the working of this poison, to appear as things of evil. How
was one of the furtive eye and the black heart of a Rufus Griswold to
understand love of woman of which reverence was a chief ingredient?

These ministering angels--Mrs. Osgood, Mrs. Gove, Mrs. Marie Louise
Shew, and others whose love for the racked and broken Dreamer and for
herself Virginia so perfectly understood--Virginia the guileless, with
her sense for spiritual things and her warm, responsive heart--brought
to the cottage not only encouragement and sympathy, but medicines and
delicacies which were offered in such manner that even one of Edgar
Poe's sensitive pride could accept them without shame.

Summer passed, and autumn, and winter drew on--filling the dwellers in
Fordham cottage with fear of they knew not what miseries. There had been
ups and downs; there had been happiness and woe; there had been times of
strength and times of weakness--of weakness when The Dreamer, unable to
hold out in the desperate battle of life as he knew it; hungry, cold and
heartbroken at the sight of his wife with that faraway look in her eyes,
had fallen--had sought and found forgetfulness only to know a horrible
awakening that was despair and that was oftentimes accompanied by
illness. Now, there was added to every thing else the knowledge that
she--his wife--his heartsease flower, and the Mother, in spite of all
his striving for them, were objects of charity.

When some of his friends, in the kindness of their hearts, published in
one of the papers an appeal to the admirers of Edgar Poe's work for aid
for him and his family in their distress, he came out in a proud denial
of their need for aid. The need was great enough, God knows!--but the
pitiful exposure was more painful than the pangs of cold and hunger.

* * * * *

At last the day drew near of whose approach all who had visited the
cottage knew but of which they had schooled themselves not to think.

January 1847 was waning. For many days the ground had not been seen. The
branches of the cherry trees gleamed--not with flowers, but with
icicles--as they leaned against the windows of the bed-chamber under
the roof. Sometimes as the winter blast stirred them, they knocked
against the panes with a sound the knuckles of a skeleton might have
made. There was not the slightest suggestion of the soft-voiced "Ligeia"
in that harsh, horrible sound.

Upon the bed the girl-wife lay well ni