Selections from Poe
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Title: Selections from Poe
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Editor: J. Montgomery Gambrill
Release date: September 1, 2005 [eBook #8893]
Most recently updated: February 2, 2015
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8893
Credits: Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SELECTIONS FROM POE ***
Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
SELECTIONS FROM POE
Edited with Biographical and Critical Introduction and Notes
BY
J. MONTGOMERY GAMBRILL
Head of the Department of History and Civics
Baltimore Polytechnic Institute
INSCRIBED TO THE POE AND LOWELL LITERARY SOCIETIES OF THE
BALTIMORE POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE
[Illustration: EDGAR ALLAN POE. After an engraving by Cole]
PREFACE
Edgar Allan Poe has been the subject of so much controversy that he is
the one American writer whom high-school pupils (not to mention
teachers) are likely to approach with ready-made prejudices. It is
impossible to treat such a subject in quite the ordinary
matter-of-course way. Furthermore, his writings are so highly
subjective, and so intimately connected with his strongly held
critical theories, as to need somewhat careful and extended study.
These facts make it very difficult to treat either the man or his art
as simply as is desirable in a secondary text-book. Consequently the
Introduction is longer and less simple than the editor would desire
for the usual text. It is believed, however, that the teacher can take
up this Introduction with the pupil in such a way as to make it
helpful, significant, and interesting.
The text of the following poems and tales is that of the
Stedman-Woodberry edition (described in the Bibliography, p. xxx), and
the selections are reprinted by permission of the publishers, Duffield
& Company; this text is followed exactly except for a very few changes
in punctuation, not more than five or six in all. My obligations to
other works are too numerous to mention; all the publications included
in the Bibliography, besides a number of others, have been examined,
but I especially desire to acknowledge the courtesy of Dr. Henry
Barton Jacobs of Baltimore, who sent me from Paris a copy of Émile
Lauvrière's interesting and important study, "Edgar Poe: Sa vie et son
oeuvre; étude de psychologie pathologique." To my wife I am indebted
for valuable assistance in the tedious work of reading proofs and
verifying the text.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
POEMS
SONG
SPIRITS OF THE DEAD
TO ----
ROMANCE
TO THE RIVER
TO SCIENCE
TO HELEN
ISRAFEL
THE CITY IN THE SEA
THE SLEEPER
LENORE
THE VALLEY OF UNREST
THE COLISEUM
HYMN
TO ONE IN PARADISE
TO F----
TO F----S S. O----D
TO ZANTE
BRIDAL BALLAD
SILENCE
THE CONQUEROR WORM
DREAM-LAND
THE RAVEN
EULALIE
TO M.L. S----
ULALUME
TO ---- ----
AN ENIGMA
TO HELEN
A VALENTINE
FOR ANNIE
THE BELLS
ANNABEL LEE
TO MY MOTHER
ELDORADO
THE HAUNTED PALACE
TALES
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER
WILLIAM WILSON
A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTRÖM
THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH
THE GOLD-BUG
THE PURLOINED LETTER
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
EDGAR ALLAN POE: HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND ART
Edgar Allan Poe is in many respects the most fascinating figure in
American literature. His life, touched by the extremes of fortune, was
on the whole more unhappy than that of any other of our prominent men
of letters. His character was strangely complex, and was the subject
of misunderstanding during his life and of heated dispute after his
death; his writings were long neglected or disparaged at home, while
accepted abroad as our greatest literary achievement. Now, after more
than half a century has elapsed since his death, careful biographers
have furnished a tolerably full account of the real facts about his
life; a fairly accurate idea of his character is winning general
acceptance; and the name of Edgar Allan Poe has been conceded a place
among the two or three greatest in our literature.
LIFE AND CHARACTER
In December, 1811, a well-known actress of the time died in Richmond,
leaving destitute three little children, the eldest but four years of
age. This mother, who was Elizabeth (Arnold) Poe, daughter of an
English actress, had suffered from ill health for several years and
had long found the struggle for existence difficult. Her husband,
David Poe, probably died before her; he was a son of General David
Poe, a Revolutionary veteran of Baltimore, and had left his home and
law books for the stage several years before his marriage. The second
of the three children, born January 19, 1809, in Boston, where his
parents happened to be playing at the time, was Edgar Poe, the future
poet and story-writer. The little Edgar was adopted by the wife of
Mr. John Allan, a well-to-do Scotch merchant of the city, who later
became wealthy, and the boy was thereafter known as Edgar Allan
Poe. He was a beautiful and precocious child, who at six years of age
could read, draw, dance, and declaim the best poetry with fine effect
and appreciation; report says, also, that he had been taught to stand
on a chair and pledge Mr. Allan's guests in a glass of wine with
"roguish grace."
In 1815 Mr. Allan went to England, where he remained five years. Edgar
was placed in an old English school in the suburbs of London, among
historic, literary, and antiquarian associations, and possibly was
taken to the Continent by his foster parents at vacation seasons. The
English residence and the sea voyages left deep impressions on the
boy's sensitive nature. Returning to Richmond, he was prepared in good
schools for the University of Virginia, which he entered at the age of
seventeen, pursuing studies in ancient and modern languages and
literatures. During this youthful period he was already developing a
striking and peculiar personality. He was brilliant, if not
industrious, as a student, leaving the University with highest honors
in Latin and French; he was quick and nervous in his movements and
greatly excelled in athletics, especially in swimming; in character,
he was reserved, solitary, sensitive, and given to lonely reverie.
Some of his aristocratic playmates remembered to his discredit that he
was the child of strolling players, and their attitude helped to add a
strain of defiance to an already intensely proud nature. Though kindly
treated by his foster parents, this strange boy longed for an
understanding sympathy that was not his. Once he thought he had found
it in Mrs. Jane Stannard, mother of a schoolmate; but the new friend
soon died, and for months the grief-stricken boy, it is said, haunted
the lonely grave at night and brooded over his loss and the mystery of
death--a not very wholesome experience for a lonely and melancholy lad
of fifteen years.
At the University he drank wine, though not intemperately, and played
cards a great deal, the end of the term finding him with gambling
debts of twenty-five hundred dollars. These habits were common at the
time, and Edgar did not incur any censure from the faculty; but
Mr. Allan declined to honor the gambling debt, removed Edgar, and
placed him in his own counting room. Such a life was too dull for the
high-spirited, poetic youth, and he promptly left his home.
Going to Boston, he published a thin volume of boyish verse,
"Tamerlane, and Other Poems," but realizing nothing financially,[1] he
enlisted in the United States Army as Edgar A. Perry. After two years
of faithful and efficient service, he procured through Mr. Allan (who
was temporarily reconciled to him) an appointment to the West Point
Military Academy, entering in July, 1830. In the meantime, he had
published in Baltimore a second small volume of poems. Fellow-students
have described him as having a "worn, weary, discontented look";
usually kindly and courteous, but shy, reserved, and exceedingly
sensitive; an extraordinary reader, but noted for carping criticism.
Although a good student, he seemed galled beyond endurance by the
monotonous routine of military duties, which he deliberately neglected
and thus procured his dismissal from the Academy. He left, alone and
penniless, in March, 1831.
[Footnote 1: In November, 1900, a single copy of this little volume
sold in New York for $2550.]
Going to New York, Poe brought out another little volume of poems
showing great improvement; then he went to Baltimore, and after a
precarious struggle of a year or two, turned to prose, and, while in
great poverty, won a prize of one hundred dollars from the Baltimore
_Saturday Visitor_ for his story, "The Manuscript Found in a
Bottle." Through John P. Kennedy[1], one of the judges whose
friendship the poverty-stricken author gained, he procured a good deal
of hack work, and finally an editorial position on the _Southern
Literary Messenger_, of Richmond. The salary was fair, and better
was in sight; yet Poe was melancholy, dissatisfied, and miserable. He
wrote a pitiable letter to Mr. Kennedy, asking to be convinced "that
it is at all necessary to live."
[Footnote 1: A well-known Marylander, author of "Horse-Shoe Robinson,"
"Swallow Barn," "Rob of the Bowl," and other popular novels of the
day, and later Secretary of the Navy.]
For several years he had been making his home with an aunt, Mrs.
Clemm, and her daughter, Virginia, a girl beautiful in character and
person, but penniless and probably already a victim of the consumption
that was eventually to cause her death. In 1836, when she was only
fourteen years old, Poe married his cousin, to whom he was
passionately attached. His devotion to her lasted through life, and
the tenderest affection existed between him and Mrs. Clemm, who was
all a mother could have been to him; so that the home life was always
beautiful in spirit, however poor in material comfort.
In January, 1837, his connection with the _Messenger_ was
severed, probably because of his occasional lapses from sobriety; but
his unfortunate temperament and his restless ambition were doubtless
factors. With some reputation as poet, story-writer, critic, and
editor, Poe removed to New York, and a year later to Philadelphia,
where he remained until 1844. Here he found miscellaneous literary,
editorial, and hack work, finally becoming editor of _Graham's
Magazine_, which prospered greatly under his management, increasing
its circulation from eight thousand to forty thousand within a
year. But Poe's restless spirit was dissatisfied. He was intensely
anxious to own a magazine for himself, and had already made several
unsuccessful efforts to obtain one,--efforts which were to be repeated
at intervals, and with as little success, until the day his death. He
vainly sought a government position, that a livelihood might be
assured while he carried out his literary plans. Finally he left
_Graham's_, doubtless because of personal peculiarities, since
his occasional inebriety did not interfere with his work; and there
followed a period of wretched poverty, broken once by the winning of a
prize of one hundred dollars for "The Gold Bug."
He continued to be known as a "reserved, isolated, dreamy man, of
high-strung nerves, proud spirit, and fantastic moods," with a
haunting sense of impending evil. His home was poor and simple, but
impressed every visitor by its neatness and quiet refinement;
Virginia, accomplished in music and languages, was as devoted to her
husband as he was to her. Both were fond of flowers and plants, and of
household pets. Mrs. Clemm gave herself completely to her "children"
and was the business manager of the family.
In the spring of 1844 Poe went with Virginia to New York, practically
penniless, and to Mrs. Clemm, who did not come at once, he wrote with
pathetic enthusiasm of the generous meals served at their boarding
house. He obtained a position on the _Evening Mirror_ at small
pay, but did his dull work faithfully and efficiently; later, he
became editor of the _Broadway Journal_, in which he printed
revisions of his best tales and poems. In 1845 appeared "The Raven,"
which created a profound sensation at home and abroad, and immediately
won, and has since retained, an immense popularity. He was at the
height of his fame, but poor, as always. In 1846 he published "The
Literati," critical comments on the writers of the day, in which the
literary small fry were mercilessly condemned and ridiculed. This
naturally made Poe a host of enemies. One of these, Thomas Dunn
English, published an abusive article attacking the author's
character, whereupon Poe sued him for libel and obtained two hundred
and twenty-five dollars damages.
The family now moved to a little three-room cottage at Fordham, a
quiet country place with flowers and trees and pleasant vistas; but
illness and poverty were soon there, too. In 1841 Virginia had burst
a blood vessel while singing, and her life was despaired of; this had
happened again and again, leaving her weaker each time. As the summer
and fall of this year wore away, she grew worse and needed the
tenderest care and attention. But winter drew on, and with it came
cold and hunger; the sick girl lay in an unheated room on a straw bed,
wrapped in her husband's coat, the husband and mother trying to chafe
a little warmth into her hands and feet. Some kind-hearted women
relieved the distress in a measure, but on January 30, 1847, Virginia
died. The effect on Poe was terrible. It is easy to see how a very
artist of death, who could study the dreadful stages of its slow
approach and seek to penetrate the mystery of its ultimate nature with
such intense interest and deep reflection as did Poe, must have
brooded and suffered during the years of his wife's illness. His own
health had long been poor; his brain was diseased and insanity seemed
imminent. After intense grief came a period of settled gloom and
haunting fear. The less than three years of life left for him was a
period of decline in every respect. But he remained in the little
cottage, finding some comfort in caring for his flowers and pets, and
taking long solitary rambles. During this time he thought out and
wrote "Eureka," a treatise on the structure, laws, and destiny of the
universe, which he desired to have regarded as a poem.
Poe had always felt a need for the companionship of sympathetic and
affectionate women, for whom he entertained a chivalric regard
amounting to reverence. After the shock of his wife's death had
somewhat worn away, he began to depend for sympathy upon various women
with whom he maintained romantic friendships. Judged by ordinary
standards, his conduct became at times little short of maudlin; his
correspondence showed a sort of gasping, frantic dependence upon the
sympathy and consolation of these women friends, and exhibited a
painful picture of a broken man. Mrs. Shew, one of the kind women who
had relieved the family at the time of Virginia's last illness,
strongly advised him to marry, and he did propose marriage to
Mrs. Sara Helen Whitman, a verse writer of some note in her day. After
a wild and exhausting wooing, begun in an extravagantly romantic
manner, the match was broken off through the influence of the lady's
friends. When it was all over Poe seemed very little disturbed. The
truth is, he was a wreck, and feeling utterly dependent, clutched
frantically at every hope of sympathy and consolation. His only real
love was for his dead wife, which he recorded shortly before his death
in the exquisite lyric, "Annabel Lee."
In July, 1849, full of the darkest forebodings, and predicting that he
should never return, Poe went to Richmond. Here he spent a few quiet
months, part of the time fairly cheerful, but twice yielding to the
temptation to drink, and each time suffering, in consequence, a
dangerous illness. On September 30 he left Richmond for New York with
fifteen hundred dollars, the product of a recent lecture arranged by
kind Richmond friends. What happened during the next three days is an
impenetrable mystery, but on October 3 (Wednesday) he was found in an
election booth in Baltimore, desperately ill, his money and baggage
gone. The most probable story is that he had been drugged by political
workers, imprisoned in a "coop" with similar victims, and used as a
repeater [1], this procedure being a common one at the time. Whether
he was also intoxicated is a matter of doubt. There could be but one
effect on his delicate and already diseased brain. He was taken to a
hospital unconscious, lingered several days in the delirium of a
violent brain fever, and in the early dawn of Sunday, October 7,
breathed his last.
[Footnote 1: Repeater, a person who illegally votes more than once]
The dead author's character immediately became the subject of violent
controversy. His severe critical strictures had made him many enemies
among the minor writers of the day and their friends. One of the men
who had suffered from Poe's too caustic pen was Rufus W. Griswold, but
friendly relations had been nominally established and Poe had
authorized Griswold to edit his works. This Griswold did, including a
biography which Poe's friends declared a masterpiece of malicious
distortion and misrepresentation; it certainly was grossly unfair and
inaccurate. Poe's friends retorted, and a long war of words followed,
in which hatred or prejudice on the one side and wholesale,
undiscriminating laudation on the other, alike tended to obscure the
truth. It is now almost impossible to see the real Poe, just as he
appeared to an ordinary, unprejudiced observer of his own time. Only
by the most careful, thoughtful, and sympathetic study can we hope to
approximate such an acquaintance.
The fundamental fact about Poe is a very peculiar and unhappy
temperament, certain characteristic qualities of which began to
disclose themselves in early boyhood and, fostered by the vicissitudes
of his career, developed throughout his life.
In youth he was nervous, sensitive, morbid, proud, solitary, and
wayward; and as the years went by, bringing poverty, illness, and the
bitterness of failure, often through his own faults, the man became
irritable, impatient, often morose. He had always suffered from fits
of depression,--"blue devils," Mr. Kennedy called them,--and though
he was extravagantly sanguine at times, melancholy was his usual mood,
often manifesting itself in a haunting fear of evil to come. The
peculiar character of his wonderful imagination made actual life less
real to him than his own land of dreams: the "distant Aidenn," the
"dim lake of Auber," the "kingdom by the sea," seemed more genuine
than the landscapes of earth; the lurid "city in the sea" more
substantial than the streets he daily walked.
