Mary Newton Stanard

“ To dream, to wonder, to work; to work, to wonder, to dream—thus were the hours, the hours of sorrow, spent. The hours of which the poet lost all count, for between his dreams and his work so intensely full were the hours of vivid mental living that each day was as a lifetime in itself.
And as he wandered under the pines or along the river, wrapped in his dreams and wondering thoughts of heaven and earth, or leaned from the window of the chamber under the low sloping roof—the chamber that had been the chamber of death—and looked beyond the embowering cherry trees upon the sky ”

“ For the hours of thy happiness are over, and joy is not gathered twice in a lifetime as the roses of Paestum twice in a year."
Yet as the back is fitted to the burden and the wind tempered to the shorn lamb, so again, as in his early griefs, the sorrow of The Dreamer was not all pain, there was an element of beauty—of poetry—in it that made it possible to be endured. Out of the depths of the Solitude and the Silence he said to his soul,
"It is a happiness to wonder—it is a happiness to dream." ”

“ Yet at Rufus Griswold's heart jealousy was gnawing. Heaven had endowed him with mind to recognize genius, yet had denied him its possession. He that would have worn the laurel himself, was born to be but the trumpeter of others' victories. He, like Edgar Poe, had an open eye and ear for beauty—for harmony. He could feel the divine fire of inspiration in the creations of master minds—yet he could not himself create. He was a brilliant critic, but (as has been said) his ambition was to be, like Poe, also a poet. His quick intuition had divined the genius of Poe at their first meeting. ”

“ Life, no matter what else it might give, life without the soft glance of her eye, the sweet sound of her voice, the pure touch of her hand within his hand, her lips upon his lips, was become an empty, aching void.
After two years of the sheltered fireside in Baltimore whose seclusion had made the dream of the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass possible, the boarding-house with its hideous clatter, its gossip and its commonplaceness was the merest make-shift of a home. It was stifling. How was a dreamer to breathe in a boarding-house? ”

“ In winter when the deep, spotless snow lay round about it, in spring when the violets and hyacinths came back to the garden-spot and the singing birds to the trees that overhung it, in summer when the climbing green rose was heavy with bloom and in autumn when the wind whistled around it, but there was a bright blaze upon the hearth inside, his heart turned joyously many times a day, and his feet at eventide, when his work at the office in the city was over, toward this sacred haven.
And Edgar the Dreamer was happy. ”

“ When one's soul has been hurt, what matters mere physical pain? When both the strength and the passion of Mr. Allan had been somewhat spent, he ceased laying on blows and asked in a calmed voice,
"Are you ready to tell me the truth now?"
In one moment of time the child lived over again the beautiful hour at his mother's grave. He saw again the silver spire and the silver half-moon and the silver star—smelled the blended odors of honeysuckle and rose, made sweeter, by the gathering dews, and felt the coolness and freshness of the long green grass that covered the grave. ”

“ Indeed the poem in the making cast a spell upon him and he passed his days and his nights as though in a trance. Virginia and Mother Clemm knew that he was in the throes of creation, and they respected his brown-study mood—stepping softly and talking little; but often by a silent pressure of his hand or a light kiss upon his brow, saying that they understood. They were happy, for they knew the state of mind that enveloped him to be one of profound happiness to him—though the brooding look that was often in his grey eyes told them that the visions he was seeing had to do with sorrow. ”

“ As Helen Whitman flitted as noiselessly as the ghost she seemed to be up the dark stairway to her chamber, and without closing the casement that admitted the moonlight and the garden's odors, lay down upon her canopied bed, she trembled. What was it that she had been aware of in the garden?—that presence—that consciousness of communion between her spirit and his upon whom all her thoughts had dwelt of late? Herself a poet, from her earliest knowledge of the work of Edgar Poe she had seemed to feel a kinship between her mind and his such as she had known in regard to no other. ”

