THE DREAMER

A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe

by

Mary Newton Stanard
(Author of “The Story of Bacon’s Rebellion”)

“They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.  In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find they have been upon the verge of the great secret.”

     —­Edgar Allan Poe, in “Eleanora"

Richmond, Virginia
The Bell Book and Stationery Company
1909
Copyright 1909
By Mary Newton Stanard

[Illustration:  The Hermitage press
Bindery of L.H.  Jenkins
Richmond, Va.]

    In the Sacred Memory
          of
    My Father and Mother

TO THE READER

This study of Edgar Allan Poe, poet and man, is simply an attempt to make something like a finished picture of the shadowy sketch the biographers, hampered by the limitations of proved fact, must, at best, give us.

To this end I have used the story-teller’s license to present the facts in picturesque form.  Yet I believe I have told a true story—­true to the spirit if not to the letter—­for I think I have made Poe and the other persons of the drama do nothing they may not have done, say nothing they may not have said, feel nothing they may not have felt.  In many instances the opinions, and even the words I have placed in Poe’s mouth are his own—­found in his published works or his letters.

I owe much, of course, to the writers of Poe books before and up to my time.  Among these, I would make especial and grateful acknowledgment to Mr. J.H.  Ingram, Professor George E. Woodberry, Professor James A. Harrison and Mrs. Susan Archer Weiss.

But more than to any one of his biographers, I am indebted to Poe himself for the revelations of his personality which appear in his own stories and poems, the most part of which are clearly autobiographic.

M.N.S.

THE DREAMER

CHAPTER I.

The last roses of the year 1811 were in bloom in the Richmond gardens and their petals would soon be scattered broadcast by the winds which had already stripped the trees and left them standing naked against the cold sky.

Cold indeed, it looked, through the small, smoky window, to the eyes of the young and beautiful woman who lay dying of hectic fever in a dark, musty room back of the shop of Mrs. Fipps, the milliner, in lower Main Street—­cold and friendless and drear.

She was still beautiful, though the sparkle in the great eyes fixed upon the bleak sky had given place to deep melancholy and her face was pinched and wan.