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
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 XXXII.
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 space 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, worship as
he had worshipped then.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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