Because of this intensely subjective and self-absorbed character of
mind, he had no understanding of human nature, no insight into
character with its marvelous complexities and contradictions. With
these limitations Poe, as might be expected, had a very defective
sense of humor, lacked true sympathy, was tactless, possessed little
business ability, and was excessively annoyed by the dull routine and
rude frictions of ordinary life. He was always touched by kindness,
but was quick to resent an injury, and even as a boy could not endure
a jest at his expense. He had many warm and devoted friends whom he
loved in return, but the limitations of his own nature probably made a
really frank, unreserved friendship impossible; and when a break
occurred, he was apt to assume that his former friend was an utter
villain. These personal characteristics, in conjunction with a goading
ambition which took form in the idea of an independent journal of his
own in which he might find untrammeled expression, added uneasiness
and restlessness to a constantly discontented nature. To some extent,
at least, Poe realized the curse of such a temperament, but he strove
vainly against its impulses.
The one genuine human happiness of this sad life was found in a
singularly beautiful home atmosphere. Husband and wife were
passionately devoted to each other, and Mrs. Clemm was more than a
mother to both. She says of her son-in-law: "At home, he was simple
and affectionate as a child, and during all the years he lived with
me, I do not remember a single night that he failed to come and kiss
his 'mother,' as he called me, before going to bed." This faithful
woman remained devoted to him after Virginia's death, and to his
memory, when calumny assailed it, after his own.
The capital charge against Poe's character has been intemperance, and
although the matter has been grossly exaggerated and misrepresented,
the charge is true. Except for short periods, he was never what is
known as dissipated, and he struggled desperately against his
weakness,--an unequal struggle, since the craving was inherited, and
fostered by environment, circumstances, and temperament. One of his
biographers tells of bread soaked in gin being fed to the little Poe
children by an old nurse during the illness of their mother; and there
is another story, already mentioned, of the little Edgar, in his
adoptive home, taught to pledge the guests as a social grace.
Drinking was common at the time, wine was offered in every home and at
every social function, and in the South, where Poe spent his youth and
early manhood, the spirit of hospitality and conviviality held out
constant temptation. To his delicate organization strong drink early
became a veritable poison, and indulgence that would have been a small
matter to another man was ruinous to him; indeed, a single glass of
wine drove him practically insane, and a debauch was sure to
follow. Indulgence was stimulated, also, by the nervous strain and
worry induced by uncertain livelihood and privation, the frequent fits
of depression, and by constant brooding. Sometimes he fought his
weakness successfully for several years, but always it conquered in
the end.
Moreover, he speaks of a very special cause in the latter part of his
life, which in fairness should be heard in his own written words to a
friend: "Six years ago a wife, whom I loved as no man ever loved
before, ruptured a blood vessel in singing. Her life was despaired
of. I took leave of her forever and underwent all the agonies of her
death. She recovered partially and I again hoped. At the end of a year
the vessel broke again. I went through precisely the same scene....
Then again--again--and even once again, at varying intervals. Each
time I felt all the agonies of her death--and at each accession of her
disorder I loved her more dearly and clung to her life with more
desperate pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive--nervous in
a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of
horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I
drank--God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course, my
enemies referred the insanity to the drink, rather than the drink to
the insanity.... It was the horrible never-ending oscillation between
hope and despair, which I could _not_ longer have endured without
total loss of reason. In the death of what was my life, then, I
received a new, but--O God!--how melancholy an existence!"
This statement, and the other facts mentioned, are not offered as
wholly excusing Poe. Doubtless a stronger man would have resisted,
doubtless a less self-absorbed man would have thought of his wife's
happiness as well as of his own relief from torture. Yet the
fair-minded person, familiar with Poe's unhappy life, and keeping in
mind the influences of heredity, temperament, and environment, will
hesitate to pronounce a severe judgment.
Poe was also accused of untruthfulness, and this accusation likewise
has a basis of fact. He repeatedly furnished or approved statements
regarding his life and work that were incorrect, he often made a
disingenuous show of pretended learning, and he sometimes misstated
facts to avoid wounding his own vanity. This ugly fault seems to have
resulted from a fondness for romantic posing, and is doubtless related
to the peculiar character of imagination already mentioned. Perhaps,
too, he inherited from his actor parents a love of applause, and if
so, the trait was certainly encouraged in early childhood. There is
no evidence that he was ever guilty of malicious or mercenary
falsehood.
Another of his bad habits was borrowing, but it must be remembered
that his life was one long struggle with grinding poverty, that he and
those dear to him sometimes suffered actual hunger and cold. Many who
knew him testified to his anxiety to pay all his debts, Mr. Graham
referring to him in this particular as "the soul of honor."
In a letter to Lowell, Poe has well described himself in a sentence:
"My life has been whim--impulse--passion--a longing for solitude--a
scorn of all things present in an earnest desire for the future."
Interpreted, this means that in a sense he never really reached
maturity, that he remained a slave to his impulses and emotions, that
he detested the ordinary business of life and could not adapt himself
to it, that his mind was full of dreams of ideal beauty and
perfection, that his whole soul yearned to attain the highest
pleasures of artistic creation. His was perpetually a deeply agitated
soul; as such, it was natural he should outwardly seem irritable,
impatient, restless, discontented, and solitary. It is impossible to
believe that there was any strain of real evil in Poe. A man who could
inspire such devotion as he had from such a woman as Mrs. Clemm, a man
who loved flowers and children and animal pets, who could be so
devoted a husband, who could so consecrate himself to art, was not a
bad man. Yet his acts were often, as we have seen, most
reprehensible. Frequently the subject of slander, he was not a victim
of conspiracy to defame. Although circumstances were many times
against him, he was his own worst enemy. He was cursed with a
temperament. His mind was analytical and imaginative, and gave no
thought to the ethical. He remained wayward as a child. The man, like
his art, was not immoral, but simply unmoral. Whatever his faults, he
suffered frightfully for them, and his fame suffered after him.
LITERARY WORK
Poe's first literary ventures were in verse. The early volumes,
showing strongly the influence of Byron and Moore, were productions of
small merit but large promise. Their author was soon to become one of
the most original of poets, his later work being unique, with a
strangely individual, "Poe" atmosphere that no other writer has ever
been able successfully to imitate. His verse is individual in theme,
treatment, and structure, all of which harmonize with his conscious
theory of poetic art. His theory is briefly this: It is not the
function of poetry to teach either truth or morals, but to gratify
through novel forms "the thirst for supernal beauty"; its proper
effect is to "excite, by elevating, the soul." The highest beauty has
always some admixture of sadness, the most poetical of all themes
being the death of a beautiful woman. Moreover, the pleasure derived
from the contemplation of this higher beauty should be indefinite;
that is, true poetic feeling is not the result of coherent narrative
or clear pictures or fine moral sentiment, but consists in vague,
exalted emotion. Music, of all the arts, produces the vaguest and most
"indefinite" pleasure; consequently verse forms should be chosen with
the greatest possible attention to musical effect. Poetry must be
purely a matter of feeling. "Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the
Intellect or with the Conscience it has only collateral relations."
This explanation is necessary, because the stock criticism of Poe's
poetry condemns it as vague, indefinite, and devoid of thought or
ethical content. These are precisely its limitations, but hardly its
faults, since the poet attained with marvelous art the very effects he
desired. The themes of nearly all the poems are death, ruin, regret,
or failure; the verse is original in form, and among the most musical
in the language, full of a haunting, almost magical melody. Mystery,
symbolism, shadowy suggestion, fugitive thought, elusive beauty,
beings that are mere insubstantial abstractions--these are the
characteristics, but designedly so, of Poe's poetry. A poem to him was
simply a crystallized mood, and it is futile for his readers to apply
any other test. Yet the influence of this verse has been wide and
important, extending to most lyric poets of the last half-century,
including such masters as Rossetti and Swinburne.
"To Helen," a poem of three brief stanzas, is Poe's first really
notable production; it is an exquisite tribute of his reverent
devotion to his boyhood friend, Mrs. Stannard, portraying her as a
classic embodiment of beauty. "Israfel" is a lyric of aspiration of
rare power and rapture, worthy of Shelley, and is withal the most
spontaneous, simple, and genuinely human poem Poe ever wrote. "The
Haunted Palace," one of the finest of his poems, is an unequaled
allegory of the wreck and ruin of sovereign reason, which to be fully
appreciated should be read in its somber setting, "The Fall of the
House of Usher." Less attractive is "The Conqueror Worm," with its
repulsive imagery, but this "tragedy 'Man,'" with the universe as a
theater, moving to the "music of the spheres," and "horror the soul of
the plot," is undeniably powerful and intensely terrible.
"The Raven," published in 1845, attained immediately a world-wide
celebrity, and rivals in fame and popularity any lyric ever written.
It is the most elaborate treatment of Poe's favorite theme, the death
of a beautiful woman. The reveries of a bereaved lover, alone in his
library at midnight in "the bleak December," vainly seeking to forget
his sorrow for the "lost Lenore," are interrupted by a tapping, as of
some one desirous to enter. After a time, he admits a "stately raven"
and seeks to beguile his sad fancy by putting questions to the bird,
whose one reply is "Nevermore," and this constitutes the refrain of
the poem. Impelled by an instinct of self-torture, the lover asks
whether he shall have "respite" from the painful memories of "Lenore,"
here or hereafter, and finally whether in the "distant Aidenn" he and
his love shall be reunited; to all of which the raven returns his one
answer. Driven to frenzy, the lover implores the bird, "Take thy beak
from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door," only to learn
that the shadow will be lifted "nevermore." The raven is, in the
poet's own words, "emblematical of Mournful and Never-Ending
Remembrance."
"Ulalume" has been commonly (though not always) regarded as a mere
experiment in verbal ingenuity, meaningless melody, or "the insanity
of versification," as a distinguished American critic has called
it. Such a judgment is a mark of inability to understand Poe's most
characteristic work, for in truth "Ulalume" is the extreme expression
at once of his critical theory and of his peculiar genius as a
poet. It was published in December of the same year in which Virginia
died in January. The poet's condition has already been described;
"Ulalume" is a marvelous expression of his mood at this time. It
depicts a soul worn out by long suffering, groping for courage and
hope, only to return again to "the door of a legended tomb." It is
true the movement is slow, impeded by the frequent repetitions, but so
the wearied mind, after nervous exhaustion, is "palsied and sere."
There is no appeal to the intellect, but this is characteristic of Poe
and appropriate to a mind numbed by protracted suffering. It is this
mood of wearied, benumbed, discouraged, hopeless hope, feebly seeking
for the "Lethean peace of the skies" only to find the mind inevitably
reverting to the "lost Ulalume," that finds expression. There is no
definite thought, because only the communication of feeling is
intended; there is no distinct setting, because the whole action is
spiritual; "the dim lake" and "dark tarn of Auber," "the ghoul-haunted
woodland of Weir," "the alley Titanic of cypress," are the
grief-stricken and fear-haunted places of the poet's own darkened
mind, while the ashen skies of "the lonesome October" are significant
enough of this "most immemorial year." The poem is a monody of
nerveless, exhausted grief. As such it must be read to be appreciated,
as such it must be judged, and so appreciated and so judged it is
absolutely unique and incomparable.
About a year later came "The Bells," wonderful for the music of its
verse, and the finest onomatopoetic poem in the language. Two days
after Poe's death appeared "Annabel Lee," a simple, sincere, and
beautiful ballad, a tribute to his dead wife. Last of all was printed
the brief "Eldorado," a fitting death-song for Poe, in which a gallant
knight sets out, "singing a song," "in search of Eldorado," only to
learn when youth and strength are gone that he must seek his goal
"down the Valley of the Shadow."
The tales, like the poems, are a real contribution to the world's
literature, but more strikingly so, since the type itself is
original. Poe, Hawthorne, and Irving are distinctly the pioneers in
the production of the modern short story, and neither has been
surpassed on his own ground; but Poe has been vastly the greater
influence in foreign countries, especially in France. Poe formed a new
conception of the short story, one which Professor Brander Matthews[1]
has treated formally and explicitly as a distinct literary form,
different from the story that is merely short. Without calling it a
distinct form, Poe implied the idea in a review of Hawthorne's
"Twice-Told Tales":
[Footnote 1: "The Philosophy of the Short-Story," Chapter IV of "Pen
and Ink."]
The ordinary novel is objectionable from its length.... As it cannot
be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense
force derivable from _totality_.... In the brief tale, however,
the author is enabled to carry out the fulness of his intention, be it
what it may. During the hour of perusal, the soul of the reader is at
the writer's control....
A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not
fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having
conceived with deliberate care a certain unique or single
_effect_ to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents--he
then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this
preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the
out-bringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In
the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the
tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preëstablished design.
This idea of a short story should be kept in mind in reading Poe's
works, for he applied his theory perfectly.
The stories are of greater variety than the poems. There are romances
of death whose themes are fear, horror, madness, catalepsy, premature
burial, torture, mesmerism, and revengeful cruelty; tales of weird
beauty; allegories of conscience; narratives of pseudo-science;
stories of analytical reasoning; descriptions of beautiful landscapes;
and what are usually termed "prose poems." He also wrote tales
grotesque, humorous, and satirical, most of which are failures. The
earlier tales are predominantly imaginative and emotional; most of the
later ones are predominantly intellectual. None of the tales touches
ordinary, healthy life; there is scarcely a suggestion of local color;
the humor is nearly always mechanical; there is little conversation
and the characters are never normal human beings. Although the stories
are strongly romantic in subject, plot, and setting, there is an
extraordinary realism in treatment, a minuteness and accuracy of
detail equaling the work of Defoe. This is one secret of the magical
art that not only transports us to the world of dream and vision where
the author's own soul roamed, but for the time makes it all real to
us.
Poe's finest tale, as a work of art, is "The Fall of the House of
Usher," which is as nearly perfect in its craftsmanship as human work
may be. It is a romance of death with a setting of profound gloom, and
is wrought out as a highly imaginative study in fear--a symphony in
which every touch blends into a perfect unity of effect. "Ligeia,"
perhaps standing next, incorporating "The Conqueror Worm" as its
keynote, portrays the terrific struggle of a woman's will against
death. "The Masque of the Red Death," a tale of the Spirit of
Pestilence and of Death victorious over human selfishness and power,
is a splendid study in somber color. "The Assignation," a romance of
Venice, is also splendid in coloring and rich in decorative effects,
presenting a luxury of sorrow culminating in romantic suicide.
"William Wilson" is an allegory of conscience personified in a double,
the forerunner of Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Other
conscience stories are "The Man of the Crowd"; "The Tell-Tale Heart,"
also depicting insanity; and "The Black Cat," of which the atmosphere
is horror. "The Adventures of One Hans Pfaal" and "The Balloon Hoax"
are examples of the pseudo-scientific tales, which attain their
verisimilitude by diverting attention from the improbability or
impossibility of the general incidents to the accuracy and naturalness
of details. In "The Descent into the Maëlstrom," scientific reasoning
is skillfully blended with imaginative strength, poetic description,
and stirring adventure. This type of story is clearly enough the
original of those of Jules Verne and similar writers. "The Murders in
the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter" are the pioneer detective
stories, Dupin the original Sherlock Holmes, and they remain the best
of their kind, unsurpassed in originality, ingenuity, and
plausibility. Another type of the story of analytical reasoning is
"The Gold-Bug," built around the solution of a cryptogram, but also
introducing an element of adventure. Poe's analytical power was real,
not a trick. If he made Legrand solve the cryptogram and boast his
ability to solve others more difficult, Poe himself solved scores sent
him in response to a public magazine challenge; if Dupin solved
mysteries that Poe invented for him, Poe himself wrote in "Marie
Roget," from newspaper accounts, the solution of a real murder
mystery, and astounded Dickens by outlining the entire plot of
"Barnaby Rudge" when only a few of the first chapters had been
published; if he wrote imaginatively of science, he in fact
demonstrated in "Maelzel's Chess Player" that a pretended automaton
was operated by a man. "Hop Frog" and "The Cask of Amontillado" are
old-world stories of revenge. "The Island of the Fay" and "The Domain
of Arnheim" are landscape studies, the one of calm loveliness, the
other of Oriental profusion and coloring. "Shadow" and "Silence" are
commonly classed as "prose poems," the former being one of Poe's most
effective productions. "Eleonora," besides having a story to tell, is
both a prose poem and a landscape study, and withal one of Poe's most
exquisite writings.
