In the following spring Edgar Poe and Virginia Clemm were, strange as it may seem, principals in another wedding. The months intervening between the two ceremonies had been teeming with interest to them both--filled with work and with happiness just short of that perfect satisfaction--that completeness--that unattainable which it is part of being a mortal with an immortal mind and soul to be continually striving after, and missing, and will be until the half-light of this world is merged into the light ineffable of the one to come. The Dreamer had returned from his brief visit to Baltimore a new man. The blue devils were gone. The heart and mind which they had made their dwelling-place were swept clean of every vestige of them and were filled to overflowing with a sweet and rare presence--the presence of her who lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by him; for he felt that her spirit was with him at every moment of the day, though her fair body was other whither. The consciousness of the secret he carried in his heart flooded his nature with sunshine. Because of it he carried his head more proudly--wore a new dignity which his friends attributed entirely to the success of his work upon the magazine. He was filled with peace and good will to all the world. He was happy and wanted everybody else to be happy--it was apparent in himself and in his work. In his dreamy moods his fancy spread a broader, a stronger wing, and soared with new daring to heights unexplored before. When Edgar Goodfellow was in the ascendency he threw himself with unwonted zest into the pleasures that were "like poppies spread" in the way of the successful author and editor--the literary lion of the town. He had always been an enthusiastic and graceful dancer and now nothing else seemed to give him so natural a vent for the happiness that was beating in his veins. His feet seemed like his pen, to be inspired. He felt that he could dance till Doomsday and all the prettiest, most bewitching girls let him see how pleased they were to have him for a partner. In the brief, glowing rests between the dances he rewarded them with charming talk, and verses in praise of their loveliness which seemed to fall without the slightest effort from his tongue into their pretty, delighted ears or from his pencil into their albums. There was at least one fair damsel--a slight, willowy creature with violet eyes and flaxen ringlets, who treasured the graceful lines he dedicated to her with a feeling warmer than friendship. She was pretty Eliza White, the daughter of his employer, the owner of the Southern Literary Messenger. She was herself a lover of poetry and romance, and a dreamer of dreams, all of which had erelong merged into one sweet dream so secret, so sacred that she scarce dared own it to her own inner self, and its central figure was her father's handsome assistant editor, who rested in blissful ignorance of the havoc he was making in her maiden heart, engrossed as he was in his own secret--his own romance. New energy, new zest, new life seemed to have entered his blood. He had endless capacity for work as well as for pleasure and could write all day and dance half the night and then lie awake star-gazing the other half and rise ready and eager for the day's work in the morning. Such a tonic--such a stimulant did his love for his faraway bride and his consciousness of her love for him prove. He was happy--very, very happy, but he desired to be happier still. The simple, beautiful words of the old, old rite uttered in the dim, empty church had woven an invisible bond between him and the maiden whom he loved to call in his heart his wife though the time when he could claim her before the world was not yet. The miracle that this bond wrought in him was a revelation to him. Was the priest a wizard? Did the words of the ancient rite possess any intrinsic power of enchantment undreamed of by the uninitiated? He had not believed it possible for mortal to love more wholly--more madly than he had loved the little Virginia before that sacred ceremony, but after it he knew there were heights of love of which he had not hitherto had a glimpse. Just the right to say to his heart "She is my own--my wife--" made her tenfold more precious than she had ever been before, but it also made the separation tenfold harder to bear--made it beyond his power to bear! The Valley of the Many-Colored Grass had been dissolved--the spell that had brought it into being broken, by the separation, and he longed with a longing that was as hunger and thirst to reconstruct this magical world in which he and his Virginia dwelt apart with her who was mother to them both, in Richmond. And so, poor as he was, he arranged to bring Virginia and Mother Clemm to Richmond and establish them in a boarding house where he could see them often and wait with better grace the still happier day of making his marriage public. The day came more speedily than they had let themselves hope. The popularity of the Messenger and the fame of its assistant editor had grown with leaps and bounds. The new year brought the welcome gift of promotion to full editorship, with an increase of salary. With the opening spring began plans for the divulging of the great secret--for public acknowledgment of the marriage. But how was it to be done?--That was the question! Edgar Poe knew too well the disapproval with which the world regarded secret marriages--with which he himself regarded them, ordinarily. His sense of refinement of fitness, of the sacredness of the marriage tie, revolted from the very idea. In what fashion then, could he and his little bride proclaim their secret that would not do violence to their own taste or set a buzz of gossip going? That the horrid lips of gossip should so much as breathe the name of his Virginia--that Mrs. Grundy should dare shrug her decorous shoulders, if ever so slightly, at mention of that sacred name--. The bare suggestion was intolerable! At last a solution offered itself to his mind. Not for an instant did he regret the sacred ceremony in Christ Church, Baltimore. Not for worlds would he have cut short for one moment of time the duration of the beautiful spiritual marriage when he had been able to say to himself: "She whose presence fills my heart and my life--whose spirit I can feel near me at my work, in my hours of recreation and in my dreams, is my wife." But of this exquisite, this inexpressibly dear union the world was in utter ignorance. It was known only to the Mother, the priest and the aged sexton. To these witnesses always, as to themselves, their marriage would date from the moment when the blessing was invoked above their bowed heads in Christ Church, but to the world--why not let it date from the day in which they would claim each other before the world, in Richmond? The thing was most simple! A second ceremony in the presence of a few friends--a brief announcement in next day's paper--and their life would be begun with the dignity, the prestige, of public marriage. * * * * * The sixteenth of May was the day chosen for the event which was more like a wedding in Arcady than in latter-day society. As at the secret ceremony, the customary preparations for a wedding were conspicuously absent; yet was not the whole town gala with sunshine and verdure and May-bloom and bird-song? Edgar Poe looked every inch a bridegroom as, with his girl-wife upon his arm, he stepped forth from Mrs. Yarrington's boarding-house, opposite the green slopes of Capitol Square. A bridegroom indeed!