A happier summer than is often given mortals to know, Edgar the Dreamer passed at the feet of the lovely young matron who had become a sort of mother-confessor to him. Happiness which, with a touch of the superstition that was characteristic of him he often told himself was too perfect to last. What was it that made him feel sometimes in looking upon her under the serene sky of that ideal summer that a cloud no bigger than a man's hand threw its shadow upon her? Was it that faint hint of sadness in her dark eyes or the ethereal radiance of her pale complexion that while thrilling him with delight in the exquisite quality of her beauty, filled him with foreboding?
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.
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!