A few days later Edgar Poe had looked with delight and ineffable emotion upon the real Boston Harbor, with its rocky little islets and its varied shipping and its busy wharves, and—for him—its suggestions of one in Heaven.
CHAPTER XIII.
Upon his arrival in Boston, our errant knight, before setting out upon his quest for the Fame and Fortune to whose service he was sworn, spent some hours in wandering about the old town, with mind open to the quickening influences of historic association and eye to the irregular, picturesque beauty about him.
It was one of those rare days that come sometimes in the month of February when, though according to the callendar it should be cold, there is a warmth in the sunshine that seems borrowed from Spring. Tired out by his tramp, young Edgar at length sat down upon a bench in the Common, under an elm, great of girth and wide-spreading. The sunshine fell pleasantly upon him, through the bare branches. Roundabout were other splendid, but now bare elms and he sat gazing upward into their sturdy brown branches and dreamily picturing to himself the beauty of these goodly trees clothed in the green vesture of summer. Suddenly, by a whimsical sequence of suggestion, the pleasure he felt in the sunshine of February as it reached him under the tree in Boston Common, vividly called to mind the refreshing coolness of the shade of the elms, in full leaf, as he, a little lad of six, had walked the streets of old Stoke-Newington for the first time.
There was little relation between that first and this present parting with the Allans, yet in his mind they became inseparably connected. He recalled his happiness in his first essays at composition, made at the Manor School, and told himself that, though he did not know it at the time, that was the first step toward his life work. He was now, here in Boston, the city of his birth, about to take the second; for the hour had arrived when his work would be given to the world!
Across his knees he held the box containing his precious manuscripts. He arose from the bench and turning toward the lower end of the Common, walked, with brisk, hopeful step down town, in the direction of a well-known publishing house whose location he had already ascertained.
Edgar Poe had known sorrow, real and imaginary; he was now to have his first meeting with Disappointment, bitter and grim.
Of all the persons who had ever seen his work, every one had been warm in its praise—everyone saving John Allan only. Some had been positively glowing. True, they had not been publishers, yet among them there had been gentlemen and ladies of taste and culture. But here was a different matter. Here was a personage with whom he had not reckoned, but who was the door, as it were, through which his work must pass into the world. He was unmistakably a personage. His bearing, though modest, spoke of power. His dress, though unobtrusive, was in the perfect taste which only the prosperous can achieve and maintain. His features were cast in the mold of the well-bred. He was past middle age and his naturally fine countenance was beautiful with the ennobling lines which time leaves upon the face of the seeker after truth. He was courteous—most Bostonians and many publishers are. He was sympathetic. He was undoubtedly intellectual, but the eyes that regarded through big, gold-rimmed spectacles, the romantic beauty, the prominent brow and the distinguished air of the sweet-voiced youth before him, wore a not only thoughtful, but something more—a distinctly shrewd and practical expression. In them was no awe of the bare mention of "original poetry."
He took the little rolls of manuscript into his strong, and at the same time smooth and well-shapen hands, and drew them out to their full length with the manner of one who handled as good every day. He cast his eyes rapidly down the sheets—too rapidly, it seemed to the poet—with a not unkind, yet critical air, while the sensitive youth before him turned red and white, hot and cold, by turns, and learned something of the horrors of the Inquisition.