y faithless
Elmira, and though he still carried his mother's miniature with him and
gazed often and fondly upon it, the sense of nearness between her spirit
and his and the soul satisfaction he had found in this nearness in the
past, were gone. The gambling fever that had fired his veins and the
nightly potations of peach-honey created an excitement and restlessness
that blurred the images his memory held of the angel mother who had
dominated his childhood and of the madonna-like mistress who had filled
the dreams of his early youth. These holy dreams became for the time
being, a reproach to him, for they aroused his conscience to an
unpleasant activity which required more frequent recourse to peach-honey
to quiet.

* * * * *

Love was, nevertheless, as necessary to this poet's soul as meat and
drink were to his body, and in the No Man's Land, "out of space, out of
time," which his fancy created and where it loved to stray, he fashioned
for himself the weirdest, strangest lady ever loved by mortal. The name
he gave her was "Ligeia." She laid upon him no exactions, chastened him
with no rebukes, demanded of him no service save that he should
dream--and dream--and dream; for was not she herself formed from "such
stuff as dreams are made of?"

The music of nature had long possessed a sort of personality for Edgar
Poe, and now the voices, the motions, the numberless colors of the world
about him took definite shape in his fancy of a wonderous fairy-woman
whom he worshipped with an unearthly, poetic passion that was compared
to the passion of the normal man to flesh and blood woman as moonlight
to sunshine--a passion which was luminous without heat.

Dim and elusive as is the very conception of "Ligeia" to the ordinary
mind, she was perfectly real to her creator. In the summer-night breeze
he heard the music of her voice and felt the delicious coolness of her
caress. Tall, swaying trees spoke to him of her height, her majesty and
her grace. He perceived the softness and lightness of her footfalls in
the passage of evening shadows across a lake or meadow, the perfection
of her features in the form and finish of flower petals and the delicate
tints of her beauty in the coloring of flowers; the raven hue and
sweeping length of of her tresses in the drowning shades of midnight and
the entrancing veil of her lashes in deep mysterious woods; and when, in
fancy, he looked beneath that veil into he