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 you once again .... Lest she may never see you more .... she bids me say that she sends you her sweetest kiss of love and will die blessing you. But come,—oh come tomorrow!" Upon that morrow the gentle creature entered into Paradise.

For months Poe was as one distraught, inspiration and incentive removed he was ill unto death, sleepless except when his "more than Mother" sat beside his bed, her hand upon his weary head in the tender communion of mutual loss. It was then his heart wrote the lines "To My Mother," which hold in crystal clear his love for the undaunted spirit of Maria Poe Clemm.

Through the year following Virginia's death Poe seldom left the cottage except to wander over the surrounding country, from Virginia's grave to the great arched acqueduct, to the rocky height of Mt. Tom from where he could gaze over the blue Hudson, and through the thick woods back to the little piazza, pacing to and fro in front of the door from which Virginia had been carried forth. He drank the lees of sorrow, but from their bitterness his spirit was strengthened to conceive his most exalted work "Eureka," the forecasting for eternity. Towards the close of the year "Ulalume" was written and first published in The American Whig Review for December. Of this poem Edmund Gosse has said: "The three lyrics which must be regarded as having the most permanent effect upon subsequent literature not in England merely, but in France, are 'Ulalume,' 'Annabel Lee,' and 'For Annie.'" The same writer advances Poe's first claim to commemoration being that "he restored to poetry a primitive faculty of which civilization seems successfully