She was laid to rest in the new cemetery on Shockoe Hill, not far from the Allan home.  The bier was followed by its black procession of mourners, and no one knew that the heart of a youth who followed too, but at a distance, was breaking.  Though husband and children and brother and sister were bowed with grief, he told himself that there was among them no sorrow like unto his sorrow who had not even the right of kinship to mourn for her.  Of what business of his (he fancied, out of the bitterness of his soul, the world saying) of what business of his was her death?  What business had he to mourn?

Again his feet kept time to the old refrain of never, nevermore, that hammered in his brain—­a refrain that to the unrealizing ear of the child of three had been sad with a beautiful, rhythmic sadness that was rather pleasurable than otherwise; that to the youth of sixteen was still musical and beautiful, though filled with despair.

As at many another time his poetical gift gave him a merciful vent for his pent up feeling, so now it came to his aid, and upon the night of the day when she was laid to rest he poured out his sorrow in “The Paean”—­which he was afterwards to revise and rename, “Lenore”—­

    “An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young—­
    A dirge for her, the doubly dead in that she died so young.”

As during his childhood, and afterwards, he had found a mournful pleasure in visiting the grave of his mother, in the churchyard on the hill; so now he found a blessed solace, in his terrible loneliness, in pilgrimages to the shrine (for as such he held the grave of his saint) in the new cemetery.  These pilgrimages he usually made at night—­his grief was too sacred a thing to be flaunted in broad daylight.  Many a night during the spring and summer found him slipping down the stair, when the house was asleep, and taking his way through the silent city of Slumber to that even more silent city of Death.

Oh, that those that lay there not much more still than they who lay asleep in their beds in that other city, might arise like them with the morrow’s sun!

Often, as he walked along, drinking in the perfumed night air that he loved—­the night breeze gratefully lifting the ringlets from his fevered brow—­often he thought of that first summer’s night when with the sweet words of Shelley’s serenade:  “I arise from dreams of thee,” singing themselves in his heart, he had gone with light feet to worship beneath her window.

Ah, the world was young then, for sweet hope was alive!

The iron gates of the cemetery were locked, but the wall was not very high.  To scale it but added zest to his adventure.  He would be a knight unfit for his vigil if he were to let himself be so easily balked.

Within the wall the odors of flowers were even heavier, more oppressively sweet than without, and the silence surpassed the silence of the outer city even as the stillness of the sleepers here surpassed the stillness of those yonder.