gger than a man's hand threw its shadow upon her? Was it that faint
hint of sadness in her dark eyes or the ethereal radiance of her pale
complexion that while thrilling him with delight in the exquisite
quality of her beauty, filled him with foreboding?

* * * * *

Ere the frosts of autumn had robbed her garden of its glory, blighting
sorrow had fallen upon her tender mother-heart in the death of a darling
baby girl. Beneath this blow the health of sweet "Helen," always frail,
succumbed, and her home became thenceforth as a living tomb, in which
the few who ever saw her again trod softly and spoke in hushed voices.

When the earliest roses were in bloom in her garden two years after
Edgar Poe first saw her there, she lay in her coffin, and for him, the
world seemed to have come to an end.

She was laid to rest in the new cemetery on Shockoe Hill, not far from
the Allan home. The bier was followed by its black procession of
mourners, and no one knew that the heart of a youth who followed too,
but at a distance, was breaking. Though husband and children and brother
and sister were bowed with grief, he told himself that there was among
them no sorrow like unto his sorrow who had not even the right of
kinship to mourn for her. Of what business of his (he fancied, out of
the bitterness of his soul, the world saying) of what business of his
was her death? What business had he to mourn?

Again his feet kept time to the old refrain of never, nevermore, that
hammered in his brain--a refrain that to the unrealizing ear of the
child of three had been sad with a beautiful, rhythmic sadness that was
rather pleasurable than otherwise; that to the youth of sixteen was
still musical and beautiful, though filled with despair.

As at many another time his poetical gift gave him a merciful vent for
his pent up feeling, so now it came to his aid, and upon the night of
the day when she was laid to rest he poured out his sorrow in "The
Paean"--which he was afterwards to revise and rename, "Lenore"--

"An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young--
A dirge for her, the doubly dead in that she died so young."

As during his childhood, and afterwards, he had found a mournful
pleasure in visiting the grave of his mother, in the churchyard on the
hill; so now he found a blessed solace, in his terrible loneliness, in
pilgrimages to the shrine (for as such he held the grave of his saint)