e who made pilgrimages thither were many of the
"starry sisterhood of poetesses"--chief of whom was the fair Frances
Osgood. Yet in his retirement The Dreamer enjoyed for the first time
since he had left Spring Garden long intervals of relief from company,
and in the pine-wood and on the bridge overlooking the river, he found
what his soul had long hungered for--silence and solitude. Under their
influence he conceived the idea of a new work--a more ambitious work
than anything he had hitherto attempted--a work in the form of a prose
poem upon no less subject than "The Universe," whose deep secrets it was
designed to reveal, with the title "Eureka!"

* * * * *

Ah, Dreamer, could we but call the curtain here!--Could we but leave you
in your cottage on the hill-top, overlooking the river, with the trees
full of blossom and music about it, and the wood inviting your fancy,
where as you pace back and forth with your hands clasped behind you your
great deep eyes are filled with the mellow light that illumines them
when they are turned inward exploring the treasures of your brain--leave
you deep in the high joy of meditation upon God's Universe!

But "the play is the tragedy, 'Man,'" and it is only for the dread
"Conqueror" to give the word, "Curtain down--lights out!"

CHAPTER XXXI.

All too soon the Wolf scratched at the door of the cottage on Fordham
Hill. All too soon the shadow that had so often enveloped the
rose-embowered cottage in Spring Garden--the shadow from the wing of the
Angel of Death--fell upon the cottage among the cherry trees.

The Dreamer sat before his desk under the picture of "Helen," for hours
and hours, or when Virginia was too ill to be up, at a little table
beside her bed in the chamber which was like a nest in a tree. In fair
weather and foul the stately figure and sorrowful eyes of Mother Clemm
were to be seen upon the streets of New York as she went about offering
the narrow rolls of manuscript for sale as fast as they were finished,
or trying to collect the little, over-due checks from those already sold
and published. Yet, with all they could do, had it not been for the
generous gifts of friends the three must needs have succumbed to cold
and hunger. And all the time the poison that fell from Rufus Griswold's
tongue was at work. Even the visits of the angels of mercy who
ministered to him and his invalid wife in this their darkest hour were
made, by