Page:Edgar Allan Poe - a centenary tribute.pdf/51

 disease or diseases under which Poe labored, I am not competent to say. Perhaps I ought not to take up my biography again until I have acquired an M.D. degree, for to judge from the way some gentlemen are writing and talking, "great wits" are not merely "to madness near allied," but they are diseased from head to toe and from the cradle to the grave. I am not prepared to deny that if Poe really haunted Mrs. Stanard's grave for nights, he was suffering from some sort of morbid affection; but I am inclined to wonder whether a poetical story which seems to be supported only by Poe's own testimony given about twenty-five years after the supposed event ought to be taken seriously and whether we have any real warrant for representing Poe down to the time he entered the University of Virginia as a very abnormal boy. It is at least curious that after a pretty careful piecing together of all the information I was able to gather with regard to Poe's school days in Richmond I should have been left with the impression that, if we did not read into the period notions derived from our study of his antecedents and of his life from his seventeenth year to his death, we should have scarcely a verifiable fact to cause us to suspect that he was not a normal boy. I may even add that the information accessible with regard to his sports and the light thrown upon Richmond life by the newspapers of the time left me surprised at the points of resemblance that could be discovered between boy life in Richmond in 1824 and that of 1874, which I myself could well remember. Here again I do not wish to seem unduly insistent upon my own points of view. I merely wish once more to ask the question whether we really know the essential