She found her way up the two flights of
stairs and Edgar and Virginia and the Mother received her with as ready
courtesy and welcome as though the two rooms that looked on the sky had
been a palace. Her intimacy became so complete--her understanding of,
and sympathy with, the three who lived for each other only so perfect
that it was almost as if she had been admitted to the Valley of the
Many-Colored Grass.

Upon her The Dreamer bestowed in abundant measure that poetic love which
the normal heart is no more capable of feeling than the normal mind is
capable of producing his poetry. A love which was like his landscapes,
not of this world or of the earth earthy--a love of the mind, the
imagination, the poetic faculty. A love whose desire was not to possess,
but to kneel to. In his rhapsodies over the phantasmal women his genius
created or the real ones whose charm he felt, it was never of flesh and
blood beauty--of blooming cheek or rounded form--that he sang, but of
the expression of the eye, the tones of the voice, the graces and gifts
of the spirit and the intellect.

In return for this love he asked only sympathy--sympathy such as he drew
from the sky and the forest and the rock-bound lake and the winds of
heaven--mood sympathy.

It was a love quite beyond the imagination of Rufus Griswold to conceive
of, even. His furtive eye was on the watch, his jealous heart was filled
with foul surmises and he added a new poison to the old, with which he
was working, drop by drop, upon the good name of Edgar Poe.

Meantime the poet, harassed by troubles of divers kinds but innocent of
the new poison as he had been of the old, welcomed the intimacy of this
congenial woman friend as balm to his tried spirit; and delved away at
his work.

Upon his desk one morning, were piled a number of the small rolls of
narrow manuscript with which the reader is familiar. These were a series
of critical sketches entitled "The Literati of New York," by which he
hoped to keep the pot boiling some days. Virginia was listening for a
step on the stair, for she had written Mrs. Osgood a note that morning,
begging her to come to them, and she knew that she would respond. The
door opened and the slight, graceful figure and delicate face with the
gentle eyes, she looked for, appeared.

"What are all these?" asked the visitor, when she had embraced Virginia
warmly and when the poet had, after bowing over her hand, which he
lightly touched with his