ion of this strange prose poem.

Like an uneasy spirit he wandered, night and day, up and down the river
bank, in the wood or in the churchyard that held the tomb of his
Virginia.

Meanwhile the Mother still kept the cottage bright. She asked no
questions when he went forth, night or day, or when he came in, night or
day; but her heart bled for him and sometimes when he would throw
himself into a deep chair and sit by the hour, seemingly staring at
nothing, but really (she knew by the harassed and brooding look in the
great, deep eyes) "dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream
before," she would steal gently to his side and with her long, slim,
expressive fingers stroke the large brow until natural sleep brought
respite from painful memories. Her ministrations were grateful to him,
yet he was barely conscious of her presence. Not even for her, and far
less for any other human being, did he feel kinship at this time. His
vision, when not turned within, looked far beyond human companionship to
the wonders of the universe--the stars and the mountains and the forests
and the rivers; but his only real companion was his own stricken heart.
Many times he said to his heart in the prophetic words of his fantastic
creation, "Morella,"

"Thy days henceforth shall be days of sorrow--that sorrow which is the
most lasting of impressions as the cypress is the most enduring of
trees. For the hours of thy happiness are over, and joy is not gathered
twice in a lifetime as the roses of Paestum twice in a year."

Yet as the back is fitted to the burden and the wind tempered to the
shorn lamb, so again, as in his early griefs, the sorrow of The Dreamer
was not all pain, there was an element of beauty--of poetry--in it that
made it possible to be endured. Out of the depths of the Solitude and
the Silence he said to his soul,

"It is a happiness to wonder--it is a happiness to dream." And more than
ever before in his life his whole existence had become a dream--the
realities being mere shadows.

To dream, to wonder, to work; to work, to wonder, to dream--thus were
the hours, the hours of sorrow, spent. The hours of which the poet lost
all count, for between his dreams and his work so intensely full were
the hours of vivid mental living that each day was as a lifetime in
itself.

And as he wandered under the pines or along the river, wrapped in his
dreams and wondering thoughts of heaven and earth, or leaned from the
window of th