The Dreamer: A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan PoeStanard, Mary Newton
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The Dreamer: A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe
Stanard, Mary Newton
Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849
She was laid to rest in the new cemetery on Shockoe Hill, not far from
the Allan home. The bier was followed by its black procession of
mourners, and no one knew that the heart of a youth who followed too,
but at a distance, was breaking. Though husband and children and brother
and sister were bowed with grief, he told himself that there was among
them no sorrow like unto his sorrow who had not even the right of
kinship to mourn for her. Of what business of his (he fancied, out of
the bitterness of his soul, the world saying) of what business of his
was her death? What business had he to mourn?
Again his feet kept time to the old refrain of never, nevermore, that
hammered in his brain--a refrain that to the unrealizing ear of the
child of three had been sad with a beautiful, rhythmic sadness that was
rather pleasurable than otherwise; that to the youth of sixteen was
still musical and beautiful, though filled with despair.
As at many another time his poetical gift gave him a merciful vent for
his pent up feeling, so now it came to his aid, and upon the night of
the day when she was laid to rest he poured out his sorrow in "The
Paean"--which he was afterwards to revise and rename, "Lenore"--
"An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young--
A dirge for her, the doubly dead in that she died so young."
As during his childhood, and afterwards, he had found a mournful
pleasure in visiting the grave of his mother, in the churchyard on the
hill; so now he found a blessed solace, in his terrible loneliness, in
pilgrimages to the shrine (for as such he held the grave of his saint)
in the new cemetery. These pilgrimages he usually made at night--his
grief was too sacred a thing to be flaunted in broad daylight. Many a
night during the spring and summer found him slipping down the stair,
when the house was asleep, and taking his way through the silent city
of Slumber to that even more silent city of Death.
Oh, that those that lay there not much more still than they who lay
asleep in their beds in that other city, might arise like them with the
morrow's sun!
Often, as he walked along, drinking in the perfumed night air that he
loved--the night breeze gratefully lifting the ringlets from his fevered
brow--often he thought of that first summer's night when with the sweet
words of Shelley's serenade: "I arise from dreams of thee," singing
themselves in his heart, he had gone with light feet to worship beneath
her window.
Ah, the world was young then, for sweet hope was alive!
The iron gates of the cemetery were locked, but the wall was not very
high. To scale it but added zest to his adventure. He would be a knight
unfit for his vigil if he were to let himself be so easily balked.
Within the wall the odors of flowers were even heavier, more
oppressively sweet than without, and the silence surpassed the silence
of the outer city even as the stillness of the sleepers here surpassed
the stillness of those yonder.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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