The Dreamer: A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan PoeStanard, Mary Newton
General
The Dreamer: A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe
Stanard, Mary Newton
Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849
And her promises were faithfully kept, for often as he listened he heard
the sounds of the swinging of the censers of the angels, and streams of
a holy perfume floated about him, and when his heart beat heavily the
winds that bathed his brow came to him laden with soft sighs, and
indistinct murmurs filled the night air.
* * * * *
And so the green spring and the flowery summer passed, and autumn drew
on.
Then came a day of days--a soft October day when merely to exist was to
be happy and to hope. And new life, like some sweet, rejuvenating
cordial seemed to enter and course through the veins of The Dreamer and
for the first time since the Silence and the Solitude had enveloped the
cottage he laughed as he flung wide the windows of the chamber that had
been the chamber of death, to let in the day. And as he looked forth he
said, again quoting the words of his "Morella,"
"The winds lie still in heaven. There is a dim moisture over all the
earth and a warm glow upon the waters, and upon the forest a rainbow--a
bow of promise--from the firmament has surely fallen. It is not a day
for sorrow but for joy, for it is a day out of Aidenn itself, and I feel
that ere it has passed I shall hold sweeter, more real communion with
her that is in Aidenn than ever before."
He went forth and wandered through the radiance of that perfect day
hours on hours, and as he paced the solemn aisles of the pine wood, or
strolled along the river walk which was veiled in a golden haze and
carpeted thick with the yellow and crimson and brown leaves of October,
he heard, clearly, the sound of the swinging of the censers of the
angels, as his senses were bathed in the holy perfume, and the zephyrs
that blew about his brow were laden with audible sweet murmurs.
As evening fell a pleasant languor possessed his limbs--a wholesome
weariness from his long wanderings--and he lay down upon a bank littered
with fallen leaves and slept. And as he slept in the fading light, the
spirit of Virginia approached him more nearly--more tangibly--than ever
before; and finally, when the red sun had sunk into the river, and when
the afterglow in the sky and the rainbow that lay upon the forest were
alike blotted out by the shadows of night, and the moon--a lustrous blur
through the haze--wandered uncertainly up the sky, she drew nearer and
nearer, and pressed a fluttering kiss--such a kiss as a butterfly might
bestow upon a flower--upon his lips; then, sighing, drew away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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