That evening--and many subsequent evenings--The Dreamer spent at "Duncan Lodge" with the Mackenzies and their friends. A series of sunlit days followed--days of lingering in Rob Sully's studio or in the familiar office of _The Southern Literary Messenger_ where the editor, Mr. John R. Thompson--himself a poet--gave him a warm welcome always, and gladly accepted and published in _The Messenger_ anything the famous former editor would let him have; days of wandering in the woods or by the tumbling river he had loved as a lad; days of searching out old haunts and making new ones.
And everywhere he found welcome. Delightful little parties were given in his honor, when in return for the courtesies paid him he charmed the company by reciting "The Raven" as he alone could recite it. His lectures upon "The Poetic Principle" and "The Philosophy of Composition," and his readings in the assembly rooms of the Exchange Hotel, drew the elite of the city, who sat spellbound while he, erect and still and pale as a statue, filled their ears with the music of his voice, and their souls with wonder at the brilliancy of his thought and words. Subscriptions to _The Stylus_ poured in. At last, this dream of his life seemed an assured fact.
One door--one only in all the town did not swing wide to receive him. The closed portal of the mansion of which he had been the proud young master, still said to him "Nevermore"--and he always had a creepy sensation when he passed it, which even the sight of the flower-garden he had loved, in fullest bloom, did not overcome.
The golden days ran into golden weeks and the weeks into months, and still Edgar Poe was making holiday in Richmond--the first holiday he had had since, as a youth of seventeen he had quarrelled with John Allan and gone forth to the battle of life. In the long, long battle since then there had been more of joy than they knew who looking on had seen the toil and the defeat and the despair, but from whose eyes the exaltation he had felt in the act of creation or in the contemplation of the works of nature, and the happiness he found in his frugal home, were hidden. But, as has been said, there had been no holiday, until now when he had come back to Richmond an older and a sadder and a more experienced Edgar Poe--an Edgar Poe upon whom the Silence and the Solitude had fallen and had left shaken--broken.