A quiet, sweet Christmas they spent together—­he reading, writing or talking over plans for new work, while she sat by with her sewing and Catalina dozed on the hearth.  Part of every day (wrapped in the old cape) he walked in the pine wood or beside the ice-bound river, and for the first time since the feverish dream of new love had come to him he was able to visit the tomb of Virginia and to dwell with happiness, and with a clear conscience, upon her memory.  During these days of serenity a ballad suggested by thoughts of her and his life with her in the lovely Valley of the Many-Colored Grass took form in his mind.  It was no dirge-like song of the “dank tarn of Auber,” but a song of a fair “kingdom by the sea” and in contrast to the sombre “Ulalume” he gave to the maiden in the new poem the pleasant sounding name of “Annabel Lee.”  Out of these days too, came “the Bells” and the exquisite sonnet to his “more than Mother.”

One flash of the false light that had lured him reached The Dreamer at Fordham.  He held a letter addressed to him in the familiar handwriting of Helen Whitman long in his hand without opening it.  This flame was burned out, he told himself—­why rake its cold ashes?  Yet he felt that nothing that she could say would have power to disturb his new peace.  Still the Mother, though she kept her own counsel, trembled for herself and for him as she was aware (without looking up from her sewing) that he had broken the seal.  Some minutes of tense stillness passed—­then,

“Shall I read you her letter?” he asked.

“As you will.”

“Then I will!—­It is in verse and the place from which she dates it is,

“Our Island of Dreams,” which she explains in a sub-heading is

“By the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn”

—­a line which she has borrowed from Keats.  This is what she writes: 

“Tell him I lingered alone on the shore,
Where we parted, in sorrow, to meet nevermore;
The night-wind blew cold on my desolate heart
But colder those wild words of doom, ‘Ye must part!’

“O’er the dark, heaving waters, I sent forth a cry;
Save the wail of those waters there came no reply. 
I longed, like a bird, o’er the billows to flee,
From our lone island home and the moan of the sea: 

    “Away,—­far away—­from the wild ocean shore,
    Where the waves ever murmur, ‘No more, nevermore,’
    Where I wake, in the wild noon of midnight, to hear
    The lone song of the surges, so mournful and drear.

    “Where the clouds that now veil from us heaven’s fair light,
    Their soft, silver lining turn forth on the night;
    When time shall the vapors of falsehood dispel
    He shall know if I loved him; but never how well.”

Silence followed the reading of the poem-letter.  Finally the mother asked,

“Will you go back?”