Although Poe was not a great critic, his critical work is by no means
valueless. He applied for the first time in America a thoroughgoing
scrutiny and able, fearless criticism to contemporary literature,
undoubtedly with good effect. His attacks on didacticism were
especially valuable. His strength as a critic lay in his artistic
temperament and in the incisive intellect that enabled him to analyze
the effects produced in his own creations and in those of others. His
weaknesses were extravagance; a mania for harping on plagiarism; lack
of spiritual insight, broad sympathies, and profound scholarship; and,
in general, the narrow range of his genius, which has already been
made sufficiently clear. His severity has been exaggerated, as he
often praised highly, probably erring more frequently by undue
laudation than by extreme severity. Though personal prejudice
sometimes crept into his work, especially in favor of women, yet on
the whole he was as fair and fearless as he claimed to be. Much of the
hasty, journalistic hack work is valueless, as might be expected, but
he wrote very suggestively of his art, and nearly all his judgments
have been sustained. Moreover, he met one supreme test of a critic in
recognizing unknown genius: Dickens he was among the first to appraise
as a great novelist; Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett (Browning) he
ranked among the great poets without hesitation; and at home he early
expressed a due appreciation of Hawthorne, Lowell, Longfellow, and
Bryant.
Poe's place, both in prose and poetry, is assured. His recognition
abroad has been clear and emphatic from the first, especially in
France, and to-day foreigners generally regard him as the greatest
writer we have produced, an opinion in which a number of our own
critics and readers concur. One's judgment in the matter will depend
upon the point of view and the standards adopted; it is too large a
subject to consider here, but if artistic craftsmanship be the
standard, certainly Hawthorne would be his only rival, and Hawthorne
was not also a poet. The question of exact relative rank, however, it
is neither possible nor important to settle. It is sufficient to say,
in the words of Professor Woodberry, "On the roll of our literature
Poe's name is inscribed among the few foremost, and in the world at
large his genius is established as valid among all men."
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The year after Poe's death there appeared "The Works of the Late Edgar
Allan Poe," with a Memoir, in two volumes, edited by R. W. Griswold
and published by J. S. Redfield, New York. The same editor and
publisher brought out a four-volume edition in 1856. Griswold had
suffered from Poe's sharp criticisms and had quarreled with him,
though later there was a reconciliation, and Poe himself selected
Griswold to edit his works. The biographer painted the dead author
very black indeed, and his account is now generally considered unfair.
In 1874-1875 "The Works of Edgar Allan Poe," with Memoir, edited by
John H. Ingram, were published in four volumes, in Edinburgh, and in
1876 in New York. Ingram represents the other extreme from Griswold,
attempting to defend practically everything that Poe was and did.
In 1884 A. C. Armstrong & Son, New York, brought out "The Works of
Edgar Allan Poe" in six volumes, with an Introduction and Memoir by
Richard Henry Stoddard. Stoddard is far from doing justice to Poe
either as man or as author.
Although Griswold's editing was poor, subsequent editions followed his
until 1895, when Professor George E. Woodberry and Mr. Edmund Clarence
Stedman published a new edition in ten volumes through Stone &
Kimball, Chicago (now published by Duffield & Company, New York). This
edition is incomparably superior to all its predecessors, going to the
original sources, and establishing an authentic text, corrected
slightly in quotations and punctuation. Professor Woodberry
contributed a Memoir, and Mr. Stedman admirable critical articles on
the poems and the tales. Scholarly notes, an extensive bibliography, a
number of portraits, and variorum readings of the poems, are included.
In 1902 T.Y. Crowell & Company, New York, issued "The Complete Works
of Edgar Allan Poe" in seventeen volumes, edited by Professor James
A. Harrison, including a biography and a volume of letters. This
edition contains much of Poe's criticism not published in previous
editions, and follows Poe's latest text exactly; complete variorum
readings are included.
In 1902 there also appeared "The Booklover's Arnheim" edition in ten
volumes, edited by Professor Charles F. Richardson and published by
G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York. This is mechanically the finest edition
of Poe's works.
The one-volume collections of poems and of tales are almost
innumerable, but nearly all are devoid of merit and poorly edited in
selection, text, and notes. (This does not refer to the small
collections for study in schools.) The best are the following: "Tales
of Mystery," Unit Book Publishing Company, New York (72 cents); "The
Best Tales of Edgar Allan Poe," edited with critical studies by
Sherwin Cody, A.C. McClurg & Company, Chicago ($1.00); "The Best Poems
and Essays of E. A. Poe," edited with biographical and critical
introduction by Sherwin Cody, McClurg ($1.00); "Poems of E. A. Poe,"
complete, edited and annotated by Charles W. Kent, The Macmillan
Company, New York (25 cents).
Professor George E. Woodberry contributed in 1885 a volume on Poe to
the American Men of Letters Series (Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston),
which is the ablest yet written. In scholarship and critical
appreciation it is all that could be desired, but unfortunately it is
unsympathetic. Mr. Woodberry assumed a coldly judicial attitude, in
which mood he is occasionally a little less than just to Poe's
character. Professor Harrison's biography, written for the Virginia
edition, is published separately by T.Y. Crowell & Company. It is very
full, and valuable for the mass of material supplied, but is not
discriminating in criticism or estimate of Poe's character.
Numerous magazine articles may be found by consulting the periodical
indexes. A number of suggestive short studies are to be found in the
text-books of American literature, such as those of Messrs. Trent,
Abernethy, Newcomer, and Wendell; and in the larger books of
Professors Richardson, Trent, and Wendell. One may also find acute and
valuable comment in such works as Professor Bliss Perry's "A Study of
Prose Fiction," and Professor Brander Matthews's "Philosophy of the
Short-Story" (published separately, and in "Pen and Ink").
Many of Poe's tales and poems have been translated into practically
all the important languages of modern Europe, including Greek. An
important French study of Poe, recently published, is mentioned in the
Preface.
POEMS
SONG
I saw thee on thy bridal day,
When a burning blush came o'er thee,
Though happiness around thee lay,
The world all love before thee;
And in thine eye a kindling light 5
(Whatever it might be)
Was all on Earth my aching sight
Of loveliness could see.
That blush, perhaps, was maiden shame:
As such it well may pass, 10
Though its glow hath raised a fiercer flame
In the breast of him, alas!
Who saw thee on that bridal day,
When that deep blush _would_ come o'er thee,
Though happiness around thee lay, 15
The world all love before thee.
SPIRITS OF THE DEAD
Thy soul shall find itself alone
'Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone;
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.
Be silent in that solitude, 5
Which is not loneliness--for then
The spirits of the dead, who stood
In life before thee, are again
In death around thee, and their will
Shall overshadow thee; be still. 10
The night, though clear, shall frown,
And the stars shall look not down
From their high thrones in the Heaven
With light like hope to mortals given,
But their red orbs, without beam, 15
To thy weariness shall seem
As a burning and a fever
Which would cling to thee forever.
Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish,
Now are visions ne'er to vanish; 20
From thy spirit shall they pass
No more, like dewdrops from the grass.
The breeze, the breath of God, is still,
And the mist upon the hill
Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken, 25
Is a symbol and a token.
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!
TO ----
I heed not that my earthly lot
Hath little of Earth in it,
That years of love have been forgot
In the hatred of a minute:
I mourn not that the desolate 5
Are happier, sweet, than I,
But that you sorrow for my fate
Who am a passer-by.
ROMANCE
Romance, who loves to nod and sing
With drowsy head and folded wing
Among the green leaves as they shake
Far down within some shadowy lake,
To me a painted paroquet 5
Hath been--a most familiar bird--
Taught me my alphabet to say,
To lisp my very earliest word
While in the wild-wood I did lie,
A child--with a most knowing eye. 10
Of late, eternal condor years
So shake the very heaven on high
With tumult as they thunder by,
I have no time for idle cares
Through gazing on the unquiet sky; 15
And when an hour with calmer wings
Its down upon my spirit flings,
That little time with lyre and rhyme
To while away--forbidden things--
My heart would feel to be a crime 20
Unless it trembled with the strings.
TO THE RIVER
Fair river! in thy bright, clear flow
Of crystal, wandering water,
Thou art an emblem of the glow
Of beauty--the unhidden heart,
The playful maziness of art 5
In old Alberto's daughter;
But when within thy wave she looks,
Which glistens then, and trembles,
Why, then, the prettiest of brooks
Her worshipper resembles; 10
For in his heart, as in thy stream,
Her image deeply lies--
His heart which trembles at the beam
Of her soul-searching eyes.
TO SCIENCE
A PROLOGUE TO "AL AARAAF"
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art,
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise, 5
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood 10
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind-tree?
TO HELEN
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicæan barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore. 5
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs, have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome. 10
Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land! 15
ISRAFEL
And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute,
and who has the sweetest voice of all God's creatures.--KORAN
In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
Whose heart-strings are a lute;
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,
And the giddy stars (so legends tell), 5
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
Of his voice, all mute.
Tottering above
In her highest noon,
The enamoured moon 10
Blushes with love,
While, to listen, the red levin
(With the rapid Pleiads, even,
Which were seven)
Pauses in Heaven. 15
And they say (the starry choir
And the other listening things)
That Israfeli's fire
Is owing to that lyre
By which he sits and sings, 20
The trembling living wire
Of those unusual strings.
But the skies that angel trod,
Where deep thoughts are a duty,
Where Love's a grown-up God, 25
Where the Houri glances are
Imbued with all the beauty
Which we worship in a star.
Therefore thou art not wrong,
Israfeli, who despisest 30
An unimpassioned song;
To thee the laurels belong,
Best bard, because the wisest:
Merrily live, and long!
The ecstasies above 35
With thy burning measures suit:
Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,
With the fervor of thy lute:
Well may the stars be mute!
Yes, Heaven is thine; but this 40
Is a world of sweets and sours;
Our flowers are merely--flowers,
And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
Is the sunshine of ours.
If I could dwell 45
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell 50
From my lyre within the sky.
THE CITY IN THE SEA
Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest. 5
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky 10
The melancholy waters lie.
No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently, 15
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free:
Up domes, up spires, up kingly halls,
Up fanes, up Babylon-like walls,
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers, 20
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie. 25
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.
There open fanes and gaping graves 30
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol's diamond eye,--
Not the gaily-jewelled dead,
Tempt the waters from their bed; 35
For no ripples curl, alas,
Along that wilderness of glass;
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea;
No heavings hint that winds have been 40
On seas less hideously serene!
But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave--there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide; 45
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven!
The waves have now a redder glow,
The hours are breathing faint and low;
And when, amid no earthly moans, 50
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.
THE SLEEPER
At midnight, in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.
An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out her golden rim,
And, softly dripping, drop by drop, 5
Upon the quiet mountain-top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley.
The rosemary nods upon the grave;
The lily lolls upon the wave; 10
Wrapping the fog about its breast,
The ruin moulders into rest;
Looking like Lethe, see! the lake
A conscious slumber seems to take,
And would not, for the world, awake. 15
All beauty sleeps!--and lo! where lies
Irene, with her destinies!
Oh lady bright! can it be right,
This window open to the night?
The wanton airs, from the tree-top, 20
Laughingly through the lattice drop;
The bodiless airs, a wizard rout,
Flit through thy chamber in and out,
And wave the curtain canopy
So fitfully, so fearfully, 25
Above the closed and fringéd lid
'Neath which thy slumb'ring soul lies hid,
That, o'er the floor and down the wall,
Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall.
Oh lady dear, hast thou no fear? 30
Why and what art thou dreaming here?
Sure thou art come o'er far-off seas,
A wonder to these garden trees!
Strange is thy pallor: strange thy dress:
Strange, above all, thy length of tress, 35
And this all solemn silentness!
The lady sleeps. Oh, may her sleep,
Which is enduring, so be deep!
Heaven have her in its sacred keep!
This chamber changed for one more holy, 40
This bed for one more melancholy,
I pray to God that she may lie
Forever with unopened eye,
While the pale sheeted ghosts go by!
My love, she sleeps. Oh, may her sleep, 45
As it is lasting, so be deep!
Soft may the worms about her creep!
Far in the forest, dim and old,
For her may some tall vault unfold:
Some vault that oft hath flung its black 50
And winged pannels fluttering back,
Triumphant, o'er the crested palls
Of her grand family funerals:
Some sepulchre, remote, alone,
Against whose portal she hath thrown, 55
In childhood, many an idle stone:
Some tomb from out whose sounding door
She ne'er shall force an echo more,
Thrilling to think, poor child of sin,
It was the dead who groaned within! 60
LENORE
Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever
Let the bell toll!--a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river;
And, Guy De Vere, hast _thou_ no tear?--weep now or never more!
See, on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!
Come, let the burial rite be read--the funeral song be sung, 5
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young,
A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.
"Wretches, ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her--that she died!
How _shall_ the ritual, then, be read? the requiem how be sung 10
By you--by yours, the evil eye,--by yours, the slanderous tongue
That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?"
_Peccanimus_; but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song
Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong.
The sweet Lenore hath gone before, with Hope that flew beside, 15
Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride:
For her, the fair and debonair, that now so lowly lies,
The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes;
The life still there, upon her hair--the death upon her eyes.
"Avaunt! avaunt! from friends below, the indignant ghost is riven-- 20
From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven--
From grief and groan, to a golden throne, beside the King of Heaven!
Let no bell toll, then,--lest her soul, amid its hallowed mirth,
Should catch the note as it doth float up from the damnéd Earth!
And I!--to-night my heart is light!--No dirge will I upraise, 25
But waft the angel on her flight with a Pæan of old days."
THE VALLEY OF UNREST
Once it smiled a silent dell
Where the people did not dwell;
They had gone unto the wars,
Trusting to the mild-eyed stars,
Nightly, from their azure towers, 5
To keep watch above the flowers,
In the midst of which all day
The red sunlight lazily lay.
Now each visitor shall confess
The sad valley's restlessness. 10
Nothing there is motionless,
Nothing save the airs that brood
Over the magic solitude.
Ah, by no wind are stirred those trees
That palpitate like the chill seas 15
Around the misty Hebrides!
Ah, by no wind those clouds are driven
That rustle through the unquiet Heaven
Uneasily, from morn till even,
Over the violets there that lie 20
In myriad types of the human eye,
Over the lilies there that wave
And weep above a nameless grave!
They wave:--from out their fragrant tops
Eternal dews come down in drops. 25
They weep:--from off their delicate stems
Perennial, tears descend in gems.
THE COLISEUM
Type of the antique Rome! Rich reliquary
Of lofty contemplation left to Time
By buried centuries of pomp and power!
At length--at length--after so many days
Of weary pilgrimage and burning thirst 5
(Thirst for the springs of lore that in thee lie),
I kneel, an altered and an humble man,
Amid thy shadows, and so drink within
My very soul thy grandeur, gloom, and glory.
Vastness, and Age, and Memories of Eld! 10
Silence, and Desolation, and dim Night!
I feel ye now, I feel ye in your strength,
O spells more sure than e'er Judæan king
Taught in the gardens of Gethsemane!
O charms more potent than the rapt Chaldee 15
Ever drew down from out the quiet stars!
Here, where a hero fell, a column falls!
Here, where the mimic eagle glared in gold,
A midnight vigil holds the swarthy bat;
Here, where the dames of Rome their gilded hair 20
Waved to the wind, now wave the reed and thistle;
Here, where on golden throne the monarch lolled,
Glides, spectre-like, unto his marble home,
Lit by the wan light of the hornéd moon,
The swift and silent lizard of the stones. 25
But stay! these walls, these ivy-clad arcades,
These mouldering plinths, these sad and blackened shafts,
These vague entablatures, this crumbling frieze,
These shattered cornices, this wreck, this ruin,
These stones--alas! these gray stones--are they all, 30
All of the famed and the colossal left
By the corrosive Hours to Fate and me?
"Not all"--the Echoes answer me--"not all!
Prophetic sounds and loud arise forever
From us, and from all Ruin, unto the wise, 35
As melody from Memnon to the Sun.
We rule the hearts of mightiest men--we rule
With a despotic sway all giant minds.
We are not impotent, we pallid stones:
Not all our power is gone, not all our fame, 40
Not all the magic of our high renown,
Not all the wonder that encircles us,
Not all the mysteries that in us lie,
Not all the memories that hang upon
And cling around about us as a garment, 45
Clothing us in a robe of more than glory."
HYMN
At morn--at noon--at twilight dim,
Maria! thou hast heard my hymn.
