      who were very intimate with him, a reflection and an echo of his
      own history. _He_ was that bird’s

    “‘Unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore—
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
    Of ‘Never—never more.’

      “Every genuine author in a greater or less degree leaves in his
      works, whatever their design, traces of his personal character:
      elements of his immortal being, in which the individual survives
      the person. While we read the pages of the ‘Fall of the House of
      Usher,’ or of ‘Mesmeric Revelations,’ we see in the solemn and
      stately gloom which invests one, and in the subtle metaphysical
      analysis of both, indications of the idiosyncrasies of what was
      most remarkable and peculiar in the author’s intellectual nature. But we see here only the better phases of his nature, only the
      symbols of his juster action, for his harsh experience had
      deprived him of all faith in man or woman. He had made up his
      mind upon the numberless complexities of the social world, and
      the whole system with him was an imposture. This conviction gave
      a direction to his shrewd and naturally unamiable character. Still, though he regarded society as composed altogether of
      villains, the sharpness of his intellect was not of that kind
      which enabled him to cope with villany, while it continually
      caused him by overshots to fail of the success of honesty. He was
      in many respects like Francis Vivian in Bulwer’s novel of ‘The
      Caxtons.’ Passion, in him, comprehended many of the worst
      emotions which militate against human happiness. You could not
      contradict him, but you raised quick choler; you could not speak
      of wealth, but his cheek paled with gnawing envy. The astonishing
      natural advantages of this poor boy—his beauty, his readiness,
      the daring spirit that breathed around him like a fiery
      atmosphere—had raised his constitutional self-confidence into an
      arrogance that turned his very claims to admiration into
      prejudices against him. Irascible, envious—bad enough, but not
      the worst, for these salient angles were all varnished over with
      a cold, repellant cynicism, his passions vented themselves in
      sneers. There seemed to him no moral susceptibility; and, what
      was more remarkable in a proud nature, little or nothing of the
      true point of honor. He had, to a morbid excess, that, desire to
      rise which is vulgarly called ambition, but no wish for the
      esteem or the love of his species; only the hard wish to
      succeed—not shine, not serve—succeed, that he might have the
      right to despise a world which galled his self-conceit. “We have suggested the influence of his aims and vicissitudes
      upon his literature. It was more conspicuous in his later than in
      his earlier writings.