“ First love—yet so much more than ordinary love—a pure passion of the soul, in which there was much of worship and nothing of desire. Surely the most pure and holy passion the world has ever known, for in it there was absolutely nothing of self. Like Dante after his first meeting with Beatrice, this Virginia boy-poet had entered upon a Vita Nuova—a new life—made all of beauty.
What difference did the taunts of schoolmates, the hardness of a foster-father make now? The wounds they made had been gratefully healed by the balm of her beauteous words about his mother. ”

“ The appeal met an instant response from the tender-hearted poet. Both the flower-like hands were captured this time, and held fast, in spite of their fluttering. The excessively sweet fragrance of the blossom in her hair was in his nostrils. Her quick, short breaths told him of the tempest in her tender young bosom.
"Myra, little Myra, do you care like that?" he cried. "Then let the friendship go, and be my dear little sweetheart, won't you? I'm dying of loneliness and the want of somebody to love and to love me—somebody who understands me—and you do, don't you, Myra, darling?" ”

“ They, like myself, have learned the lesson of being poor and happy. But I must keep them above want—I will keep them above want!" As he repeated the words the meditative mood dropped from him. He straightened himself in his chair with sudden energy, his voice trembled and sunk almost to a whisper, in place of the dreamy look his eyes flamed with passion.
"Mr. Graham," he exclaimed, "to see those you love better than your own soul in want, and, in spite of working like mad, to be powerless to raise them out of it, is hell!" ”

“ Though the lamp had gone out, a candle stood upon a stand at the head of his bed. He lighted it, and by its ray, wrote, under the spell of the hour, the first utterance in which he, Edgar Poe, ascended from the plane of a maker of "promising" verse, to the realm of the true poet—a poem to the lady of his heart's dream destined (though he little guessed it) to make her name immortal and to send the fame of his youthful passion down the ages as one of the world's historic love-affairs. ”

“ Out from the warmth and the light and the perfume and the luxury and the praise of the beautiful drawing-room with its distinguished assemblage,—out into the streets of New York—into the bleakness and the darkness of the winter's night—stepped Edgar Poe and his wife. Virginia was wrapped against the cold in a Paisley shawl that had been one of Mother Clemm's bridal presents, while Edgar wore the military cape he had at West Point and which, except in times of unusual prosperity, had served him as a great-coat ever since. ”

“ In spite of the small sums that came to him as veritable God-sends from the sale of his stories and from odd jobs on the Visitor and other journals, Edgar Poe was poor—miserably poor. And just as he had begun to flatter himself that he did not mind, that he would bear it with the nonchalance of the true philosopher he believed he had become, it assumed the shape of horror unspeakable to him. Not for himself, if there were only himself to think of, he felt assured, he could laugh poverty—want even—to scorn; but that his little Virginia should feel the pinch was damnable! ”

“ The Dreamer had returned from his brief visit to Baltimore a new man. The blue devils were gone. The heart and mind which they had made their dwelling-place were swept clean of every vestige of them and were filled to overflowing with a sweet and rare presence—the presence of her who lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by him; for he felt that her spirit was with him at every moment of the day, though her fair body was other whither. The consciousness of the secret he carried in his heart flooded his nature with sunshine. ”

“ The "Lady Ligeia" had been but the creation of his own brain. Very fair she had been to his dreaming vision, very sweet her companionship had been to his imagination—sufficient for all the needs of his being in his youthful days when sorrow was but a beautiful sentiment, when "terror was not fright, but a tremulous delight" but how was such an one as she to bind up the broken heart of a man? It was the human element in the eyes of her that sat among the roses that enchained him. Ethereal—spirit-like—as she was, the eyes upturned in sorrow were the eyes of no spirit, but of a woman ”

“ It is easy to imagine the contempt with which John Allan would have perused it. Not so John Kennedy. Busy lawyer and successful man of letters and of the world though he was, he had gone out of his way to stretch a hand to the gifted starveling he had discovered struggling for a foothold on the bottommost rung of the ladder of literary fame, and had not only helped him up the ladder but had drawn him, in his weakness and his strength, into the circle of his friendship, and now he had no idea of letting him go. ”

