His heart beat tumultuously at the thought.  Then—­Oh, wonder!  His knees trembled under him—­he grew dizzy and was ready, indeed, to cry, “I die, I faint, I fail!” She crossed the square of light the window made.  In her uplifted hand she carried the lamp from which the light shone, and for a moment her slight figure, clad all in white as he had seen her in the garden a few hours before, and softly illuminated, was framed in the ivy-wreathed casement.  But for a moment—­then disappeared, but the trembling boy-lover and poet seemed to see it still, and gazed and gazed until the light was out and all the house dark.

He stumbled back through the moonlight to his home, he crept up the creaking stair again, to his little, dormer-windowed room; but sleep was now, more than ever, impossible.

Though the lamp had gone out, a candle stood upon a stand at the head of his bed.  He lighted it, and by its ray, wrote, under the spell of the hour, the first utterance in which he, Edgar Poe, ascended from the plane of a maker of “promising” verse, to the realm of the true poet—­a poem to the lady of his heart’s dream destined (though he little guessed it) to make her name immortal and to send the fame of his youthful passion down the ages as one of the world’s historic love-affairs.

What was her name? he wondered.  He had never heard it, but he would call her Helen—­Helen, the ancient synonym of womanly beauty, but the loveliest Helen, he believed, that ever set poet-lover piping her praise.

And so, “To Helen,” were the words he wrote at the top of his page, and underneath the name these lines: 

    “Helen, thy beauty is to me
      Like those Nicean barks of yore,
      That gently o’er a perfumed sea,
      The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
      To his own native shore.

    “On desperate seas long wont to roam,
      Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
    Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
      To the glory that was Greece
    And the grandeur that was Rome.

    “Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
      How statue-like I see thee stand! 
    The agate lamp within thy hand,
      Ah!  Psyche, from the regions which
    Are Holy Land!”

CHAPTER IX.

With his meeting with “Helen,” a new life, indeed, seemed to have opened for Edgar the Dreamer.  Not only had her own interest and sympathy been aroused, but her husband, a learned and accomplished judge of the Supreme Court of Virginia, also received him cordially and became deeply interested in him, and he found in their home what his own had lacked for him, a thoroughly congenial atmosphere.

“Helen” Stanard listened kindly to his boyish rhapsodies about his favorite poets, and encouraged him to bring her his own portefolio of verses, which he did, all but the ones addressed to herself—­these he kept secret.  She read all he brought her carefully, and intelligently criticised them in a way that was a real help to him.