And so wandered her spirit out of the cold and the want and the gloom that had darkened and chilled the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, into the regions of “bliss beyond compare.”

But her husband, left behind, was as the man in his own story, “Silence,” who sat upon a rock—­the gray and ghastly rock of “Desolation.”  “With his brow lofty with thought and his eyes wild with care and the fables of sorrow and weariness and disgust with mankind written in furrows upon his cheek,” he sat upon the lonely grey rock and leaned his head upon his hand and looked out upon the desolation.  She was no more—­no more!—­the maiden who lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by him;—­his wife—­in all the storm and stress of his troubled life his true heartsease!

Out of the desolation he perceived a thing that was formless, that was invisible—­but that was appalling—­silence.  Silence that made him shrink and quake—­he that had loved, had longed for silence!  Silence would crush him now.  And solitude!—­how often he had craved it!  He had solitude a plenty now.

Like a hunted animal, he looked about for a refuge from the Silence and the Solitude that gave him chase, but he knew that however fast he might flee they would be hard on his heels.

How white she was—­and how still!  Nevermore to hear the sounds of her low sweet voice, nevermore to hear her merry laughter, nevermore her light foot-step that—­like her voice and her laugh—­was music to his ears!  Nevermore!—­for she was wrapped in the Silence—­the last great silence of all.

Nevermore would she sit beside him as he worked, or plant flowers about the door, or lay her hand in his and explore with him the wonderful dream-valley; nevermore lay her sweet lips upon his or raise the snow-white lids from her eyes and shine on him from under their long, jetty fringes.  Henceforth a Solitude as vast as the Silence would be his portion.

Their sweet friend Marie Louise Shew robed her for the tomb and over the snow they bore her to rest in a vault in the village churchyard.

Then, for many weeks Edgar Poe lay in the bed-chamber under the roof, desperately ill—­for the most part unconscious.  The mother bereaved of her child had no time to give herself over to mourning, for as she had wrestled with death for the possession of a son when he was first given into her keeping, even more fiercely did she wrestle now that he must be son and daughter too.  The kind friends who had made Virginia’s last days comfortable aided her in the battle, and finally the victory was won,—­pale, shaken, wraith-like, the personification of woe made beautiful—­The Dreamer came forth into the air of heaven once more, and as spring opened was to be seen, as of old, walking among the pines or beside the river.