Page:Edgar Allan Poe - a centenary tribute.pdf/81

 color for their calumnies, he deeply deplored and strenuously struggled to overcome.

"I have absolutely no pleasure," he writes, one year before his death, "in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge.

"It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been in the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories."

"No one," says Ingram, in his candid and discriminating analysis of Poe's character and career, "who really knew the man, either personally or through his works, but will believe this disclosure, revealed in one of his intensely glowing letters to Mrs. Whitman."

The sad confession is now quite universally accepted as the truth, and the harsh and pitiless condemnation of his occasional excesses, distorted and exaggerated as these were by malice and envy immediately after his death, has been softened and subdued by a more just and charitable judgment.

This is the final judgment and it will stand without danger of reversal.

It recognizes the supremacy of his surpassing genius, but disdains to disparage or tarnish it by gloating over the frailties of temperament, steadily fought against, seldom victorious, conquering only in hours of extreme anguish and sorrow and always lamented with an intensity of grief known only to the exquisitely sensitive souls of those who, like him, feel the stain of such weakness more keenly than a wound.

I speak of this distressing fact because reference to it