the new Allan home and from the balcony of the second story looked out
upon the varied scenes of the river studded with green islets, the
village beyond the water, and far away the verdant slopes and forested
hills into the depths of which he looked with rapt eyes, seeing visions
which that forest never held for any other gaze. Mayhap, adown those
dim green aisles he previsioned the "ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir"
with the tomb of Ulalume at the end of the ghostly path through the
forest--the road through life that led to the grave where his heart lay
buried. Through the telescope on that balcony he may first have
followed the wanderings of Al Araaf, the star that shone for him alone.
In the dim paths of the moonlit garden flitted before his eyes the
dreamful forms that were afterward prisoned in the golden net of his
wondrous poesy.

[Illustration: EDGAR ALLAN POE
From the daguerreotype formerly owned by Edmund Clarence Stedman]

To these poetic scenes he soon bade farewell, and on St. Valentine's
day, 1826, entered the University of Virginia, where Number 13, West
Range, is still pointed out as the old-time abiding place of
Virginia's greatest poet, whose genius has given rise to more
acrimonious discussion than has ever gathered about the name of any
other American man of letters. The real home of Poe at this time was
the range of hills known as the Ragged Mountains, for it was among
their peaks and glens and caverns and wooded paths and rippling
streams that he roamed in search of strange tales and mystic poems
that would dazzle his readers in after days. His rambles among the
hills of the University town soon came to a close. Mr. Allan, being
confronted by a gaming debt which he regarded as too large to fit the
sporting necessities of a boy of seventeen, took him from college and