Mrs. Shew, one of the kind women who
had relieved the family at the time of Virginia's last illness,
strongly advised him to marry, and he did propose marriage to
Mrs. Sara Helen Whitman, a verse writer of some note in her day. After
a wild and exhausting wooing, begun in an extravagantly romantic
manner, the match was broken off through the influence of the lady's
friends. When it was all over Poe seemed very little disturbed. The
truth is, he was a wreck, and feeling utterly dependent, clutched
frantically at every hope of sympathy and consolation. His only real
love was for his dead wife, which he recorded shortly before his death
in the exquisite lyric, "Annabel Lee."
In July, 1849, full of the darkest forebodings, and predicting that he
should never return, Poe went to Richmond. Here he spent a few quiet
months, part of the time fairly cheerful, but twice yielding to the
temptation to drink, and each time suffering, in consequence, a
dangerous illness. On September 30 he left Richmond for New York with
fifteen hundred dollars, the product of a recent lecture arranged by
kind Richmond friends. What happened during the next three days is an
impenetrable mystery, but on October 3 (Wednesday) he was found in an
election booth in Baltimore, desperately ill, his money and baggage
gone. The most probable story is that he had been drugged by political
workers, imprisoned in a "coop" with similar victims, and used as a
repeater [1], this procedure being a common one at the time.
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