The _Penn Magazine_ was advertised to appear on January 1, 1841, but this scheme was balked by a financial depression which at that time occurred throughout the country.
But who will not sympathize with Poe and admit that, considering the disappointments to which he was continually subject, and the constant humiliation and drawback of the poverty which met him on every hand, balking each movement and design--together with the ill-health from which he was now destined to be a constant sufferer--his faults and failures should not be treated with every possible allowance? If he were naturally weak, and lacking in the strength and firmness of will to determinately resist obstacles and discouragements, we see in it the effect of the heredity, apparent in his sister; and consequently so much greater is his claim to be leniently judged.
In all this time of which we have spoken, embracing a period of several years, Mrs. Clemm and her daughter continued their quiet life at the cottage, the former doing what she could toward the support and comfort of the family. But a great affliction was to befall them, in the dangerous illness of Virginia, now in her twenty-first year, who had the misfortune, while singing, to break a small blood-vessel. She had already developed signs of consumption, and from this time forth remained more or less an invalid, subject to occasional hemorrhages, but, from all accounts, losing none of her characteristic cheerfulness and light-heartedness.
Poe was at this time still engaged in the editorship _of Graham's Magazine_, and it is now that we begin to hear of him in the character of "a devoted husband, watching beside the sick bed of an idolized wife," with which the world is familiar. Certainly the condition of the helpless creature who so clung to him, and the real danger which threatened her, was calculated to awaken all the tenderness of his nature.
"She could not bear the slightest exposure," wrote Mr. Harris in _Hearth and Home_, "all needed the utmost care and all those conveniences as to apartment and surroundings which are so important in the case of an invalid. And yet the room where she lay for weeks, hardly able to breathe except as she was fanned, was a little place with the ceiling so low over the narrow bed that her head almost touched it."