“ It so chanced that upon that very day the editor of Graham's Magazine found himself sufficiently recovered from his illness to go out for the first time. As he fared forth, gaunt and tremulous, the midsummer beauty of out-of-doors effected him curiously. It seemed strange to him that the rose on the porch should be so gay, that the sunshine should lie so golden upon the houses and in the streets of Spring Garden—that birds should be singing and the whole world going happily on when his heart held such black despair. ”

“ It was in the Gothic church. From the remote pew in the gallery where he sat with his school-mates, he looked down upon a wonderful vision of white and gold in one of the principal pews of the main aisle. Clad all in white and with a shower of golden tresses falling over her shoulders, she was like a glorious lily or a holy angel. Her eyes, uplifted in the rapture of worship, he divined, rather than saw, were of the hue of heaven itself. He loved her at once, with all his soul's might. Her name? Her home? These were mysteries—sacred mysteries—whose unfathomableness but added to her charm. ”

“ One of these we will call Edgar Goodfellow—Edgar the gay, the laughter-loving, the daring, the real, live, wholesome, normal boy; keen for the society of other boys and liking to dance, to run, to jump, to climb, even to fight. The other, Edgar the Dreamer, fond of solitude and silence and darkness, for they aided him to wander far away from the everyday world to one of make believe created by himself and filled with beings to whom real people were but as empty shadows ”

“ Ere the frosts of autumn had robbed her garden of its glory, blighting sorrow had fallen upon her tender mother-heart in the death of a darling baby girl. Beneath this blow the health of sweet "Helen," always frail, succumbed, and her home became thenceforth as a living tomb, in which the few who ever saw her again trod softly and spoke in hushed voices.
When the earliest roses were in bloom in her garden two years after Edgar Poe first saw her there, she lay in her coffin, and for him, the world seemed to have come to an end. ”

“ But there was one whom he had believed to be his friend—a big man whose big brain he had admired—in whose furtive eye was an unholy glee, about whose thick lips played a smile which slightly revealed his fang-like teeth. To him was entrusted the part of literary executor—it had been The Dreamer's own request. In his power it would lie to give to the world his own account of this man who had said he was no poet and had distanced him in the race for a woman's favor.
The day was at hand when Rufus Griswold would have his full revenge upon the fair fame of Edgar the Dreamer. ”

“ Edgar Poe had never really loved the girl. He had merely loved the dream to which her tender words and timid caresses gave an adorable reality; but now in his disappointment at not hearing from her he felt that her love and loyalty to him were the only things in the world worth having and persuaded himself that without her there as no incentive to live or to strive. His misery was increased by an over-whelming homesickness, to escape from which, he wandered restlessly about, vainly seeking excitement and forgetfulness. ”

“ Edgar and Virginia Poe had known hard times in New York—the bitterness of hard times in a city large enough for each man to mind his own business and leave his neighbors to mind theirs. Yet as the boat slowed down and neared the wharf, and—past the shipping—they descried the houses and spires of town looming, ghostlike, through the enveloping mist of the soft, grey April day, it was with a thrill that these two standing hand in hand—like children—upon the deck, clasped each other's fingers with closer pressure and whispered,
"New York once more!" ”

“ The music of nature had long possessed a sort of personality for Edgar Poe, and now the voices, the motions, the numberless colors of the world about him took definite shape in his fancy of a wonderous fairy-woman whom he worshipped with an unearthly, poetic passion that was compared to the passion of the normal man to flesh and blood woman as moonlight to sunshine—a passion which was luminous without heat. ”

“ They showed in the fragile figure of Virginia—once so full of sweet curves;—in the ethereal look that had come into the once rounded cheeks and full pouting lips, in the transparency of her skin and in the sweet eyes that when not filled with the merry laughter that had through thick and thin filled her dwelling place with sunshine and music, had a faraway expression in them, as if they were looking into another world.
They showed most of all in The Dreamer himself. To him these years had been years of fierce battle; battle, not for wealth, but for bread ”