No Spot of Ground Read Online Free PDF Page A

horse’s challenge.
    Poe’s head moved left to right as one horse after another screamed into the night. Sorrel’s map hadn’t shown the Yankee line stretching that far, well south of the tributary, beyond Clingman’s brigade to where Fitz Lee’s cavalry was supposed to be, out on his right flank.
    He listened as the horses called to one another like bugles before a battle, and he thought: The Yankees are moving, and they’re moving along my front .
    Suddenly the warm south wind turned chill.
    How many? he thought.
    Sobbing in the mist like men in the extremes of agony, the crying horses offered no answer.
    *
    He became a child again, living with Evania in her perfect kingdom, that winding blue river valley west of Baltimore. Never before had he known rest; but there he found it, a cease from the despairing, agonized wanderings that had driven him, like a leaf before a black autumn storm, from Richmond to Boston and every city between.
    At last he knew what it was to be a gentleman. He had thought he had achieved that title before, through education and natural dignity and inclination− but now he knew that before he had only aspired to the name. Mr. Allan fancied himself a gentleman; but his money was tainted with trade, with commerce and usury. Now Poe understood that the highest type of gentleman was produced only through ease and leisure− not laziness, but rather the freedom from material cares that allowed a man to cultivate himself endlessly, to refine his thought and intellect through study and application of the highest forms of human aspiration.
    He was not lazy. He occupied himself in many ways. He moved Mrs. Clemm to Baltimore, bought her a house, arranged for her an annuity. He added to the mansion, creating a new facade of Italian marble that reflected the colors of the westering sun; he employed the servants to move tons of earth in order to create a landscape garden of fully forty acres that featured, in the midst of a wide artificial lake, an arabesque castle, a lacy wedding-cake gift to his bride.
    He had always thought landscape gardening fully an equal of poetry in its ability to invoke the sublime and reveal the face of the deity. In this he was a disciple of de Carbonnieres, Piranesi, and Shenstone: The garden was nature perfected, as it had been in the mind of God, a human attempt to restore the divine, Edenic sublimity. He crafted his effects carefully—— the long, winding streams through which one approached Poe’s demiparadise in swan-shaped boats, the low banks crowded with moss imported from Japan, natural-seeming outcroppings of uniquely colored and textured rock. At the end was a deep, black chasm through which the water rushed alarmingly, as if to Hades− but then the boat was swept into the dazzling wide lake, the sun sparkling on the white sand banks, the blue waters—— and then, as the visitor’s eyes adjusted from blackness to brightness, one perceived in the midst of a blue-green island the white castle with its lofty, eyelike windows, the symbol of purest Mind in the midst of Nature.
    Nothing was suffered to spoil the effects that had taken a full six years to create. Not a stray leaf, not a twig, not a cattail was permitted to sully the ground or taint the water− fully thirty Africans were constantly employed to make certain that Poe’s domain was swept clean.
    It cost money—— but money Poe had, and if not there was always more to be obtained at three and one half percent. His days of penny-counting were over, and he spent with a lavish hand.
    He fulfilled another ambition: he started a literary magazine, the Southern Gentleman , with its offices in Baltimore. For it he wrote essays, criticism, occasional stories, once or twice a poem.
    Only once or twice.
    Somehow, he discovered, the poetry had fled his soul.
    And he began to feel, to his growing horror, that his loss of poetry was nothing but a just punishment.
    True poetry, he knew, could not reside in the