Mother Clemm who had lain waiting and watching for him all night arose from her uneasy couch when she heard the latch of the gate lifted, and opened the door.  He came in and walked past her like a wraith.  His eyes were wild, his face was bloodless and haggard, his hair damp and disordered.  The Mother’s eyes were filled with dumb pain.  He suffered her to take his hand in hers and to gaze into his eyes with pity and even raised the hand that held his own to his lips, as though to reassure her; but he spake no word—­made no attempt at explanation—­and she asked no questions.

For a moment he remained beside her, then straight to his desk he walked and began arranging writing materials before him, while she disappeared into the kitchen and started a blaze under a pot of coffee that stood upon the little stove.

He wrote rapidly—­furiously—­without pausing for thought or for the fastidious choice of words that was apt to make him halt frequently in the act of composition, and the words that he wrote were the wild words—­wild, but beautiful and moving as an echo from Israfel’s own lute—­of the poem, “Ulalume:” 

    “The skies they were ashen and sober;
      The leaves they were crisped and sere,—­
      The leaves they were withering and sere,—­
    It was night in the lonesome October
      Of my most immemorial year.”

* * * * *

After that eventful night a change came over him that sat upon the Rock of Desolation.  The Solitude and the Silence still enfolded him, but the Star of Love had arisen in his firmament, ushering in a new day and new hope to his soul.  And he no longer trembled as he sat upon the rock, but with new energy he worked and with exceeding patience he waited.  And as he worked interest in life returned to him, and ambition returned.

One day he copied “Ulalume” upon a long, narrow slip of paper and rolled it into one of the tight little rolls that all the editors knew and Mother Clemm made a pilgrimage to the city especially on account of it.  First she tried it at The Union Magazine, which promptly rejected it.  It was too “queer” the editor said.  But The American Review agreed to take it and to print it without signature—­for this poem must be published anonymously, if at all, the poet insisted.  It soon afterward appeared and Mr. Willis copied it into the next number of The Home Journal with complimentary editorial comment.

The result was a new sensation—­the reader everywhere declared himself to be brought under a magic spell by the words of this remarkable poem—­though he frankly owned that he did not in the least understand them; which was as Edgar Poe intended.

* * * * *