In joy and woe, in good and ill,
Mother of God, be with me still!
When the hours flew brightly by, 5
And not a cloud obscured the sky,
My soul, lest it should truant be,
Thy grace did guide to thine and thee.
Now, when storms of fate o'ercast
Darkly my Present and my Past, 10
Let my Future radiant shine
With sweet hopes of thee and thine!
TO ONE IN PARADISE
Thou wast all that to me, love,
For which my soul did pine:
A green isle in the sea, love,
A fountain and a shrine
All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers, 5
And all the flowers were mine.
Ah, dream too bright to last!
Ah, starry Hope, that didst arise
But to be overcast!
A voice from out the Future cries, 10
"On! on!"--but o'er the Past
(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies
Mute, motionless, aghast.
For, alas! alas! with me
The light of Life is o'er! 15
No more--no more--no more--
(Such language holds the solemn sea
To the sands upon the shore)
Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree,
Or the stricken eagle soar. 20
And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy gray eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams--
In what ethereal dances, 25
By what eternal streams.
TO F----
Beloved! amid the earnest woes
That crowd around my earthly path
(Drear path, alas! where grows
Not even one lonely rose),
My soul at least a solace hath 5
In dreams of thee, and therein knows
An Eden of bland repose.
And thus thy memory is to me
Like some enchanted far-off isle
In some tumultuous sea,-- 10
Some ocean throbbing far and free
With storms, but where meanwhile
Serenest skies continually
Just o'er that one bright island smile.
TO F----S S. O----D
Thou wouldst be loved?--then let thy heart
From its present pathway part not:
Being everything which now thou art,
Be nothing which thou art not.
So with the world thy gentle ways, 5
Thy grace, thy more than beauty,
Shall be an endless theme of praise,
And love--a simple duty.
TO ZANTE
Fair isle, that from the fairest of all flowers
Thy gentlest of all gentle names dost take,
How many memories of what radiant hours
At sight of thee and thine at once awake!
How many scenes of what departed bliss, 5
How many thoughts of what entombéd hopes,
How many visions of a maiden that is
No more--no more upon thy verdant slopes!
_No more!_ alas, that magical sad sound
Transforming all! Thy charms shall please no more, 10
Thy memory no more. Accurséd ground!
Henceforth I hold thy flower-enamelled shore,
O hyacinthine isle! O purple Zante!
"Isola d'oro! Fior di Levante!"
BRIDAL BALLAD
The ring is on my hand,
And the wreath is on my brow;
Satins and jewels grand
Are all at my command,
And I am happy now. 5
And my lord he loves me well;
But, when first he breathed his vow,
I felt my bosom swell,
For the words rang as a knell,
And the voice seemed his who fell 10
In the battle down the dell,
And who is happy now.
But he spoke to reassure me,
And he kissed my pallid brow,
While a reverie came o'er me, 15
And to the church-yard bore me,
And I sighed to him before me,
Thinking him dead D'Elormie,
"Oh, I am happy now!"
And thus the words were spoken, 20
And this the plighted vow;
And though my faith be broken,
And though my heart be broken,
Here is a ring, as token
That I am happy now! 25
Would God I could awaken!
For I dream I know not how,
And my soul is sorely shaken
Lest an evil step be taken,
Lest the dead who is forsaken 30
May not be happy now.
SILENCE
There are some qualities, some incorporate things,
That have a double life, which thus is made
A type of that twin entity which springs
From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.
There is a twofold Silence--sea and shore, 5
Body and soul. One dwells in lonely places,
Newly with grass o'ergrown; some solemn graces,
Some human memories and tearful lore,
Render him terrorless: his name's "No More."
He is the corporate Silence: dread him not: 10
No power hath he of evil in himself;
But should some urgent fate (untimely lot!)
Bring thee to meet his shadow (nameless elf,
That haunteth the lone regions where hath trod
No foot of man), commend thyself to God! 15
THE CONQUEROR WORM
Lo! 't is a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years.
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre to see 5
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low, 10
And hither and thither fly;
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their condor wings 15
Invisible Woe.
That motley drama--oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore
By a crowd that seize it not, 20
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot;
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
But see amid the mimic rout 25
A crawling shape, intrude:
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes--it writhes!--with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food, 30
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
Out--out are the lights--out all!
And over each quivering form
The curtain, a funeral pall, 35
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm. 40
DREAM-LAND
By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly 5
From an ultimate dim Thule:
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of Space--out of Time.
Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And chasms and caves and Titan woods, 10
With forms that no man can discover
For the tears that drip all over;
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore;
Seas that restlessly aspire, 15
Surging, unto skies of fire;
Lakes that endlessly outspread
Their lone waters, lone and dead,--
Their still waters, still and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily. 20
By the lakes that thus outspread
Their lone waters, lone and dead,--
Their sad waters, sad and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily;
By the mountains--near the river 25
Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever;
By the gray woods, by the swamp
Where the toad and the newt encamp;
By the dismal tarns and pools
Where dwell the Ghouls; 30
By each spot the most unholy,
In each nook most melancholy,--
There the traveller meets aghast
Sheeted Memories of the Past:
Shrouded forms that start and sigh 35
As they pass the wanderer by,
White-robed forms of friends long given,
In agony, to the Earth--and Heaven.
For the heart whose woes are legion
'T is a peaceful, soothing region; 40
For the spirit that walks in shadow
'T is--oh, 't is an Eldorado!
But the traveller, travelling through it,
May not--dare not openly view it;
Never its mysteries are exposed 45
To the weak human eye unclosed;
So wills its King, who hath forbid
The uplifting of the fringéd lid;
And thus the sad Soul that here passes
Beholds it but through darkened glasses. 50
By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have wandered home but newly 55
From this ultimate dim Thule.
THE RAVEN
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of, forgotten lore,--
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door: 5
Only this and nothing more."
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;--vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow--sorrow for the lost Lenore, 10
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore:
Nameless here forevermore.
And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me--filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating 15
"'T is some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door,
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door:
This it is and nothing more."
Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; 20
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you"--here I opened wide the door:--
Darkness there and nothing more.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, 25
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore:"
Merely this and nothing more. 30
Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
"Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore;
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore: 35
'T is the wind and nothing more."
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door, 40
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door:
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,--
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven, 45
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore:
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning--little relevancy bore; 50
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door,
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as "Nevermore."
But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only 55
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered, not a feather then he fluttered,
Till I scarcely more than muttered,--"Other friends have flown before;
On the morrow _he_ will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before."
Then the bird said, "Nevermore." 60
Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore 65
Of 'Never--nevermore.'"
But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore, 70
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking "Nevermore."
This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining 75
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er
_She_ shall press, ah, nevermore!
Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor. 80
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite--respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! prophet still, if bird or devil! 85
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted--
On this home by Horror haunted--tell me truly, I implore:
Is there--_is_ there balm in Gilead?--tell me--tell me, I implore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." 90
"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil--prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us, by that God we both adore,
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore:
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore." 95
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
"Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting:
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! quit the bust above my door! 100
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, 105
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor:
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted--nevermore.
EULALIE
I dwelt alone
In a world of moan,
And my soul was a stagnant tide,
Till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride,
Till the yellow-haired young Eulalie became my smiling bride. 5
Ah, less--less bright
The stars of the night
Than the eyes of the radiant girl!
And never a flake
That the vapor can make 10
With the moon-tints of purple and pearl
Can vie with the modest Eulalie's most unregarded curl,
Can compare with the bright-eyed Eulalie's most humble and careless curl.
Now doubt--now pain
Come never again, 15
For her soul gives me sigh for sigh;
And all day long
Shines, bright and strong,
Astarte within the sky,
While ever to her dear Eulalie upturns her matron eye, 20
While ever to her young Eulalie upturns her violet eye.
TO M.L.S--
Of all who hail thy presence as the morning;
Of all to whom thine absence is the night,
The blotting utterly from out high heaven
The sacred sun; of all who, weeping, bless thee
Hourly for hope, for life, ah! above all, 5
For the resurrection of deep-buried faith
In truth, in virtue, in humanity;
Of all who, on despair's unhallowed bed
Lying down to die, have suddenly arisen
At thy soft-murmured words, "Let there be light!" 10
At the soft-murmured words that were fulfilled
In the seraphic glancing of thine eyes;
Of all who owe thee most, whose gratitude
Nearest resembles worship, oh, remember
The truest, the most fervently devoted, 15
And think that these weak lines are written by him:
By him, who, as he pens them, thrills to think
His spirit is communing with an angel's.
ULALUME
The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crispéd and sere,
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year; 5
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir:
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
Here once, through an alley Titanic 10
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul--
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriac rivers that roll,
As the lavas that restlessly roll 15
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole,
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.
Our talk had been serious and sober, 20
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere,
Our memories were treacherous and sere,
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year,
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!) 25
We noted not the dim lake of Auber
(Though once we had journeyed down here),
Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber
Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
And now, as the night was senescent 30
And star-dials pointed to morn,
As the star-dials hinted of morn,
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent 35
Arose with a duplicate horn,
Astarte's bediamonded crescent
Distinct with its duplicate horn.
And I said--"She is warmer than Dian:
She rolls through an ether of sighs, 40
She revels in a region of sighs:
She has seen that the tears are not dry on
These cheeks, where the worm never dies,
And has come past the stars of the Lion
To point us the path to the skies, 45
To the Lethean peace of the skies:
Come up, in despite of the Lion,
To shine on us with her bright eyes:
Come up through the lair of the Lion,
With love in her luminous eyes." 50
But Psyche, uplifting her finger,
Said--"Sadly this star I mistrust:
Her pallor I strangely mistrust:
Oh, hasten!--oh, let us not linger!
Oh, fly!--let us fly!--for we must." 55
In terror she spoke, letting sink her
Wings until they trailed in the dust;
In agony sobbed, letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust,
Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust. 60
I replied--"This is nothing but dreaming:
Let us on by this tremulous light!
Let us bathe in this crystalline light!
Its sibyllic splendor is beaming
With hope and in beauty to-night: 65
See, it flickers up the sky through the night!
Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,
And be sure it will lead us aright:
We safely may trust to a gleaming
That cannot but guide us aright, 70
Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night."
Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom,
And conquered her scruples and gloom;
And we passed to the end of the vista, 75
But were stopped by the door of a tomb,
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said--"What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?"
She replied--"Ulalume--Ulalume-- 80
'T is the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"
Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crisped and sere,
As the leaves that were withering and sere,
And I cried--"It was surely October 85
On this very night of last year
That I journeyed--I journeyed down here,
That I brought a dread burden down here:
On this night of all nights in the year,
Ah, what demon has tempted me here? 90
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber,
This misty mid region of Weir:
Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."
TO ----
Not long ago the writer of these lines,
In the mad pride of intellectuality,
Maintained "the power of words"--denied that ever
A thought arose within the human brain
Beyond the utterance of the human tongue: 5
And now, as if in mockery of that boast,
Two words, two foreign soft dissyllables,
Italian tones, made only to be murmured
By angels dreaming in the moonlit "dew
That hangs like chains of pearl on Hermon hill," 10
Have stirred from out the abysses of his heart
Unthought-like thoughts, that are the souls of thought,--
Richer, far wilder, far diviner visions
Than even the seraph harper, Israfel
(Who has "the sweetest voice of all God's creatures"), 15
Could hope to utter. And I--my spells are broken;
The pen falls powerless from my shivering hand;
With thy dear name as text, though hidden by thee,
I cannot write--I cannot speak or think--
Alas, I cannot feel; for't is not feeling,-- 20
This standing motionless upon the golden
Threshold of the wide-open gate of dreams,
Gazing entranced adown the gorgeous vista,
And thrilling as I see, upon the right,
Upon the left, and all the way along, 25
Amid empurpled vapors, far away
To where the prospect terminates--thee only.
AN ENIGMA
"Seldom we find," says Solomon Don Dunce,
"Half an idea in the profoundest sonnet.
Through all the flimsy things we see at once
As easily as through a Naples bonnet--
Trash of all trash! how can a lady don it? 5
Yet heavier far than your Petrarchan stuff,
Owl-downy nonsense that the faintest puff
Twirls into trunk-paper the while you con it."
And, veritably, Sol is right enough.
The general tuckermanities are arrant 10
Bubbles, ephemeral and _so_ transparent;
But _this_ is, now, you may depend upon it,
Stable, opaque, immortal--all by dint
Of the dear names that lie concealed within 't.
TO HELEN.
I saw thee once--once only--years ago:
I must not say how many--but not many.
It was a July midnight; and from out
A full-orbed moon, that, like thine own soul, soaring
Sought a precipitate pathway up through heaven, 5
There fell a silvery-silken veil of light,
With quietude and sultriness and slumber,
Upon the upturned faces of a thousand
Roses that grew in an enchanted garden,
Where no wind dared to stir, unless on tiptoe: 10
Fell on the upturned faces of these roses
That gave out, in return for the love-light,
Their odorous souls in an ecstatic death:
Fell on the upturned faces of these roses
That smiled and died in this parterre, enchanted 15
By thee, and by the poetry of thy presence.
Clad all in white, upon a violet bank
I saw thee half reclining; while the moon
Fell on the upturned faces of the roses,
And on thine own, upturned--alas, in sorrow! 20
Was it not Fate, that, on this July midnight--
Was it not Fate (whose name is also Sorrow)
That bade me pause before that garden-gate
To breathe the incense of those slumbering roses?
No footsteps stirred: the hated world all slept, 25
Save only thee and me--O Heaven! O God!
How my heart beats in coupling those two words!--
Save only thee and me. I paused, I looked,
And in an instant all things disappeared.
(Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!) 30
The pearly lustre of the moon went out:
The mossy banks and the meandering paths,
The happy flowers and the repining trees,
Were seen no more: the very roses' odors
Died in the arms of the adoring airs. 35
All, all expired save thee--save less than thou:
Save only the divine light in thine eyes,
Save but the soul in thine uplifted eyes:
I saw but them--they were the world to me:
I saw but them, saw only them for hours, 40
Saw only them until the moon went down.
What wild heart-histories seem to lie enwritten
Upon those crystalline, celestial spheres;
How dark a woe, yet how sublime a hope;
How silently serene a sea of pride; 45
How daring an ambition; yet how deep,
How fathomless a capacity for love!
But now, at length, dear Dian sank from sight,
Into a western couch of thunder-cloud;
And thou, a ghost, amid the entombing trees 50
Didst glide away. Only thine eyes remained:
They would not go--they never yet have gone;
Lighting my lonely pathway home that night,
They have not left me (as my hopes have) since;
They follow me--they lead me through the years; 55
They are my ministers--yet I their slave;
Their office is to illumine and enkindle--
My duty, to be saved by their bright light,
And purified in their electric fire,
And sanctified in their elysian fire, 60
They fill my soul with beauty (which is hope),
And are, far up in heaven, the stars I kneel to
In the sad, silent watches of my night;
While even in the meridian glare of day
I see them still--two sweetly scintillant 65
Venuses, unextinguished by the sun.
A VALENTINE
For her this rhyme is penned, whose luminous eyes,
Brightly expressive as the twins of Leda,
Shall find her own sweet name, that nestling lies
Upon the page, enwrapped from every reader.
Search narrowly the lines! they hold a treasure 5
Divine, a talisman, an amulet
That must be worn at heart. Search well the measure--
The word--the syllables. Do not forget
The trivialest point, or you may lose your labor:
And yet there is in this no Gordian knot 10
Which one might not undo without a sabre,
If one could merely comprehend the plot.
Enwritten upon the leaf where now are peering
Eyes scintillating soul, there lie _perdus_
Three eloquent words oft uttered in the hearing 15
Of poets, by poets--as the name is a poet's, too.
Its letters, although naturally lying
Like the knight Pinto, Mendez Ferdinando,
Still form a synonym for Truth.--Cease trying!
You will not read the riddle, though you do the best you can do. 20
FOR ANNIE
Thank Heaven! the crisis,
The danger, is past,
And the lingering illness
Is over at last,
And the fever called "Living" 5
Is conquered at last.
Sadly I know
I am shorn of my strength,
And no muscle I move
As I lie at full length: 10
But no matter!--I feel
I am better at length.
And I rest so composedly
Now, in my bed,
That any beholder 15
Might fancy me dead,
Might start at beholding me,
Thinking me dead.
The moaning and groaning,
The sighing and sobbing, 20
Are quieted now,
With that horrible throbbing
At heart:--ah, that horrible,
Horrible throbbing!
The sickness, the nausea, 25
The pitiless pain,
Have ceased, with the fever
That maddened my brain,
With the fever called "Living"
That burned in my brain. 30
And oh! of all tortures,
That torture the worst
Has abated--the terrible
Torture of thirst
For the naphthaline river 35
Of Passion accurst:
I have drank of a water
That quenches all thirst:
Of a water that flows,
With a lullaby sound, 40
From a spring but a very few
Feet under ground,
From a cavern not very far
Down under ground.
And ah! let it never 45
Be foolishly said
That my room it is gloomy,
And narrow my bed;
For man never slept
In a different bed: 50
And, _to sleep_, you must slumber
In just such a bed.
My tantalized spirit
Here blandly reposes,
Forgetting, or never 55
Regretting, its roses:
Its old agitations
Of myrtles and roses;
For now, while so quietly
Lying, it fancies 60
A holier odor
About it, of pansies:
A rosemary odor,
Commingled with pansies,
With rue and the beautiful 65
Puritan pansies.
And so it lies happily,
Bathing in many
A dream of the truth
And the beauty of Annie, 70
Drowned in a bath
Of the tresses of Annie.
She tenderly kissed me,
She fondly caressed,
And then I fell gently 75
To sleep on her breast,
Deeply to sleep
From the heaven of her breast.
When the light was extinguished,
She covered me warm, 80
And she prayed to the angels
To keep me from harm,
To the queen of the angels
To shield me from harm.
And I lie so composedly 85
Now, in my bed,
(Knowing her love)
That you fancy me dead;
And I rest so contentedly
Now, in my bed, 90
(With her love at my breast)
That you fancy me dead,
That you shudder to look at me,
Thinking me dead.
But my heart it is brighter 95
Than all of the many
Stars in the sky,
For it sparkles with Annie:
It glows with the light
Of the love of my Annie, 100
With the thought of the light
Of the eyes of my Annie.
THE BELLS
I
Hear the sledges with the bells,
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night! 5
While the stars, that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline deligit;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme, 10
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells--
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
II
Hear the mellow wedding bells, 15
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!
From the molten-golden notes, 20
And all in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells, 25
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! how it tells
Of the rapture that impels 30
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells--
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells! 35
III
Hear the loud alarum bells,
Brazen bells!
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright! 40
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire, 45
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now--now to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon. 50
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!
How they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour 55
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear it fully knows,
By the twanging
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows; 60
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling
And the wrangling,
How the danger sinks and swells,--
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells, 65
Of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells--
In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!
IV
Hear the tolling of the bells, 70
Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone! 75
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people--ah, the people,
They that dwell up in the steeple, 80
All alone,
And who tolling, tolling, tolling
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone-- 85
They are neither man nor woman,
They are neither brute nor human,
They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls, 90
Rolls
A pæan from the bells;
And his merry bosom swells
With the pæan of the bells,
And he dances, and he yells: 95
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the pæan of the bells,
Of the bells:
Keeping time, time, time, 100
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells--
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time, 105
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells:
To the tolling of the bells, 110
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells--
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.
ANNABEL LEE
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought 5
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love,
I and my Annabel Lee; 10
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling 15
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea. 20
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me;
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night, 25
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we,
Of many far wiser than we;
And neither the angels in heaven above, 30
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; 35
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling--my darling--my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea, 40
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
TO MY MOTHER
Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,
The angels, whispering to one another,
Can find among their burning terms of love--
None so devotional as that of "Mother,"
Therefore by that dear name I long have called you-- 5
You who are more than mother unto me,
And fill my heart of hearts where Death installed you
In setting my Virginia's spirit free.
My mother, my own mother, who died early,
Was but the mother of myself; but you 10
Are mother to the one I loved so dearly,
And thus are dearer than the mother I knew
By that infinity with which my wife
Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.
ELDORADO
Gayly bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song, 5
In search of Eldorado.
But he grew old,
This knight so bold,
And o'er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found 10
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.
And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow: 15
"Shadow," said he,
"Where can it be,
This land of Eldorado?"
"Over the Mountains
Of the Moon, 20
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied,
"If you seek for Eldorado!"
TALES
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER
Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitôt qu'on le touche il résonne.
Béranger
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of
the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had
been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of
country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew
on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it
was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of
insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the
feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because
poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the
sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon
the scene before me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscape
features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye-like
windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks of
decayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to
no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the
reveller upon opium: the bitter lapse into everyday life, the hideous
dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a
sickening of the heart, an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no
goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the
sublime. What was it--I paused to think--what was it that so unnerved
me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all
insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded
upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the
unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there _are_
combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of
thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among
considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a
mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the
details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to
annihilate, its capacity for sorrowful impression; and acting upon
this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and
lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed
down--but with a shudder even more thrilling than before--upon the
remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly
tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a
sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of
my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our
last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant
part of the country--a letter from him--which in its wildly
inportunate nature had admitted of no other than a personal reply.
The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute
bodily illness, of a mental disorder which oppressed him, and of an
earnest desire to see me, as his best and indeed his only personal
friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society,
some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this,
and much more, was said--it was the apparent _heart_ that went
with his request--which allowed me no room for hesitation; and I
accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular
summons.
Although as boys we had been even intimate associates, yet I really
knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and
habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been
noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament,
displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art,
and manifested of late in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive
charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies,
perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognizable
beauties, of musical science. I had learned, too, the very remarkable
fact that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had
put forth at no period any enduring branch; in other words, that the
entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with
very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this
deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect
keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character
of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which
the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the
other--it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the
consequent undeviating transmission from sire to son of the patrimony
with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge
the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal
appellation of the "House of Usher"--an appellation which seemed to
include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family
and the family mansion.
I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment,
that of looking down within the tarn, had been to deepen the first
singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of
the rapid increase of my superstition--for why should I not so term
it?--served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have
long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as
a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I
again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the
pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy--a fancy so ridiculous,
indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the
sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as
really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung
an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity: an
atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had
reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent
tarn: a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly
discernible, and leaden-hued.
Shaking off from my spirit what _must_ have been a dream, I
scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal
feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The
discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the
whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet
all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of
the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency
between its still perfect adaptation of parts and the crumbling
condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that
reminded one of the specious totality of old wood-work which has
rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance
from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of
extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of
instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have
discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the
roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag
direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.
Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A
servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of
the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence,
through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio
of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know
not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already
spoken. While the objects around me--while the carvings of the
ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of
the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as
I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been
accustomed from my infancy--while I hesitated not to acknowledge how
familiar was all this--I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were
the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up. On one of the
staircases, I met the physician of the family. His countenance, I
thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. He
accosted me with trepidation and passed on. The valet now threw open
a door and ushered me into the presence of his master.
The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The
windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from
the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from
within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the
trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more
prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach
the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and
fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general
furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books
and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any
vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of
sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and
pervaded all.
Upon my entrance, Usher arose from a sofa on which he had been lying
at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much
in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality--of the
constrained effort of the _ennuyé_ man of the world. A glance,
however, at his countenance, convinced me of his perfect sincerity. We
sat down; and for some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him
with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely man had never before
so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It
was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of
the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet
the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A
cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous
beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a
surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but
with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely
moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral
energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these
features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the
temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten.
And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these
features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much
of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of
the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things
startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to
grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated
rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort,
connect its arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.
In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence,
an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of
feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy, an
excessive nervous agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed
been prepared, no less by his letter than by reminiscences of certain
boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical
conformation and temperament. His action was alternately vivacious and
sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the
animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of
energetic concision--that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and
hollow-sounding enunciation--that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly
modulated guttural utterance--which may be observed in the lost
drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of
his most intense excitement.
It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest
desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He
entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of
his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and
one for which he despaired to find a remedy--a mere nervous affection,
he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It
displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as
he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the
terms and the general manner of the narration had their weight. He
suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid
food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain
texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were
tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds,
and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with
horror.
To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. "I
shall perish," said he, "I _must_ perish in this deplorable
folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the
events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I
shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which
may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed,
no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect--in terror. In
this unnerved--in this pitiable condition, I feel that the period will
sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together,
in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR."
I learned moreover at intervals, and through broken and equivocal
hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was
enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the
dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never
ventured forth--in regard to an influence whose supposititious force
was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be re-stated--an influence
which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family
mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his
spirit--an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets,
and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length,
brought about upon the morale of his existence.
He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the
peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more
natural and far more palpable origin--to the severe and long-continued
illness, indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution, of a
tenderly beloved sister--his sole companion for long years, his last
and only relative on earth. "Her decease," he said, with a bitterness
which I can never forget, "would leave him (him the hopeless and the
frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers." While he spoke,
the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed slowly through a
remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my
presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not
unmingled with dread, and yet I found it impossible to account for
such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed
her retreating steps. When a door, at length, closed upon her, my
glance sought instinctively and eagerly the countenance of the
brother; but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could only
perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the
emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears.
The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her
physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person,
and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical
character, were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily
borne up against the pressure of her malady, and had not betaken
herself finally to bed; but, on the closing in of the evening of my
arrival at the house, she succumbed (as her brother told me at night
with inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the
destroyer; and I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person
would thus probably be the last I should obtain--that the lady, at
least while living, would be seen by me no more.
For several days ensuing, her name was unmentioned by either Usher or
myself; and during this period I was busied in earnest endeavors to
alleviate the melancholy of my friend. We painted and read together;
or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his
speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy
admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the
more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a
mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured
forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one
unceasing radiation of gloom.
I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus
spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail
in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the
studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the
way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous
lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my
ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular
perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von
Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and
which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses at which I shuddered the
more thrillingly because I shuddered knowing not why;--from these
paintings (vivid as their images now are before me) I would in vain
endeavor to educe more than a small portion which should lie within
the compass of merely written words. By the utter simplicity, by the
nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever
mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at
least, in the circumstances then surrounding me, there arose, out of
the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon
his canvas, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I
ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too
concrete reveries of Fuseli.
One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so
rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth, although
feebly, in words. A small picture presented the interior of an
immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls,
smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory
points of the design served well to convey the idea that this
excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the
earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and
no torch or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a
flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a
ghastly and inappropriate splendor.
I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve
which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the
exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps,
the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar,
which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his
performances. But the fervid _facility_ of his impromptus could
not be so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the notes,
as well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently
accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of
that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I have
previously alluded as observable only in particular moments of the
highest artificial excitement. The words of one of these rhapsodies I
have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed
with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic current of its
meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full
consciousness, on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty
reason upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled "The Haunted
Palace," ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus:--
I
In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace--
Radiant palace--reared its head.
In the monarch Thought's dominion,
It stood there;
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair.
II
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow,
(This--all this--was in the olden
Time long ago)
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A wingéd odor went away.
III
Wanderers in that happy valley
Through two luminous windows saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute's well-tunéd law,
Round about a throne where, sitting,
Porphyrogene,
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.
IV
And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.
V
But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)
And round about his home the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.
VI
And travellers now within that valley
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh--but smile no more.
I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad led us into
a train of thought, wherein there became manifest an opinion of
Usher's which I mention not so much on account of its novelty, (for
other men[1] haye thought thus,) as on account of the pertinacity with
which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of
the sentience of all vegetable things. But in his disordered fancy the
idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under
certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words
to express the full extent, or the earnest _abandon_ of his
persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously
hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his fore-fathers. The
conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in
the method of collocation of these stones--in the order of their
arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread
them, and of the decayed trees which stood around--above all, in the
long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its
reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its evidence--the
evidence of the sentience--was to be seen, he said (and I here started
as he spoke), in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere
of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was
discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible
influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family,
and which made _him_ what I now saw him--what he was. Such
opinions need no comment, and I will make none.
[Footnote 1: Watson, Dr. Percival, Spallanzani, and especially the
Bishop of Landaff.--See "Chemical Essays," Vol. V.]
Our books--the books which, for years, had formed no small portion of
the mental existence of the invalid--were, as might be supposed, in
strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We pored together over
such works as the Ververt and Chartreuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of
Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean
Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of
Jean D'Indaginé, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue
Distance of Tieck; and the City of the Sun of Campanella. One favorite
volume was a small octavo edition of the _Directorium
Inquisitorum_, by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were
passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and Ægipans,
over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight,
however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious
book in quarto Gothic--the manual of a forgotten church--the
_Vigilice Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiæ Maguntinæ_.
I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its
probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when one evening, having
informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he stated his
intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight, (previously to its
final interment,) in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls
of the building. The worldly reason, however, assigned for this
singular proceeding, was one which I did not feel at liberty to
dispute. The brother had been led to his resolution (so he told me)
by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of the
deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her
medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the
burial-ground of the family. I will not deny that when I called to
mind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met upon the
staircase, on the day of my arrival at the house, I had no desire to
oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no means an
unnatural, precaution.
At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements
for the temporary entombment. The body having been encoffined, we two
alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it (and which
had been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its
oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation)
was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light;
lying, at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the
building in which was my own sleeping apartment. It had been used,
apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a
donjon-keep, and in later days as a place of deposit for powder, or
some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor,
and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it,
were carefully sheathed with copper. The door, of massive iron, had
been, also, similarly protected. Its immense weight caused an
unusually sharp grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges.
Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region
of horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the
coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude
between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and
Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words
from which I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and
that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed
between them. Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead--for
we could not regard her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed
the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies
of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush
upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile
upon the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed
down the lid, and, having secured the door of iron, made our way, with
toil, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of
the house.
And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable
change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His
ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected
or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal,
and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if
possible, a more ghastly hue--but the luminousness of his eye had
utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard
no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually
characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought
his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive
secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage. At
times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable
vagaries of madness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long
hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to
some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition
terrified--that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet
certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet
impressive superstitions.
It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the
seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within
the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep
came not near my couch, while the hours waned and waned away. I
struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me. I
endeavored to believe that much, if not all, of what I felt was due to
the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room--of the
dark and tattered draperies which, tortured into motion by the breath
of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and
rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were
fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and at
length there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless
alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself
upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness
of the chamber, hearkened--I know not why, except that an instinctive
spirit prompted me--to certain low and indefinite sounds which came,
through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not
whence. Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable
yet unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste, (for I felt that I
should sleep no more during the night,) and endeavored to arouse
myself from the pitiable condition into which I had fallen, by pacing
rapidly to and fro through the apartment.
I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light step on an
adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognized it
as that of Usher. In an instant afterward he rapped with a gentle
touch at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as
usual, cadaverously wan--but, moreover, there was a species of mad
hilarity in his eyes--an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole
demeanor. His air appalled me--but anything was preferable to the
solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence
as a relief.
"And you have not seen it?" he said abruptly, after having stared
about him for some moments in silence--"you have not then seen
it?--but, stay! you shall." Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded
his lamp, he hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely open
to the storm.
The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our
feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and
one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had
apparently collected its force in our vicinity; for there were
frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the wind; and the
exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon
the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-like
velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each
other, without passing away into the distance. I say that even their
exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this; yet we had no
glimpse of the moon or stars, nor was there any flashing forth of the
lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated
vapor, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were
glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly
visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the
mansion.
"You must not--you shall not behold this!" said I, shudderingly, to
Usher, as I led him with a gentle violence from the window to a
seat. "These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical
phenomena not uncommon--or it may be that they have their ghastly
origin in the rank miasma of the tarn. Let us close this casement; the
air is chilling and dangerous to your frame. Here is one of your
favorite romances. I will read, and you shall listen;--and so we will
pass away this terrible night together."
The antique volume which I had taken up was the "Mad Trist" of Sir
Launcelot Canning; but I had called it a favorite of Usher's more in
sad jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its
uncouth and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for
the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the
only book immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the
excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac might find relief (for
the history of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies) even in
the extremeness of the folly which I should read. Could I have judged,
indeed, by the wild overstrained air of vivacity with which he
hearkened, or apparently hearkened, to the words of the tale, I might
well have congratulated myself upon the success of my design.
I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred,
the hero of the Trist, having sought in vain for peaceable admission
into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an entrance by
force. Here, it will be remembered, the words of the narrative run
thus:--
"And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who was now
mighty withal, on account of the powerfulness of the wine which he had
drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who, in
sooth, was of an obstinate and maliceful turn, but, feeling the rain
upon his shoulders, and fearing the rising of the tempest, uplifted
his mace outright, and with blows made quickly room in the plankings
of the door for his gauntleted hand; and now pulling therewith
sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore all asunder, that the
noise of the dry and hollow-sounding wood alarumed and reverberated
throughout the forest."
At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment
paused; for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my
excited fancy had deceived me)--it appeared to me that from some very
remote portion of the mansion there came, indistinctly, to my ears,
what might have been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo
(but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and
ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It
was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my
attention; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and
the ordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the
sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or
disturbed me. I continued the story:--
"But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was
sore enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit;
but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious
demeanor, and of a fiery tongue, which sate in guard before a palace
of gold, with a floor of silver; and upon the wall there hung a shield
of shining brass with this legend enwritten--
Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin;
Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win.
And Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head of the
dragon, which fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a
shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had
fain to close his ears with his hands against the dreadful noise of
it, the like whereof was never before heard."
Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild
amazement; for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this
instance, I did actually hear (although from what direction it
proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant,
but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating
sound--the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up
for the dragon's unnatural shriek as described by the romancer.
Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of this second and
most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations,
in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained
sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the
sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that
he had noticed the sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange
alteration had during the last few minutes taken place in his
demeanor. From a position fronting my own, he had gradually brought
round his chair, so as to sit with his face to the door of the
chamber; and thus I could but partially perceive his features,
although I saw that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring
inaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast--yet I knew that he
was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of the eye as I caught
a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body, too, was at
variance with this idea--for he rocked from side to side with a gentle
yet constant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken notice of all
this, I resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot, which thus
proceeded:--
"And now, the champion, having escaped from the terrible fury of the
dragon, bethinking himself of the brazen shield, and of the breaking
up of the enchantment which was upon it, removed the carcass from out
of the way before him, and approached valorously over the silver
pavement of the castle to where the shield was upon the wall; which in
sooth tarried not for his full coming, but fell down at his feet upon
the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible ringing sound."
No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than--as if a shield of
brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of
silver--I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic and clangorous,
yet apparently muffled reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped
to my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was
undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent
fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned
a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there
came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered
about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and
gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely
over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words.
"Not hear it?--yes, I hear it, and _have_ heard it.
Long--long--long--many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard
it--yet I dared not--oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!--I dared
not--I _dared_ not speak! _We have put her living in the
tomb!_ Said I not that my senses were acute? I _now_ tell you
that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard
them--many, many days ago--yet I dared not--_I dared not speak!_
And now--to-night--Ethelred--ha! ha!--the breaking of the hermit's
door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangor of the
shield!--say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of
the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered
archway of the vault! Oh, whither shall I fly? Will she not be here
anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard
her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and
horrible beating of her heart? Madman!"--here he sprang furiously to
his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were
giving up his soul--"_Madman! I tell you that she now stands without
the door!_"
As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found
the potency of a spell, the huge antique panels to hich the speaker
pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony
jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust--but then without those
doors there _did_ stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the
lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the
evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated
frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon
the threshold--then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon
the person of her brother, and, in her violent and now final
death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the
terrors he had anticipated.
From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm
was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old
causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I
turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the
vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that
of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly
through that once barely-discernible fissure, of which I have before
spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag
direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly
widened--there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind--the entire orb
of the satellite burst at once upon my sight--my brain reeled as I saw
the mighty walls rushing asunder--there was a long tumultuous shouting
sound like the voice of a thousand waters--and the deep and dank tarn
at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the
"_House of Usher_."
WILLIAM WILSON
What say of it? what say of CONSCIENCE grim,
That spectre in my path?
CHAMBERLAYNE: _Pharronida_
Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now
lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. This has
been already too much an object for the scorn--for the horror--for the
detestation of my race. To the uttermost regions of the globe have not
the indignant winds bruited its unparalleled infamy? Oh, outcast of
all outcasts most abandoned!--to the earth art thou not forever dead?
to its honors, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations?--and a
cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally
between thy hopes and heaven?
I would not, if I could, here or to-day, embody a record of my later
years of unspeakable misery and unpardonable crime. This epoch, these
later years, took unto themselves a sudden elevation in turpitude,
whose origin alone it is my present purpose to assign. Men usually
grow base by degrees. From me, in an instant, all virtue dropped
bodily as a mantle. From comparatively trivial wickedness I passed,
with the stride of a giant, into more than the enormities of an
Elah-Gabalus. What chance--what one event brought this evil thing to
pass, bear with me while I relate. Death approaches; and the shadow
which foreruns him has thrown a softening influence over my spirit. I
long, in passing through the dim valley, for the sympathy--I had
nearly said for the pity--of my fellow-men. I would fain have them
believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances
beyond human control. I would wish them to seek out for me, in the
details I am about to give, some little oasis of _fatality_ amid a
wilderness of error. I would have them allow--what they cannot refrain
from allowing--that, although temptation may have erewhile existed as
great, man was never _thus_, at least, tempted before--certainly,
never _thus_ fell. And is it therefore that he has never thus
suffered? Have I not indeed been living in a dream? And am I not now
dying a victim to the horror and the mystery of the wildest of all
sublunary visions?
I am the descendant of a race whose imaginative and easily excitable
temperament has at all times rendered them remarkable; and, in my
earliest infancy, I gave evidence of having fully inherited the family
character. As I advanced in years it was more strongly developed;
becoming, for many reasons, a cause of serious disquietude to my
friends, and of positive injury to myself. I grew self-willed,
addicted to the wildest caprices, and a prey to the most ungovernable
passions. Weak-minded, and beset with constitutional infirmities akin
to my own, my parents could do but little to check the evil
propensities which distinguished me. Some feeble and ill-directed
efforts resulted in complete failure on their part, and, of course, in
total triumph on mine. Thenceforward my voice was a household law; and
at an age when few children have abandoned their leading-strings I was
left to the guidance of my own will, and became, in all but name, the
master of my own actions.
My earliest recollections of a school-life are connected with a large,
rambling, Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England,
where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all
the houses were excessively ancient. In truth, it was a dream-like and
spirit-soothing place, that venerable old town. At this moment, in
fancy, I feel the refreshing chilliness of its deeply-shadowed
avenues, inhale the fragrance of its thousand shrubberies, and thrill
anew with undefinable delight at the deep hollow note of the
church-bell, breaking, each hour, with sullen and sudden roar, upon
the stillness of the dusky atmosphere in which the fretted Gothic
steeple lay imbedded and asleep.
It gives me, perhaps, as much of pleasure as I can now in any manner
experience to dwell upon minute recollections of the school and its
concerns. Steeped in misery as I am--misery, alas! only too real--I
shall be pardoned for seeking relief, however slight and temporary, in
the weakness of a few rambling details. These, moreover, utterly
trivial, and even ridiculous in themselves, assume to my fancy
adventitious importance, as connected with a period and a locality
when and where I recognize the first ambiguous monitions of the
destiny which afterwards so fully overshadowed me. Let me then
remember.
The house, I have said, was old and irregular. The grounds were
extensive, and a high and solid brick wall, topped with a bed of
mortar and broken glass, encompassed the whole. This prison-like
rampart formed the limit of our domain; beyond it we saw but thrice a
week--once every Saturday afternoon, when, attended by two ushers, we
were permitted to take brief walks in a body through some of the
neighboring fields--and twice during Sunday, when we were paraded in
the same formal manner to the morning and evening service in the one
church of the village. Of this church the principal of our school was
pastor. With how deep a spirit of wonder and perplexity was I wont to
regard him from our remote pew in the gallery, as, with step solemn
and slow, he ascended the pulpit! This reverend man, with countenance
so demurely benign, with robes so glossy and so clerically flowing,
with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast,--could this be he
who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy habiliments,
administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian Laws of the academy? Oh,
gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution!
At an angle of the ponderous wall frowned a more ponderous gate. It
was riveted and studded with iron bolts, and surmounted with jagged
iron spikes. What impressions of deep awe did it inspire! It was never
opened save for the three periodical egressions and ingressions
already mentioned; then, in every creak of its mighty hinges, we found
a plenitude of mystery--a world of matter for solemn remark, or for
more solemn meditation.
The extensive enclosure was irregular in form, having many capacious
recesses. Of these, three or four of the largest constituted the
play-ground. It was level, and covered with fine hard gravel. I well
remember it had no trees, nor benches, nor anything similar within
it. Of course it was in the rear of the house. In front lay a small
parterre, planted with box and other shrubs; but through this sacred
division we passed only upon rare occasions indeed--such as a first
advent to school or final departure thence, or perhaps when, a parent
or friend having called for us, we joyfully took our way home for the
Christmas or Midsummer holidays.
But the house--how quaint an old building was this!--to me how
veritably a palace of enchantment! There was really no end to its
windings--to its incomprehensible subdivisions. It was difficult, at
any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its two stories
one happened to be. From each room to every other there were sure to
be found three or four steps either in ascent or descent. Then the
lateral branches were innumerable, inconceivable, and so returning in
upon themselves that our most exact ideas in regard to the whole
mansion were not very far different from those with which we pondered
upon infinity. During the five years of my residence here I was never
able to ascertain, with precision, in what remote locality lay the
little sleeping apartment assigned to myself and some eighteen or
twenty other scholars.
The school-room was the largest in the house--I could not help
thinking, in the world. It was very long, narrow, and dismally low,
with pointed Gothic windows and a ceiling of oak. In a remote and
terror-inspiring angle was a square enclosure of eight or ten feet,
comprising the _sanctum_, "during hours," of our principal, the
Reverend Dr. Bransby. It was a solid structure, with massy door,
sooner than open which in the absence of the "Dominie" we would all
have willingly perished by the _peine forte et dure._ In other angles
were two other similar boxes, far less reverenced, indeed, but still
greatly matters of awe. One of these was the pulpit of the "classical"
usher; one, of the "English and mathematical." Interspersed about the
room, crossing and recrossing in endless irregularity, were
innumerable benches and desks, black, ancient, and time-worn, piled
desperately with much-be-thumbed books, and so beseamed with initial
letters, names at full length, grotesque figures, and other multiplied
efforts of the knife, as to have entirely lost what little of original
form might have been their portion in days long departed. A huge
bucket with water stood at one extremity of the room, and a clock of
stupendous dimensions at the other.
Encompassed by the massy walls of this venerable academy, I passed,
yet not in tedium or disgust, the years of the third lustrum of my
life. The teeming brain of childhood requires no external world of
incident to occupy or amuse it; and the apparently dismal monotony of
a school was replete with more intense excitement than my riper youth
has derived from luxury, or my full manhood from crime. Yet I must
believe that my first mental development had in it much of the
uncommon--even much of the _outré_. Upon mankind at large the events
of very early existence rarely leave in mature age any definite
impression. All is gray shadow--a weak and irregular remembrance--an
indistinct regathering of feeble pleasures and phantasmagoric
pains. With me this is not so. In childhood I must have felt, with the
energy of a man, what I now find stamped upon memory in lines as
vivid, as deep, and as durable as the _exergues_ of the Carthaginian
medals.
Yet in fact--in the fact of the world's view--how little was there to
remember! The morning's awakening, the nightly summons to bed; the
connings, the recitations; the periodical half-holidays, and
perambulations; the play-ground, with its broils, its pastimes, its
intrigues;--these, by a mental sorcery long forgotten, were made to
involve a wilderness of sensation, a world of rich incident, an
universe of varied emotion, of excitement the most passionate and
spirit-stirring. "_Oh, le bon temps, que ce siècle de fer!_"
In truth, the ardor, the enthusiasm, and the imperiousness of my
disposition, soon rendered me a marked character among my schoolmates,
and by slow but natural gradations gave me an ascendancy over all not
greatly older than myself: over all with a single exception. This
exception was found in the person of a scholar who, although no
relation, bore the same Christian and surname as myself,--a
circumstance, in fact, little remarkable; for, notwithstanding a noble
descent, mine was one of those every-day appellations which seem by
prescriptive right to have been, time out of mind, the common property
of the mob. In this narrative I have therefore designated myself as
William Wilson,--a fictitious title not very dissimilar to the
real. My namesake alone, of those who in school-phraseology
constituted "our set," presumed to compete with me in the studies of
the class--in the sports and broils of the play-ground--to refuse
implicit belief in my assertions, and submission to my will--indeed,
to interfere with my arbitrary dictation in any respect whatsoever.
If there is on earth a supreme and unqualified despotism, it is the
despotism of a master-mind in boyhood over the less energetic spirits
of its companions.
Wilson's rebellion was to me a source of the greatest embarrassment;
the more so as, in spite of the bravado with which in public I made a
point of treating him and his pretensions, I secretly felt that I
feared him, and could not help thinking the equality, which he
maintained so easily with myself, a proof of his true superiority;
since not to be overcome cost me a perpetual struggle. Yet this
superiority, even this equality, was in truth acknowledged by no one
but myself; our associates, by some unaccountable blindness, seemed
not even to suspect it. Indeed, his competition, his resistance, and
especially his impertinent and dogged interference with my purposes,
were not more pointed than private. He appeared to be destitute alike
of the ambition which urged, and of the passionate energy of mind
which enabled, me to excel. In his rivalry he might have been supposed
actuated solely by a whimsical desire to thwart, astonish, or mortify
myself; although there were times when I could not help observing,
with a feeling made up of wonder, abasement, and pique, that he
mingled with his injuries, his insults, or his contradictions, a
certain most inappropriate, and assuredly most unwelcome,
_affectionateness_ of manner. I could only conceive this singular
behavior to arise from a consummate self-conceit assuming the vulgar
airs of patronage and protection.
Perhaps it was this latter trait in Wilson's conduct, conjoined with
our identity of name, and the mere accident of our having entered the
school upon the same day, which set afloat the notion that we were
brothers, among the senior classes in the academy. These do not
usually inquire with much strictness into the affairs of their
juniors. I have before said, or should have said, that Wilson was not
in the most remote degree connected with my family. But assuredly if
we _had_ been brothers we must have been twins; for, after leaving
Dr. Bransby's, I cassually learned that my namesake was born on the
nineteenth of January, 1813; and this is a somewhat remarkable
coincidence; for the day is precisely that of my own nativity.
It may seem strange that in spite of the continual anxiety occasioned
me by the rivalry of Wilson, and his intolerable spirit of
contradiction, I could not bring myself to hate him altogether. We
had, to be sure, nearly every day a quarrel in which, yielding me
publicly the palm of victory, he, in some manner, contrieved to make
me feel that it was he who had deserved it; yet a sense of pride on my
part, and a veritable dignity on his own, kept us always upon what are
called "speaking terms," while there were many points of strong
congeniality in our tempers, operating to awake in me a sentiment
which our position alone, perhaps, prevented from ripening into
friendship. It is difficult, indeed, to define, or even to describe,
my real feelings towards him. They formed a motley and heterogeneous
admixture: some petulant animosity, which was not yet hatred, some
esteem, more respect, much fear, with a world of uneasy curiosity. To
the moralist it will be unnecessary to say, in addition, that Wilson
and myself were the most inseparable of companions.
It was no doubt the anomalous state of affairs existing between us
which turned all my attacks upon him (and they were many, either open
or covert) into the channel of banter or practical joke (giving pain
while assuming the aspect of mere fun) rather than into a more serious
and determined hostility. But my endeavors on this head were by no
means uniformly successful, even when my plans were the most wittily
concocted; for my namesake had much about him, in character, of that
unassuming and quiet austerity which, while enjoying the poignancy of
its own jokes, has no heel of Achilles in itself, and absolutely
refuses to be laughed at. I could find, indeed, but one vulnerable
point, and that lying in a personal peculiarity arising, perhaps, from
constitutional disease, would have been spared by any antagonist less
at his wit's end than myself:--my rival had a weakness in the faucial
or guttural organs, which precluded him from raising his voice at any
time _above a very low whisper_. Of this defect I did not fail to take
what poor advantage lay in my power.
Wilson's retaliations in kind were many; and there was one form of his
practical wit that disturbed me beyond measure. How his sagacity
first discovered at all that so petty a thing would vex me, is a
question I never could solve; but having discovered, he habitually
practised the annoyance. I had always felt aversion to my uncourtly
patronymic, and its very common, if not plebeian praenomen. The words
were venom in my ears; and when, upon the day of my arrival, a second
William Wilson came also to the academy, I felt angry with him for
bearing the name, and doubly disgusted with the name because a
stranger bore it, who would be the cause of its twofold repetition,
who would be constantly in my presence, and whose concerns, in the
ordinary routine of the school business, must inevitably, on account
of the detestable coincidence, be often confounded with my own.
The feeling of vexation thus engendered grew stronger with every
circumstance tending to show resemblance, moral or physical, between
my rival and myself. I had not then discovered the remarkable fact
that we were of the same age; but I saw that we were of the same
height, and I perceived that we were even singularly alike in general
contour of person and outline of feature. I was galled, too, by the
rumor touching a relationship which had grown current in the upper
forms. In a word, nothing could more seriously disturb me (although I
scrupulously concealed such disturbance) than any allusion to a
similarity of mind, person, or condition existing between us. But, in
truth, I had no reason to believe that (with the exception of the
matter of relationship, and in the case of Wilson himself) this
similarity had ever been made a subject of comment, or even observed
at all by our schoolfellows. That _he_ observed it in all its
bearings, and as fixedly as I, was apparent; but that he could
discover in such circumstances so fruitful a field of annoyance can
only be attributed, as I said before, to his more than ordinary
penetration.
His cue, which was to perfect an imitation of myself, lay both in
words and in actions; and most admirably did he play his part. My
dress it was an easy matter to copy; my gait and general manner were,
without difficulty, appropriated; in spite of his constitutional
defect, even my voice did not escape him. My louder tones were, of
course, unattempted, but then the key,--it was identical; _and his
singular whisper,--it grew the very echo of my own._
How greatly this most exquisite portraiture harassed me (for it could
not justly be termed a caricature) I will not now venture to describe.
I had but one consolation--in the fact that the imitation, apparently,
was noticed by myself alone, and that I had to endure only the knowing
and strangely sarcastic smiles of my namesake himself. Satisfied with
having produced in my bosom the intended effect, he seemed to chuckle
in secret over the sting he had inflicted, and was
uncharacteristically disregardful of the public applause which the
success of his witty endeavours might have so easily elicited. That
the school, indeed, did not feel his design, perceive its
accomplishment, and participate in his sneer, was, for many anxious
months, a riddle I could not resolve. Perhaps the _gradation_ of his
copy rendered it not so readily perceptible; or, more possibly, I owed
my security to the masterly air of the copyist, who, disdaining the
letter (which in a painting is all the obtuse can see) gave but the
full spirit of his original for my individual contemplation and
chagrin.
I have already more than once spoken of the disgusting air of
patronage which he assumed toward me, and of his frequent officious
interference with my will. This interference often took the ungracious
character of advice; advice not openly given, but hinted or
insinuated. I received it with a repugnance which gained strength as I
grew in years. Yet, at this distant day, let me do him the simple
justice to acknowledge that I can recall no occasion when the
suggestions of my rival were on the side of those errors or follies so
usual to his immature age and seeming inexperience; that his moral
sense, at least, if not his general talents and worldly wisdom, was
far keener than my own; and that I might, to-day, have been a better,
and thus a happier man, had I less frequently rejected the counsels
embodied in those meaning whispers which I then but too cordially
hated and too bitterly despised.
As it was, I at length grew restive in the extreme under his
distasteful supervision, and daily resented more and more openly what
I considered his intolerable arrogance. I have said that, in the first
years of our connection as schoolmates, my feelings in regard to him
might have been easily ripened into friendship; but, in the latter
months of my residence at the academy, although the intrusion of his
ordinary manner had, beyond doubt, in some measure abated, my
sentiments, in nearly similar proportion, partook very much of
positive hatred. Upon one occasion he saw this, I think, and
afterwards avoided or made a show of avoiding me.
It was about the same period, if I remember aright, that, in an
altercation of violence with him, in which he was more than usually
thrown off his guard, and spoke and acted with an openness of demeanor
rather foreign to his nature, I discovered, or fancied I discovered,
in his accent, his air and general appearance, a something which first
startled, and then deeply interested me, by bringing to mind dim
visions of my earliest infancy--wild, confused and thronging memories
of a time when memory herself was yet unborn. I cannot better describe
the sensation which oppressed me than by saying that I could with
difficulty shake off the belief of my having been acquainted with the
being who stood before me, at some epoch very long ago--some point of
the past even infinitely remote. The delusion, however, faded rapidly
as it came; and I mention it at all but to define the day of the last
conversation I there held with my singular namesake.
The huge old house, with its countless subdivisions, had several large
chambers communicating with each other, where slept the greater number
of the students. There were, however (as must necessarily happen in a
building so awkwardly planned) many little nooks or recesses, the odds
and ends of the structure; and these the economic ingenuity of Dr.
Bransby had also fitted up as dormitories; although, being the merest
closets, they were capable of accommodating but a single
individual. One of these small apartments was occupied by Wilson.
One night, about the close of my fifth year at the school, and
immediately after the altercation just mentioned, finding every one
wrapped in sleep, I arose from bed, and, lamp in hand, stole through a
wilderness of narrow passages from my own bedroom to that of my
rival. I had long been plotting one of those ill-natured pieces of
practical wit at his expense in which I had hitherto been so uniformly
unsuccessful. It was my intention, now, to put my scheme in operation,
and I resolved to make him feel the whole extent of the malice with
which I was imbued. Having reached his closet, I noiselessly entered,
leaving the lamp, with a shade over it, on the outside. I advanced a
step, and listened to the sound of his tranquil breathing. Assured of
his being asleep, I returned, took the light, and with it again
approached the bed. Close curtains were around it, which, in the
prosecution of my plan, I slowly and quietly withdrew, when the bright
rays fell vividly upon the sleeper, and my eyes at the same moment
upon his countenance. I looked,--and a numbness, an iciness of
feeling, instantly pervaded my frame. My breast heaved, my knees
tottered, my whole spirit became possessed with an objectless yet
intolerable horror. Gasping for breath, I lowered the lamp in still
nearer proximity to the face. Were these,--_these_ the lineaments of
William Wilson? I saw, indeed, that they were his, but I shook as if
with a fit of the ague, in fancying they were not. What _was_ there
about them to confound me in this manner? I gazed,--while my brain
reeled with a multitude of incoherent thoughts. Not thus he
appeared--assuredly not _thus_--in the vivacity of his waking
hours. The same name! the same contour of person! the same day of
arrival at the academy! And then his dogged and meaningless imitation
of my gait, my voice, my habits, and my manner! Was it, in truth,
within the bounds of human possibility, that _what I now saw_ was the
result, merely, of the habitual practice of this sarcastic imitation?
Awe-stricken, and with a creeping shudder, I extinguished the lamp,
passed silently from the chamber, and left, at once, the halls of that
old academy, never to enter them again.
After a lapse of some months, spent at home in mere idleness, I found
myself a student at Eton. The brief interval had been sufficient to
enfeeble my remembrance of the events at Dr. Bransby's, or at least to
effect a material change in the nature of the feelings with which I
remembered them. The truth--the tragedy--of the drama was no more. I
could now find room to doubt the evidence of my senses; and seldom
called up the subject at all but with wonder at the extent of human
credulity, and a smile at the vivid force of the imagination which I
hereditarily possessed. Neither was this species of scepticism likely
to be diminished by the character of the life I led at Eton. The
vortex of thoughtless folly, into which I there so immediately and so
recklessly plunged, washed away all but the froth of my past hours,
engulfed at once every solid or serious impression, and left to memory
only the veriest levities of a former existence.
I do not wish, however, to trace the course of my miserable profligacy
here--a profligacy which set at defiance the laws, while it eluded the
vigilance, of the institution. Three years of folly, passed without
profit, had but given me rooted habits of vice, and added, in a
somewhat unusual degree, to my bodily stature, when, after a week of
soulless dissipation, I invited a small party of the most dissolute
students to a secret carousal in my chambers. We met at a late hour of
the night; for our debaucheries were to be faithfully protracted until
morning. The wine flowed freely, and there were not wanting other and
perhaps more dangerous seductions; so that the gray dawn had already
faintly appeared in the east while our delirious extravagance was at
its height. Madly flushed with cards and intoxication, I was in the
act of insisting upon a toast of more than wonted profanity, when my
attention was suddenly diverted by the violent, although partial,
unclosing of the door of the apartment, and by the eager voice of a
servant from without. He said that some person, apparently in great
haste, demanded to speak with me in the hall.
Wildly excited with wine, the unexpected interruption rather delighted
than surprised me. I staggered forward at once, and a few steps
brought me to the vestibule of the building. In this low and small
room there hung no lamp; and now no light at all was admitted, save
that of the exceedingly feeble dawn which made its way through the
semicircular window. As I put my foot over the threshold, I became
aware of the figure of a youth about my own height, and habited in a
white kerseymere morning frock, cut in the novel fashion of the one I
myself wore at the moment. This the faint light enabled me to
perceive; but the features of his face I could not distinguish. Upon
my entering, he strode hurriedly up to me, and, seizing me by the arm
with a gesture of petulant impatience, whispered the words "William
Wilson!" in my ear.
I grew perfectly sober in an instant.
There was that in the manner of the stranger, and in the tremulous
shake of his uplifted finger, as he held it between my eyes and the
light, which filled me with unqualified amazement; but it was not this
which had so violently moved me. It was the pregnancy of solemn
admonition in the singular, low, hissing utterance; and, above all, it
was the character, the tone, _the key_, of those few, simple, and
familiar, yet _whispered_ syllables, which came with a thousand
thronging memories of by-gone days, and struck upon my soul with the
shock of a galvanic battery. Ere I could recover the use of my senses
he was gone.
Although this event failed not of a vivid effect upon my disordered
imagination, yet was it evanescent as vivid. For some weeks, indeed, I
busied myself in earnest inquiry, or was wrapped in a cloud of morbid
speculation. I did not pretend to disguise from my perception the
identity of the singular individual who thus perseveringly interfered
with my affairs, and harassed me with his insinuated counsel. But who
and what was this Wilson?--and whence came he?--and what were his
purposes? Upon neither of these points could I be satisfied--merely
ascertaining, in regard to him, that a sudden accident in his family
had caused his removal from Dr. Bransby's academy on the afternoon of
the day in which I myself had eloped. But in a brief period I ceased
to think upon the subject, my attention being all absorbed in a
contemplated departure for Oxford. Thither I soon went, the
uncalculating vanity of my parents furnishing me with an outfit and
annual establishment which would enable me to indulge at will in the
luxury already so dear to my hear--to vie in profuseness of
expenditure with the haughtiest heirs of the wealthiest earldoms in
Great Britain.
Excited by such appliances to vice, my constitutional temperament
broke forth with redoubled ardor, and I spurned even the common
restraints of decency in the mad infatuation of my revels. But it were
absurd to pause in the detail of my extravagance. Let it suffice, that
among spendthrifts I out-Heroded Herod, and that, giving name to a
multitude of novel follies, I added no brief appendix to the long
catalogue of vices then usual in the most dissolute university of
Europe.
It could hardly be credited, however, that I had even here, so utterly
fallen from the gentlemanly estate as to seek acquaintance with the
vilest arts of the gambler by profession, and, having become an adept
in his despicable science, to practise it habitually as a means of
increasing my already enormous income at the expense of the
weak-minded among my fellow-collegians. Such, nevertheless, was the
fact. And the very enormity of this offence against all manly and
honorable sentiment proved, beyond doubt, the main if not the sole
reason of the impunity with which it was committed. Who, indeed,
among my most abandoned associates, would not rather have disputed the
clearest evidence of his senses, than have suspected of such courses
the gay, the frank, the generous William Wilson--the noblest and most
liberal commoner at Oxford: him whose follies (said his parasites)
were but the follies of youth and unbridled fancy--whose errors but
inimitable whim--whose darkest vice but a careless and dashing
extravagance?
I had been now two years successfully busied in this way, when there
came to the university a young _parvenu_ nobleman, Glendinning--rich,
said report, as Herodes Atticus--his riches, too, as easily
acquired. I soon found him of weak intellect, and of course marked him
as a fitting subject for my skill. I frequently engaged him in play,
and contrived, with the gambler's usual art, to let him win
considerable sums, the more effectually to entangle him in my
snares. At length, my schemes being ripe, I met him (with the full
intention that this meeting should be final and decisive) at the
chambers of a fellow-commoner (Mr. Preston) equally intimate with
both, but who, to do him justice, entertained not even a remote
suspicion of my design. To give to this a better coloring, I had
contrived to have assembled a party of some eight or ten, and was
solicitously careful that the introduction of cards should appear
accidental, and originate in the proposal of my contemplated dupe
himself. To be brief upon a vile topic, none of the low finesse was
omitted, so customary upon similar occasions that it is a just matter
for wonder how any are still found so besotted as to fall its victim.
We had protracted our sitting far into the night, and I had at length
effected the manoeuvre of getting Glendinning as my sole
antagonist. The game, too, was my favorite _écarté_. The rest of the
company, interested in the extent of our play, had abandoned their own
cards, and were standing around us as spectators. The _parvenu_, who
had been induced, by my artifices in the early part of the evening, to
drink deeply, now shuffled, dealt, or played, with a wild nervousness
of manner for which his intoxication, I thought, might partially but
could not altogether account. In a very short period he had become my
debtor to a large amount, when, having taken a long draught of port,
he did precisely what I had been coolly anticipating--he proposed to
double our already extravagant stakes. With a well-feigned show of
reluctance, and not until after my repeated refusal had seduced him
into some angry words which gave a color of pique to my compliance,
did I finally comply. The result, of course, did but prove how
entirely the prey was in my toils; in less than an hour he had
quadrupled his debt. For some time his countenance had been losing
the florid tinge lent it by the wine; but now, to my astonishment, I
perceived that it had grown to a pallor truly fearful. I say, to my
astonishment. Glendinning had been represented to my eager inquiries
as immeasurably wealthy; and the sums which he had as yet lost,
although in themselves vast, could not, I supposed, very seriously
annoy, much less so violently affect him. That he was overcome by the
wine just swallowed, was the idea which most readily presented itself;
and, rather with a view to the preservation of my own character in the
eyes of my associates, than from any less interested motive, I was
about to insist, peremptorily, upon a discontinuance of the play, when
some expressions at my elbow from among the company, and an
ejaculation evincing utter despair on the part of Glendinning, gave me
to understand that I had effected his total ruin under circumstances
which, rendering him an object for the pity of all, should have
protected him from the ill offices even of a fiend.
What now might have been my conduct it is difficult to say. The
pitiable condition of my dupe had thrown an air of embarrassed gloom
over all; and for some moments a profound silence was maintained,
during which I could not help feeling my cheeks tingle with the many
burning glances of scorn or reproach cast upon me by the less
abandoned of the party. I will even own that an intolerable weight of
anxiety was for a brief instant lifted from my bosom by the sudden and
extraordinary interruption which ensued. The wide, heavy folding-doors
of the apartment were all at once thrown open, to their full extent,
with a vigorous and rushing impetuosity that extinguished, as if by
magic, every candle in the room. Their light, in dying, enabled us
just to perceive that a stranger had entered, about my own height, and
closely muffled in a cloak. The darkness, however, was now total; and
we could only _feel_ that he was standing in our midst. Before any one
of us could recover from the extreme astonishment into which this
rudeness had thrown all, we heard the voice of the intruder.
