"I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low
And the stars are shining bright.
I arise from dreams of thee,
And the spirit in my feet
Has led me—who knows how?—
To thy chamber-window, sweet!
"The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream;
The champak odors fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale's complaint,
It dies upon her heart,
As I must die on thine,
Oh, beloved, as thou art!
"Oh, lift me from the grass!
I die, I faint, I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast.
Oh, press it close to thine again,
Where it will break at last."
The words of the latter half of this serenade were meaningless as applied to his case. To have quoted them—even mentally—in any literal sense, would have seemed to him profanation; yet the whole poem in some way not to be analysed or defined, expressed his mood—and who so brutal as to seek to reduce to common-sense the emotions of a poet-lover, in the springtime of life?
At length he was before the closed and shuttered house, standing silent and asleep. Opposite were the grassy slopes of Capitol Square—with the pillared, white Capitol, in its midst, looking, in the moonlight, like a dream of old Greece. Her house! He looked upon its moonlit, ivied walls with adoration. A light still shone from one upper room. Was it her chamber? Was she, too, awake and alive to the beauty of this magic night?
His heart beat tumultuously at the thought. Then—Oh, wonder! His knees trembled under him—he grew dizzy and was ready, indeed, to cry, "I die, I faint, I fail!" She crossed the square of light the window made. In her uplifted hand she carried the lamp from which the light shone, and for a moment her slight figure, clad all in white as he had seen her in the garden a few hours before, and softly illuminated, was framed in the ivy-wreathed casement. But for a moment—then disappeared, but the trembling boy-lover and poet seemed to see it still, and gazed and gazed until the light was out and all the house dark.
He stumbled back through the moonlight to his home, he crept up the creaking stair again, to his little, dormer-windowed room; but sleep was now, more than ever, impossible.
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.
What was her name? he wondered. He had never heard it, but he would call her Helen—Helen, the ancient synonym of womanly beauty, but the loveliest Helen, he believed, that ever set poet-lover piping her praise.
And so, "To Helen," were the words he wrote at the top of his page, and underneath the name these lines: