wondered if his beautiful young mother, with the roses on her hair, down under the green earth, was not aware of the love and loyalty of her boy and if her spirit soaring the highest heavens, would not aid him in carrying out the resolution which in the bitterness of his soul, he then and there made—­the resolution to bring this mean little, puffed up world to do honor to his name—­to her name, of which he was prouder in this hour when others would trample it in the dust than he had ever been before.

Young boy though he was, he was conscious of his God-given endowments.  He felt that the divine fire of poetic feeling in his breast was an immortal thing.  Up to this time, his singing had been as the singing of a wood-bird—­an impulse, a necessity to express the thoughts and feelings of his heart.  He had never looked far enough ahead to consider whether he should or should not publish his work; but now ambition awoke—­full-grown at its birth—­and set him afire.  From those parents whose memory had been insulted he had received (God willing it) the precious heritage of brilliant intellect.  He would put the work of this intellect—­his stories and his poems—­into books.  He would give them to the wide world.  He would win recognition for the name of Poe.

He drew from within his coat the miniature of his mother—­her dying gift.  He gazed upon it long and tenderly, and with it still exposed to view brought from his desk the little packet of yellowed letters in their faded blue ribbon.  He knew them by heart, but he read them—­each one—­over again, as carefully as if it had been the first time.  They were not many and those not long; but ah, they were sweet!—­those tender, quaint love-letters that had passed between his parents in their brief courtship and married life.  His father’s so manly so strong—­like the letters of a soldier.  His mother’s so modest, so tender.  They did not stir his pulses so wildly now as they did upon his first reading of them, when a little lad at old Stoke-Newington—­but they were no less beautiful to him now than then.  The sentences made him think of the dainty, sweet aroma of pressed roses.

He tied the packet up again and kissed letters and picture, as if to seal the promise he was making them, then restored them to their hiding-places.  With the bitter knowledge that had come to him, he felt that years had passed over him—­that he would never be young again—­this boy of fourteen!

He raised his deep, pensive eyes once more to the quiet sky and his spirit cried to Heaven to grant him power to accomplish this task he had set himself:  to lift the loved name of his parents from the dust where it lay, and to set it high in the temple of fame, wreathed with immortal myrtle.

His resolution gave to his poetic face and his slender figure an air of mastery, as though some new, high quality had been born within him.

CHAPTER VIII.