No matter what his subject, however, Edgar Poe always wrote with power—­with intensity.  He seemed by turns to dip his pen into fire, into gall, into vitriol—­at times into his own heart’s blood.

Of the last named type was the story “Eleonora,” which appeared, not in Graham’s, but in The Gift for the new year, and wherein was set forth in phrases like strung jewels the story of the “Valley of the Many-Colored Grass.”  The whole fabric of this loveliest of his conceptions is like a web wrought in some fairy loom of bright strands of silk of every hue, and studded with fairest gems.  In it is no hint of the gruesome, or the sombre—­even though the Angel of Death is there.  It is all pure beauty—­a perfect flower from the fruitful tree of his genius at the height of its power.

All of Edgar Poe’s work gains much by being read aloud, for the eye alone cannot fully grasp the music that is in his prose as well as his verse.  “Eleonora” was read aloud in every city and hamlet of the United States, and at firesides far from the beaten paths—­the traveled roads—­that led to the cities; for it was written when every word from the pen of Edgar Poe was looked for, waited for, with eager impatience, and when Graham’s Magazine had been made in one little year, by his writing, and the writing of others whom he had induced to contribute to its pages, to lead the thought of the day in America.

And the success of The Dreamer made him a lion in the “City of Brotherly Love” as it had made him a lion in Richmond.  The doors of the most exclusive—­the most cultivated—­homes of that fastidious city stood open to welcome him.  The loveliest women, whether the grey ladies of the “Society of Friends” or the brightly plumaged birds of the gayer world, smiled their sweetest upon him.  As he walked along the streets passers-by would whisper to one another,

“There goes Mr. Poe.  Did you notice his eyes?  They say he has the most expressive eyes in Philadelphia.”

* * * * *

Throughout this year of almost dazzling triumph the little cottage with its rose-hooded porch, in Spring Garden, had been a veritable snug harbor to The Dreamer.  In winter when the deep, spotless snow lay round about it, in spring when the violets and hyacinths came back to the garden-spot and the singing birds to the trees that overhung it, in summer when the climbing green rose was heavy with bloom and in autumn when the wind whistled around it, but there was a bright blaze upon the hearth inside, his heart turned joyously many times a day, and his feet at eventide, when his work at the office in the city was over, toward this sacred haven.

And Edgar the Dreamer was happy.  He should have been rich and would have been but for the meagre returns from literary work in his time.  Men were then supposed to write for fame, and very little money was deemed sufficient reward for the best work.  The poverty of authors was proverbial and to starve cheerfully was supposed to be part of being one.