--plainly, but perfectly apparelled--handsome, proud, fearless--his great eyes luminous with solemn joy. The simplest of white frocks became Virginia's innocence and beauty more than costly bridal array and the nosegay of white violets above her chaste bosom was her only ornament. With this sweet pair came the happy mother and a little train of close friends. It was late afternoon. The sunshine was mellow and the air was filled with the delicious insense which in mid-May the majestic paulonia tree drops from its purple bells and which is the very breath of the warm-natured South. No line of carriages stood at the door. No awning shut the picture they made from admiring eyes, but happily the little party chatted together as they strolled under over-arching greenery to the corner of Main and Seventh Streets, where in the prim parlor of the Presbyterian minister, the words were pronounced which told the world that Edgar Poe and Virginia Clemm were one. Upon the return of the party to Mrs. Yarrington's, a cake was cut, the health and happiness of the bride and groom were drunk in wine of "Muddie's" own make, and the modest festival was over. * * * * * How happy the young lovers and dreamers were in their home-making! Their housekeeping and furnishings were the simplest, but love made everything beautiful and sufficient. They had a garden in which they planted all their favorite flowers and to which came the birds--the birds with whom they had discovered a sudden kinship, for they too, were nesting--and filled it with music. And they sang and chatted as happily as the birds themselves as the pretty business progressed. How delightful it was to receive their friends, together, in their own home and at their own board--Eddie's old friends, especially. Rob Stanard, now a prosperous lawyer, and Rob Sully whose reputation as an artist was growing, were the first to call and present their compliments to the bride and groom; and how cordial they were! How affectionate to Eddie--how warm in their expressions of friendship for the girl-wife! Virginia found it the greatest fun imaginable to go to market with "Muddie," with a basket hanging from her pretty arm. The market men and women began to daily watch for the sweet face and tripping step of the exquisite child whom it seemed so comical to address as "Mrs. Poe," and who rewarded their open admiration with the loveliest smile, the prettiest words of greeting and interest, the merriest rippling laugh that rang through the market place and waked echoes in many a heart that had believed itself a stranger to joy. And the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass was reconstructed in even more than its old beauty. The flowers of love and contentment and innocent pleasure that besprinkled its green carpet had never been so many or so gay, the dream-mountains that shut it in from the rest of the world were as fair as sunset clouds, and the peace that flowed through it as a river broke into singing as it flowed. * * * * * Meantime Edgar Poe worked--and worked--and worked. Every number of the Messenger contained page after page of the brilliantly conceived and artistically worded product of his brain and pen. His heart--his imagination satisfied and at rest in the love and comradeship of a woman who fulfilled his ideal of beauty, of character, and of charm, whose mind he himself had taught and trained to appreciate and to love the things that meant most to him, whose sympathy responded to his every mood, whose voice soothed his tired nerves with the music that was one of the necessities of his temperament, a woman, withal, who lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by him--his harassing devils cast out by this true heartsease, Edgar Poe's industry and his power of mental production were almost past belief. As he worked a dream that had long been half-formed in his brain took definite shape and became the moving influence of the intellectual side of his life. His literary conscience had always been strict--even exacting--with him, making him push the quest for the right word in which to express his idea--just the right word, no other--to its farthest limit. Urged by this conscience, he could rarely ever feel that his work was finished, but kept revising, polishing and republishing it in improved form, even after it had been once given to the world. He had in his youth contemplated serving his country as a soldier. He now began to dream of serving her as a captain of literature, as it were--as a defender of purity of style; for this dream which became the most serious purpose of his life was of raising the standard of American letters to the ideal perfection after which he strove in his own writings. For his campaign a trusty weapon was at hand in the editorial department of the Southern Literary Messenger, which he turned into a sword of fearless, merciless criticism. Literary criticism (so called) in America had been hitherto mere puffery--puffery for the most part of weak, prolix, commonplace scribblings of little would-be authors and poets. A reformation in criticism, therefore, Edgar Poe conceived to be the only remedy for the prevalent mediocrity in writing that was vitiating the taste of the day, the only hope of placing American literature upon a footing of equality with that of England--in a word, for bringing about anything approaching the perfection of which he dreamed. The new kind of criticism to which he introduced his readers created a sensation by reason of its very novelty. His brilliant, but withering critiques were more eagerly looked for than the most thrilling of his stories, and though the little, namby-pamby authors whom the gleaming sword mowed down by tens were his and the Messenger's enemies for life, the interested readers that were gathered in by hundreds were loud in their praise of the progressiveness of the magazine and the genius of the man who was making it. In the North as well as the South the name of Edgar Poe was now on many lips and serious attention began to be paid to the opinion of the Southern Literary Messenger.