Part 32 (2/2)

One day he copied ”Ulalume” upon a long, narrow slip of paper and rolled it into one of the tight little rolls that all the editors knew and Mother Clemm made a pilgrimage to the city especially on account of it.

First she tried it at _The Union Magazine_, which promptly rejected it.

It was too ”queer” the editor said. But _The American Review_ agreed to take it and to print it without signature--for this poem must be published anonymously, if at all, the poet insisted. It soon afterward appeared and Mr. Willis copied it into the next number of _The Home Journal_ with complimentary editorial comment.

The result was a new sensation--the reader everywhere declared himself to be brought under a magic spell by the words of this remarkable poem--though he frankly owned that he did not in the least understand them; which was as Edgar Poe intended.

Even the old dream of founding a magazine returned and possessed him as it had so often possessed him before. It was in the interest of the magazine, which he still proposed to name _The Stylus_, that he determined to give his new work, ”Eureka!” as a lecture, in various places. He did give it once--in New York--coming out of his seclusion for the first time, upon a frosty February night. The rhapsody, delivered in his low but musical and dramatic tones, thrilled his audience, but it was a small audience, and when soon afterward, the work was published by the _Putnams_ it was a small number of copies that was sold.

And again Edgar Poe was desperately poor. Yet he had seen the Star of Love--”Astarte's bediamonded crescent”--usher in a new morning; and he waited and worked in hope.

CHAPTER x.x.xII.

Autumn with its enchanted October night, and winter filled with work and spent in deep seclusion at Fordham, and spring with its revival of plans for _The Stylus_, and the appearance of ”Eureka!” as a book, and its author's return to the world as a lecturer, slipped by.

About midsummer The Dreamer lay a night in the old town of Providence.

It was a warm night and the window of his room was open--letting in a flood of light from the full moon. He leaned from the window which looked upon a plot of flowers whose many odors rising, enveloped him in incense sweet as the incense from the censers of the angels when the spirit of his Virginia was near. But it was not of Virginia that the fragrance told him tonight. Something about the blended odors, combined with the sensuous warmth of the night and the light of the moon, transported him suddenly, magically, back through the years to his boyhood and to the little room in the Allan cottage on Clay Street, hanging, like this room, over a s.p.a.ce of flowers--the night following the day when he had first seen Rob Stanard's mother.

Back, back into the long dead past he wandered! The broken and jaded Edgar Poe was dreaming again the dream of the fresh, enthusiastic boy, Edgar Poe.

How every incident of that day and night stood out in his memory! He could feel again the wonder that he felt when he saw the beautiful ”Helen” standing against the arbor-vitae in the garden; could see her graceful approach to meet and greet him--the lonely orphan boy--could hear her gracious words in praise of his mother while she held his hand in both her own. As he lived it all over again, with the silver moonlight enfolding him and the breath of the flowers filling his nostrils, a clock somewhere in the house struck the night's noon hour.

He started--even so it had been that other night in the long past. He half believed that if he should go forth into this night as he had gone into that he should see once more the lady of his dream, with the lamp in her hand, framed in the ivy-wreathed window, and seeing, wors.h.i.+p as he had wors.h.i.+pped then.

Scarce knowing what he did, he arose and hurrying down the stair was in the street. The streets were strange to him but there was a pleasant sense of adventure in wandering through them--he knew not whither--and the sweet airs of the flowers were everywhere.

Suddenly he stopped. While all the town slept there was one beside himself, who kept vigil. Clad all in white, she half reclined upon a violet bank in an old garden where the moon fell on the upturned faces of a thousand roses and on her own, ”upturned,--alas, in sorrow!”

Faint with the beauty and the poetry of the scene he leaned upon the gate of the

”enchanted garden Where no wind dared to stir unless on tiptoe.”

He dared not speak or give any sign of his presence, but he gazed and gazed until to his entranced eyes it seemed that

”The pearly l.u.s.tre of the moon went out: The mossy banks and the meandering paths-- The happy flowers and the repining trees-- Were seen no more.”

All was lost to his vision--

”Save only the divine light in those eyes-- Save but the soul in those uplifted eyes.”

He continued to gaze until the moon disappeared behind a bank of cloud and he watched the white-robed figure glide away like ”a ghost amid the entombing trees.” Yet still (it seemed to him) the eyes remained. They lighted his lonely footsteps home that night and he told himself that they would light him henceforth, through the years.

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