Upon her The Dreamer bestowed in abundant measure that poetic love which the normal heart is no more capable of feeling than the normal mind is capable of producing his poetry.  A love which was like his landscapes, not of this world or of the earth earthy—­a love of the mind, the imagination, the poetic faculty.  A love whose desire was not to possess, but to kneel to.  In his rhapsodies over the phantasmal women his genius created or the real ones whose charm he felt, it was never of flesh and blood beauty—­of blooming cheek or rounded form—­that he sang, but of the expression of the eye, the tones of the voice, the graces and gifts of the spirit and the intellect.

In return for this love he asked only sympathy—­sympathy such as he drew from the sky and the forest and the rock-bound lake and the winds of heaven—­mood sympathy.

It was a love quite beyond the imagination of Rufus Griswold to conceive of, even.  His furtive eye was on the watch, his jealous heart was filled with foul surmises and he added a new poison to the old, with which he was working, drop by drop, upon the good name of Edgar Poe.

Meantime the poet, harassed by troubles of divers kinds but innocent of the new poison as he had been of the old, welcomed the intimacy of this congenial woman friend as balm to his tried spirit; and delved away at his work.

Upon his desk one morning, were piled a number of the small rolls of narrow manuscript with which the reader is familiar.  These were a series of critical sketches entitled “The Literati of New York,” by which he hoped to keep the pot boiling some days.  Virginia was listening for a step on the stair, for she had written Mrs. Osgood a note that morning, begging her to come to them, and she knew that she would respond.  The door opened and the slight, graceful figure and delicate face with the gentle eyes, she looked for, appeared.

“What are all these?” asked the visitor, when she had embraced Virginia warmly and when the poet had, after bowing over her hand, which he lightly touched with his lips, led her to a chair.

Her eyes were fixed upon the pile of manuscripts.

“One of them is yourself, Madam,” replied the poet.

“Myself?” she questioned, in amazement.

He bowed, gravely.  “Yourself—­as one of the Literati of New York.  In each one of these one of you is rolled up and discussed.  I will show you by the difference in their length the varying degrees of estimation in which I hold you literary folk.  Come Virginia, and help me!”

The fair visitor smiled as they drew out to the full length roll after roll of the manuscript—­letting them fly together again as if they had been spiral springs.  The largest they saved for the last.  The poet lifted it from its place and gave an end to his wife and like two merry, laughing children they ran to opposite corners, stretching the manuscript diagonally across the entire space between.