There was one fair star that invited his fancy with peculiar insistence.  It seemed to beckon to him with the flashes of its beams.  He questioned “Ligeia” of it and she told him that it was none other than Al Aaraaf, the great star discovered by Tycho Brahe, which after suddenly appearing and shining for a few nights with a brilliancy surpassing that of Jupiter, disappeared never to be seen again; never except by him—­The Dreamer—­to whom it was given not only to gaze upon it from the far earth, but, with her as his guide, to visit it and to explore its fairy landscape where the spirits of lost sculptures enjoyed immortality.

The result of this flight of fancy to a magical world was the poem, “Al Aaraaf.”

He spent the interim between his honorable discharge from the army and his entrance at West Point in a happy visit to Baltimore, where he made the acquaintance of his father’s kindred and succeeded in publishing the new poem, with a revised edition of the old ones.

For the first time, his work appeared under his own signature: 

“Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems.  By Edgar A. Poe.”

The new poem was unintelligible to the critics—­but what of that? he asked himself.  One of his optimistic moods was upon him.  He despised the critics for their lack of perception and as he held the slim volume in his hands and gazed upon that, to him, wondrous title-page, his countenance shone as though it had caught the reflection of the magic star itself.  What mattered all the wounds, all the woes of his past life?  He had entered into a land where dreams came true!

For the first time, too, his work received recognition as poetry, in the literary world.  It was but a nod, yet it was a beginning; and it pleased him to think that this first nod of greeting as a poet came to him from Boston, where his mother had found “her best, most sympathetic friends.”  Before publishing his new book he had sent some extracts from it to Mr. John Neal, Editor of the Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette, who promptly gave them a place in his paper, with some kind words commending them to lovers of “genuine poetry.”

“He is entirely a stranger to me,” wrote the Boston editor, of the twenty-year-old poet, “but with all his faults, if the remainder of Al Aaraaf and Tamerlane are as good as the body of the extracts here given, he will deserve to stand high—­very high—­in the estimation of the shining brotherhood.”

In a burst of gratitude the happy poet wrote to Mr. Neal his thanks for these “very first words of encouragement,” he had received.

“I am young,” he confided to this earliest friend in the charmed world of letters, “I am young—­not yet twenty—­am a poet if deep worship of all beauty can make me one—­and wish to be so in the common meaning of the word.”

CHAPTER XVI.

Upon a dark and drizzling November night of the year 1830, four cadets of West Point Academy sat around a cosy open fire in Room 28, South Barracks, spinning yarns for each other’s amusement.