ooked with rapt eyes, seeing visions
which that forest never held for any other gaze. Mayhap, adown those
dim green aisles he previsioned the "ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir"
with the tomb of Ulalume at the end of the ghostly path through the
forest--the road through life that led to the grave where his heart lay
buried. Through the telescope on that balcony he may first have
followed the wanderings of Al Araaf, the star that shone for him alone.
In the dim paths of the moonlit garden flitted before his eyes the
dreamful forms that were afterward prisoned in the golden net of his
wondrous poesy.

[Illustration: EDGAR ALLAN POE
From the daguerreotype formerly owned by Edmund Clarence Stedman]

To these poetic scenes he soon bade farewell, and on St. Valentine's
day, 1826, entered the University of Virginia, where Number 13, West
Range, is still pointed out as the old-time abiding place of
Virginia's greatest poet, whose genius has given rise to more
acrimonious discussion than has ever gathered about the name of any
other American man of letters. The real home of Poe at this time was
the range of hills known as the Ragged Mountains, for it was among
their peaks and glens and caverns and wooded paths and rippling
streams that he roamed in search of strange tales and mystic poems
that would dazzle his readers in after days. His rambles among the
hills of the University town soon came to a close. Mr. Allan, being
confronted by a gaming debt which he regarded as too large to fit the
sporting necessities of a boy of seventeen, took him from college and
put him into the counting-room of Ellis & Allan, a position far from
agreeable to one accustomed to counting only poetic feet.

The inevitable rupture soon came, and Poe went to Boston, the city of
his physical birth and destined to become the place of his birth into
the tempestuous world of authorship. Forty copies of "Tamerlane and
Other Poems" appeared upon the shelf of the printer--and nowhere else.
It is said that seventy-three years later a single copy was sold for
$2,250. Had this harvest been reaped by the author in those early
days, who can estimate the gain to the field of literature?

Boston proving inhospitable to the firstling of her gifted son's
imagination, the Common soon missed the solitary, melancholy figure
that had for months haunted the old historic walks. Edgar A. Poe
dropped out of the world, or perhaps out of the delusion of fancying
himself in the