And the cottage at Fordham became a Mecca to the “literati of New York,” even as the cottage at Spring Garden had been a Mecca to the literati of Philadelphia.  Among those who made pilgrimages thither were many of the “starry sisterhood of poetesses”—­chief of whom was the fair Frances Osgood.  Yet in his retirement The Dreamer enjoyed for the first time since he had left Spring Garden long intervals of relief from company, and in the pine-wood and on the bridge overlooking the river, he found what his soul had long hungered for—­silence and solitude.  Under their influence he conceived the idea of a new work—­a more ambitious work than anything he had hitherto attempted—­a work in the form of a prose poem upon no less subject than “The Universe,” whose deep secrets it was designed to reveal, with the title “Eureka!”

* * * * *

Ah, Dreamer, could we but call the curtain here!—­Could we but leave you in your cottage on the hill-top, overlooking the river, with the trees full of blossom and music about it, and the wood inviting your fancy, where as you pace back and forth with your hands clasped behind you your great deep eyes are filled with the mellow light that illumines them when they are turned inward exploring the treasures of your brain—­leave you deep in the high joy of meditation upon God’s Universe!

But “the play is the tragedy, ‘Man,’” and it is only for the dread “Conqueror” to give the word, “Curtain down—­lights out!”

CHAPTER XXXI.

All too soon the Wolf scratched at the door of the cottage on Fordham Hill.  All too soon the shadow that had so often enveloped the rose-embowered cottage in Spring Garden—­the shadow from the wing of the Angel of Death—­fell upon the cottage among the cherry trees.

The Dreamer sat before his desk under the picture of “Helen,” for hours and hours, or when Virginia was too ill to be up, at a little table beside her bed in the chamber which was like a nest in a tree.  In fair weather and foul the stately figure and sorrowful eyes of Mother Clemm were to be seen upon the streets of New York as she went about offering the narrow rolls of manuscript for sale as fast as they were finished, or trying to collect the little, over-due checks from those already sold and published.  Yet, with all they could do, had it not been for the generous gifts of friends the three must needs have succumbed to cold and hunger.  And all the time the poison that fell from Rufus Griswold’s tongue was at work.  Even the visits of the angels of mercy who ministered to him and his invalid wife in this their darkest hour were made, by the working of this poison, to appear as things of evil.  How was one of the furtive eye and the black heart of a Rufus Griswold to understand love of woman of which reverence was a chief ingredient?

These ministering angels—­Mrs. Osgood, Mrs. Gove, Mrs. Marie Louise Shew, and others whose love for the racked and broken Dreamer and for herself Virginia so perfectly understood—­Virginia the guileless, with her sense for spiritual things and her warm, responsive heart—­brought to the cottage not only encouragement and sympathy, but medicines and delicacies which were offered in such manner that even one of Edgar Poe’s sensitive pride could accept them without shame.