Poe frequently refers to Helen as Psyche, a lovely princess who fell in love with Cupid. Psyche symbolized the soul to the ancient Greeks, and Poe compares Helen to the very soul of "regions which are the Holy Land," alluding to Greece, the birthplace of so many of our ideals of beauty, democracy, and scholarship. In his essay on The Coliseum, he writes that it is "a temple for the gods, but not on Earth alone; for it is within the breast of her whom I love, that my imagination builds it." In other words, the Coliseum is a monument to the glory of Rome built with the bones of slaves. Poe also uses the term "palace" several times in his work. In an 1831 letter to John Allan, then editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, he wrote that he was working on "a poem in twelve cantos, entitled 'The Palace of Art,' " which was never published. In another letter, this time to James Russell Lowell, he said that he had begun a long poem about "the fall of Jerusalem's palace." This too was never completed. 3 Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel Paul Clifford.