interest, the merriest rippling laugh
that rang through the market place and waked echoes in many a heart that
had believed itself a stranger to joy.

And the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass was reconstructed in even more
than its old beauty. The flowers of love and contentment and innocent
pleasure that besprinkled its green carpet had never been so many or so
gay, the dream-mountains that shut it in from the rest of the world were
as fair as sunset clouds, and the peace that flowed through it as a
river broke into singing as it flowed.

* * * * *

Meantime Edgar Poe worked--and worked--and worked.

Every number of the _Messenger_ contained page after page of the
brilliantly conceived and artistically worded product of his brain and
pen. His heart--his imagination satisfied and at rest in the love and
comradeship of a woman who fulfilled his ideal of beauty, of character,
and of charm, whose mind he himself had taught and trained to appreciate
and to love the things that meant most to him, whose sympathy responded
to his every mood, whose voice soothed his tired nerves with the music
that was one of the necessities of his temperament, a woman, withal, who
lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by him--his
harassing devils cast out by this true heartsease, Edgar Poe's industry
and his power of mental production were almost past belief.

As he worked a dream that had long been half-formed in his brain took
definite shape and became the moving influence of the intellectual side
of his life. His literary conscience had always been strict--even
exacting--with him, making him push the quest for the right word in
which to express his idea--just the right word, no other--to its
farthest limit. Urged by this conscience, he could rarely ever feel that
his work was finished, but kept revising, polishing and republishing it
in improved form, even after it had been once given to the world. He had
in his youth contemplated serving his country as a soldier. He now began
to dream of serving her as a captain of literature, as it were--as a
defender of purity of style; for this dream which became the most
serious purpose of his life was of raising the standard of American
letters to the ideal perfection after which he strove in his own
writings.

For his campaign a trusty weapon was at hand in the editorial department
of the _Southern Literary Messenger_, which he turned into a sword