Even the old dream of founding a magazine returned and possessed him as it had so often possessed him before.  It was in the interest of the magazine, which he still proposed to name The Stylus, that he determined to give his new work, “Eureka!” as a lecture, in various places.  He did give it once—­in New York—­coming out of his seclusion for the first time, upon a frosty February night.  The rhapsody, delivered in his low but musical and dramatic tones, thrilled his audience, but it was a small audience, and when soon afterward, the work was published by the Putnams it was a small number of copies that was sold.

And again Edgar Poe was desperately poor.  Yet he had seen the Star of Love—­“Astarte’s bediamonded crescent”—­usher in a new morning; and he waited and worked in hope.

CHAPTER XXXII.

Autumn with its enchanted October night, and winter filled with work and spent in deep seclusion at Fordham, and spring with its revival of plans for The Stylus, and the appearance of “Eureka!” as a book, and its author’s return to the world as a lecturer, slipped by.

About midsummer The Dreamer lay a night in the old town of Providence.  It was a warm night and the window of his room was open—­letting in a flood of light from the full moon.  He leaned from the window which looked upon a plot of flowers whose many odors rising, enveloped him in incense sweet as the incense from the censers of the angels when the spirit of his Virginia was near.  But it was not of Virginia that the fragrance told him tonight.  Something about the blended odors, combined with the sensuous warmth of the night and the light of the moon, transported him suddenly, magically, back through the years to his boyhood and to the little room in the Allan cottage on Clay Street, hanging, like this room, over a space of flowers—­the night following the day when he had first seen Rob Stanard’s mother.

Back, back into the long dead past he wandered!  The broken and jaded Edgar Poe was dreaming again the dream of the fresh, enthusiastic boy, Edgar Poe.

How every incident of that day and night stood out in his memory!  He could feel again the wonder that he felt when he saw the beautiful “Helen” standing against the arbor-vitae in the garden; could see her graceful approach to meet and greet him—­the lonely orphan boy—­could hear her gracious words in praise of his mother while she held his hand in both her own.  As he lived it all over again, with the silver moonlight enfolding him and the breath of the flowers filling his nostrils, a clock somewhere in the house struck the night’s noon hour.  He started—­even so it had been that other night in the long past.  He half believed that if he should go forth into this night as he had gone into that he should see once more the lady of his dream, with the lamp in her hand, framed in the ivy-wreathed window, and seeing, worship as he had worshipped then.