Erelong Number 13 was the liveliest and most popular room in the Row, but of the orgies held there the faculty rested in blissful unconsciousness.  At class-time young Poe was invariably in his place and invariably the pale, thoughtful, student-like and faultlessly neat and gentle-mannered youth whose intelligent attention and admirable recitations were the joy of his masters.  They heard rumors that he was something of a poet and were not surprised, the suggestions of ideality in the formation of his brow and the expression of his eyes hinted at such talent, and so long as he did not let the Muse come between him and his regular work, he should not be discouraged or restrained.

Indeed, in spite of the sway of Edgar Goodfellow at this time, Edgar the Dreamer was often present too, and during solitary tramps into the wild fastenesses of the Ragged Mountains, he not only conceived many fancies to be worked into poems, but made mentally, the first draft of a story to win fame.

The love of no real woman came to supplant the seemingly faithless Elmira, and though he still carried his mother’s miniature with him and gazed often and fondly upon it, the sense of nearness between her spirit and his and the soul satisfaction he had found in this nearness in the past, were gone.  The gambling fever that had fired his veins and the nightly potations of peach-honey created an excitement and restlessness that blurred the images his memory held of the angel mother who had dominated his childhood and of the madonna-like mistress who had filled the dreams of his early youth.  These holy dreams became for the time being, a reproach to him, for they aroused his conscience to an unpleasant activity which required more frequent recourse to peach-honey to quiet.

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Love was, nevertheless, as necessary to this poet’s soul as meat and drink were to his body, and in the No Man’s Land, “out of space, out of time,” which his fancy created and where it loved to stray, he fashioned for himself the weirdest, strangest lady ever loved by mortal.  The name he gave her was “Ligeia.”  She laid upon him no exactions, chastened him with no rebukes, demanded of him no service save that he should dream—­and dream—­and dream; for was not she herself formed from “such stuff as dreams are made of?”

The music of nature had long possessed a sort of personality for Edgar Poe, and now the voices, the motions, the numberless colors of the world about him took definite shape in his fancy of a wonderous fairy-woman whom he worshipped with an unearthly, poetic passion that was compared to the passion of the normal man to flesh and blood woman as moonlight to sunshine—­a passion which was luminous without heat.