, to cry, "I die,
I faint, I fail!" She crossed the square of light the window made. In
her uplifted hand she carried the lamp from which the light shone, and
for a moment her slight figure, clad all in white as he had seen her in
the garden a few hours before, and softly illuminated, was framed in the
ivy-wreathed casement. But for a moment--then disappeared, but the
trembling boy-lover and poet seemed to see it still, and gazed and gazed
until the light was out and all the house dark.

He stumbled back through the moonlight to his home, he crept up the
creaking stair again, to his little, dormer-windowed room; but sleep was
now, more than ever, impossible.

Though the lamp had gone out, a candle stood upon a stand at the head
of his bed. He lighted it, and by its ray, wrote, under the spell of the
hour, the first utterance in which he, Edgar Poe, ascended from the
plane of a maker of "promising" verse, to the realm of the true poet--a
poem to the lady of his heart's dream destined (though he little guessed
it) to make her name immortal and to send the fame of his youthful
passion down the ages as one of the world's historic love-affairs.

What was her name? he wondered. He had never heard it, but he would call
her Helen--_Helen_, the ancient synonym of womanly beauty, but the
loveliest Helen, he believed, that ever set poet-lover piping her
praise.

And so, "To Helen," were the words he wrote at the top of his page, and
underneath the name these lines:

"Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

"On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.

"Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand!
The agate lamp within thy hand,
Ah! Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!"

CHAPTER IX.

With his meeting with "Helen," a new life, indeed, seemed to have opened
for Edgar the Dreamer. Not only had her own interest and sympathy been
aroused, but her husband, a learned and accomplished judge of the
Supreme Court of Virginia, also received him cordially and became deeply
interested in him, and he found in their home what his own had lacked
for him, a thoroughly congenial atmos