"Gentlemen," he said, in a low, distinct, and never-to-be-forgotten
_whisper_ which thrilled to the very marrow of my bones, "gentlmen, I
make no apology for this behavior, because, in thus behaving, I am but
fulfilling a duty. You are, beyond doubt, uninformed of the true
character of the person who has to-night won at _écarté_ a large sum
of money from Lord Glendinning. I will therefore put you upon an
expeditious and decisive plan of obtaining this very necessary
information. Please to examine, at your leisure, the inner linings of
the cuff of his left sleeve, and the several little packages which may
be found in the somewhat capacious pockets of his embroidered morning
wrapper."
While he spoke, so profound was the stillness that one might have
heard a pin drop upon the floor. In ceasing, he departed at once, and
as abruptly as he had entered. Can I--shall I describe my sensations?
Must I say that I felt all the horrors of the damned? Most assuredly I
had little time for reflection. Many hands roughly seized me upon the
spot, and lights were immediately re-procured. A search ensued. In the
lining of my sleeve were found all the court cards essential in
_écarté_, and, in the pockets of my wrapper, a number of packs,
facsimiles of those used at our sittings, with the single exception
that mine were of the species called, technically, _arrondis_; the
honors being slightly convex at the ends, the lower cards slightly
convex at the sides. In this disposition, the dupe who cuts, as
customary, at the length of the pack, will invariably find that he
cuts his antagonist an honor; while the gambler, cutting at the
breadth, will, as certainly, cut nothing for his victim which may
count in the records of the game.
Any burst of indignation upon this discovery would have affected me
less than the silent contempt, or the sarcastic composure, with which
it was received.
"Mr. Wilson," said our host, stooping to remove from beneath his feet
an exceedingly luxurious cloak of rare furs, "Mr. Wilson, this is your
property." (The weather was cold; and, upon quitting my own room, I
had thrown a cloak over my dressing wrapper, putting it off upon
reaching the scene of play.) "I presume it is supererogatory to seek
here" (eying the folds of the garment with a bitter smile) "for any
farther evidence of your skill. Indeed, we have had enough. You will
see the necessity, I hope, of quitting Oxford--at all events, of
quitting instantly my chambers."
Abased, humbled to the dust as I then was, it is probable that I
should have resented this galling language by immediate personal
violence, had not my whole attention been at the moment arrested by a
fact of the most startling character. The cloak which I had worn was
of a rare description of fur; how rare, how extravagantly costly, I
shall not venture to say. Its fashion, too, was of my own fantastic
invention; for I was fastidious to an absurd degree of coxcombry, in
matters of this frivolous nature. When, therefore, Mr. Preston reached
me that which he had picked up upon the floor, and near the
folding-doors of the apartment, it was with an astonishment nearly
bordering upon terror, that I perceived my own already hanging on my
arm, (where I had no doubt unwittingly placed it) and that the one
presented me was but its exact counterpart in every, in even the
minutest possible particular. The singular being who had so
disastrously exposed me, had been muffled, I remembered, in a cloak;
and none had been worn at all by any of the members of our party, with
the exception of myself. Retaining some presence of mind, I took the
one offered me by Preston; placed it, unnoticed, over my own; left the
apartment with a resolute scowl of defiance; and, next morning ere
dawn of day, commenced a hurried journey from Oxford to the continent,
in a perfect agony of horror and of shame.
_I fled in vain._ My evil destiny pursued me as if in exultation, and
proved, indeed, that the exercise of its mysterious dominion had as
yet only begun. Scarcely had I set foot in Paris, ere I had fresh
evidence of the detestable interest taken by this Wilson in my
concerns. Years flew, while I experienced no relief. Villain!--at
Rome, with how untimely, yet with how spectral an officiousness,
stepped he in between me and my ambition! At Vienna, too--at
Berlin--and at Moscow! Where, in truth, had I _not_ bitter cause to
curse him within my heart? From his inscrutable tyranny did I at
length flee, panic-stricken, as from a pestilence; and to the very
ends of the earth _I fled in vain._
And again, and again, in secret communion with my own spirit, would I
demand the questions, "Who is he?--whence came he?--and what are his
objects?" But no answer was there found. And now I scrutinized, with a
minute scrutiny, the forms, and the methods, and the leading traits of
his impertinent supervision. But even here there was very little upon
which to base a conjecture. It was noticeable, indeed, that, in no one
of the multiplied instances in which he had of late crossed my path,
had he so crossed it except to frustrate those schemes, or to disturb
those actions, which, if fully carried out, might have resulted in
bitter mischief. Poor justification this, in truth, for an authority
so imperiously assumed! Poor indemnity for natural rights of
self-agency so pertinaciously, so insultingly denied!
I had also been forced to notice that my tormentor, for a very long
period of time (while scrupulously and with miraculous dexterity
maintaining his whim of an identity of apparel with myself) had so
contrived it, in the execution of his varied interference with my
will, that I saw not, at any moment, the features of his face. Be
Wilson what he might, _this_, at least, was but the veriest of
affectation, or of folly. Could he, for an instant, have supposed
that, in my admonisher at Eton--in the destroyer of my honor at
Oxford,--in him who thwarted my ambition at Rome, my revenge at Paris,
my passionate love at Naples, or what he falsely termed my avarice in
Egypt,--that in this, my arch-enemy and evil genius, I could fail to
recognize the William Wilson of my schoolboy days: the namesake, the
companion, the rival, the hated and dreaded rival at Dr. Bransby's?
Impossible!--but let me hasten to the last eventful scene of the
drama.
Thus far I had succumbed suginely to this imperious domination. The
sentiment of deep awe with which I habitually regarded the elevated
character, the majestic wisdom, the apparent omnipresence and
omnipotence of Wilson, added to a feeling of even terror, with which
certain other traits in his nature and assumptions inspired me, had
operated, hitherto, to impress me with an idea of my own utter
weakness and helplessness, and to suggest an implicit, although
bitterly reluctant submission to his arbitrary will. But, of late
days, I had given myself up entirely to wine; and its maddening
influence upon my hereditary temper rendered me more and more
impatient of control. I began to murmur, to hesitate, to resist. And
was it only fancy which induced me to believe that, with the increase
of my own firmness, that of my tormentor underwent a proportional
diminution? Be this as it may, I now began to feel the inspiration of
a burning hope, and at length nurtured in my secret thoughts a stern
and desperate resolution that I would submit no longer to be enslaved.
It was at Rome, during the Carnival of 18--, that I attended a
masquerade in the palazzo of the Neapolitan Duke Di Broglio. I had
indulged more freely than usual in the excesses of the wine-table; and
now the suffocating atmosphere of the crowded rooms irritated me
beyond endurance. The difficulty, too, of forcing my way through the
mazes of the company contributed not a little to the ruffling of my
temper; for I was anxiously seeking (let me not say with what unworthy
motive) the young, the gay, the beautiful wife of the aged and doting
Di Broglio. With a too unscrupulous confidence she had previously
communicated to me the secret of the costume in which she would be
habited, and now, having caught a glimpse of her person, I was
hurrying to make my way into her presence. At this moment I felt a
light hand placed upon my shoulder, and that ever-remembered, low,
damnable _whisper_ within my ear.
In an absolute frenzy of wrath, I turned at once upon him who had thus
interrupted me, and seized him violently by the collar. He was
attired, as I had expected, in a costume altogether similar to my own;
wearing a Spanish cloak of blue velvet, begirt about the waist with a
crimson belt sustaining a rapier. A mask of black silk entirely
covered his face.
"Scoundrel!" I said, in a voice husky with rage, while every syllable
I uttered seemed as new fuel to my fury; "scoundrel! impostor!
accursed villain! you shall not--you _shall not_ dog me unto death!
Follow me, or I stab you where you stand!"--and I broke my way from
the ball-room into a small ante-chamber adjoining, dragging him
unresistingly with me as I went.
Upon entering, I thrust him furiously from me. He staggered against
the wall, while I closed the door with an oath, and commanded him to
draw. He hesitated but for an instant; then, with a slight sigh, drew
in silence, and put himself upon his defence.
The contest was brief indeed. I was frantic with every species of wild
excitement, and felt within my single arm the energy and power of a
multitude. In a few seconds I forced him by sheer strength against the
wainscoting, and thus, getting him at mercy, plunged my sword, with
brute ferocity, repeatedly through and through his bosom.
At that instant some person tried the latch of the door. I hastened to
prevent an intrusion, and then immediately returned to my dying
antagonist. But what human language can adequately portray _that_
astonishment, _that_ horror which possessed me at the spectacle then
presented to view? The brief moment in which I averted my eyes had
been sufficient to produce, apparently, a material change in the
arrangements at the upper or farther end of the room. A large
mirror--so at first it seemed to me in my confusion--now stood where
none had been perceptible before; and, as I stepped up to it in
extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and
dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering
gait.
Thus it appeared, I say, but was not. It was my antagonist--it was
Wilson, who then stood before me in the agonies of his dissolution.
His mask and cloak lay, where he had thrown them, upon the floor. Not
a thread in all his raiment--not a line in all the marked and singular
lineaments of his face which was not, even in the most absolute
identity, _mine own_!
It was Wilson; but he spoke no longer in a whisper, and I could have
fancied that I myself was speaking while he said:--
_"You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also
dead--dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou
exist--and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how
utterly thou hast murdered thyself."_
A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTRÖM
The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as _our_ ways;
nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the
vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, _which have
a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus_.
JOSEPH GLANVILLE
We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag. For some minutes
the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak.
"Not long ago," said he at length, "and I could have guided you on
this route as well as the youngest of my sons; but, about three years
past, there happened to me an event such as never happened before to
mortal man--or at least such as no man ever survived to tell of--and
the six hours of deadly terror which I then endured have broken me up
body and soul. You suppose me a _very_ old man--but I am not. It took
less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty black to
white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves, so that I
tremble at the least exertion, and am frightened at a shadow. Do you
know I can scarcely look over this little cliff without getting
giddy?"
The "little cliff," upon whose edge he had so carelessly thrown
himself down to rest that the weightier portion of his body hung over
it, while he was only kept from falling by the tenure of his elbow on
its extreme and slippery edge--this "little cliff" arose, a sheer
unobstructed precipice of black shining rock, some fifteen or sixteen
hundred feet from the world of crags beneath us. Nothing would have
tempted me to within half a dozen yards of its brink. In truth so
deeply was I excited by the perilous position of my companion, that I
fell at full length upon the ground, clung to the shrubs around me,
and dared not even glance upward at the sky--while I struggled in vain
to divest myself of the idea that the very foundations of the mountain
were in danger from the fury of the winds. It was long before I could
reason myself into sufficient courage to sit up and look out into the
distance.
"You must get over these fancies," said the guide, "for I have brought
you here that you might have the best possible view of the scene of
that event I mentioned--and to tell you the whole story with the spot
just under your eye.
"We are now," he continued, in that particularizing manner which
distinguished him--"we are now close upon the Norwegian coast--in the
sixty-eighth degree of latitude--in the great province of
Nordland--and in the dreary district of Lofoden. The mountain upon
whose top we sit is Helseggen, the Cloudy. Now raise yourself up a
little higher--hold on to the grass if you feel giddy--so--and look
out, beyond the belt of vapor beneath us, into the sea."
I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters
wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian
geographer's account of the _Mare Tenebrarum_. A panorama more
deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. To the right
and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, like
ramparts of the world, lines of horridly black and beetling cliff,
whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated by the
surf which reared high up against it its white and ghastly crest,
howling and shrieking forever. Just opposite the promontory upon whose
apex we were placed, and at a distance of some five or six miles out
at sea, there was visible a small, bleak-looking island; or, more
properly, its position was discernible through the wilderness of surge
in which it was enveloped. About two miles nearer the land arose
another of smaller size, hideously craggy and barren, and encompassed
at various intervals by a cluster of dark rocks.
The appearance of the ocean, in the space between the more distant
island and the shore, had something very unusual about it. Although,
at the time, so strong a gale was blowing landward that a brig in the
remote offing lay to under a double-reefed trysail, and constantly
plunged her whole hull out of sight, still there was here nothing like
a regular swell, but only a short, quick, angry cross dashing of water
in every direction--as well in the teeth of the wind as otherwise. Of
foam there was little except in the immediate vicinity of the rocks.
"The island in the distance," resumed the old man, "is called by the
Norwegians Vurrgh. The one midway is Moskoe. That a mile to the
northward is Ambaaren. Yonder are Iflesen, Hoeyholm, Kieldholm,
Suarven, and Buckholm. Farther off--between Moskoe and Vurrgh--are
Otterholm, Flimen, Sandflesen, and Skarholm. These are the true names
of the places--but why it has been thought necessary to name them at
all is more than either you or I can understand. Do you hear anything?
Do you see any change in the water?"
We had now been about ten minutes upon the top of Helseggen, to which
we had ascended from the interior of Lofoden, so that we had caught no
glimpse of the sea until it had burst upon us from the summit. As the
old man spoke, I became aware of a loud and gradually increasing
sound, like the moaning of a vast herd of buffaloes upon an American
prairie; and at the same moment I perceived that what seamen term the
_chopping_ character of the ocean beneath us, was rapidly changing
into a current which set to the eastward. Even while I gazed, this
current acquired a monstrous velocity. Each moment added to its
speed--to its headlong impetuosity. In five minutes the whole sea, as
far as Vurrgh, was lashed into ungovernable fury; but it was between
Moskoe and the coast that the main uproar held its sway. Here the vast
bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting
channels, burst suddenly into frenzied convulsion--heaving, boiling,
hissing--gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all
whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water
never elsewhere assumes, except in precipitous descents.
In a few minutes more, there came over the scene another radical
alteration. The general surface grew somewhat more smooth, and the
whirlpools, one by one, disappeared, while prodigious streaks of foam
became apparent where none had been seen before. These streaks, at
length, spreading out to a great distance, and entering into
combination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided
vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more
vast. Suddenly--very suddenly--this assumed a distinct and definite
existence, in a circle of more than a mile in diameter. The edge of
the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray; but no
particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose
interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining,
and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of
some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a
swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an
appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty
cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven.
The mountain trembled to its very base, and the rock rocked. I threw
myself upon my face, and clung to the scant herbage in an excess of
nervous agitation.
"This," said I at length, to the old man--"this _can_ be nothing else
than the great whirlpool of the Maelström."
"So it is sometimes termed," said he. "We Norwegians call it the
Moskoe-ström, from the island of Moskoe in the midway." The ordinary
accounts of this vortex had by no means prepared me for what I
saw. That of Jonas Ramus, which is perhaps the most circumstantial of
any, cannot impart the faintest conception either of the magnificence
or of the horror of the scene--or of the wild bewildering sense of
_the novel_ which confounds the beholder. I am not sure from what
point of view the writer in question surveyed it, nor at what time;
but it could neither have been from the summit of Helseggen, nor
during a storm. There are some passages of his description,
nevertheless, which may be quoted for their details, although their
effect is exceedingly feeble in conveying an impression of the
spectacle.
"Between Lofoden and Moskoe," he says, "the depth of the water is
between thirty-six and forty fathoms; but on the other side, toward
Ver (Vurrgh), this depth decreases so as not to afford a convenient
passage for a vessel, without the risk of splitting on the rocks,
which happens even in the calmest weather. When it is flood, the
stream runs up the country between Lofoden and Moskoe with a
boisterous rapidity; but the roar of its impetuous ebb to the sea is
scarce equalled by the loudest and most dreadful cataracts, the noise
being heard several leagues Off; and the vortices or pits are of such
an extent and depth, that if a ship comes within its attraction, it is
inevitably absorbed and carried down to the bottom, and there beat to
pieces against the rocks; and when the water relaxes, the fragments
thereof are thrown up again. But these intervals of tranquillity are
only at the turn of the ebb and flood, and in calm weather, and last
but a quarter of an hour, its violence gradually returning. When the
stream is most boisterous, and its fury heightened by a storm, it is
dangerous to come within a Norway mile of it. Boats, yachts, and ships
have been carried away by not guarding against it before they were
within its reach. It likewise happens frequently that whales come too
near the stream, and are overpowered by its violence; and then it is
impossible to describe their howlings and bellowings in their
fruitless struggles to disengage themselves. A bear once, attempting
to swim from Lofoden to Moskoe, was caught by the stream and borne
down, while he roared terribly, so as to be heard on shore. Large
stocks of firs and pine trees, after being absorbed by the current,
rise again broken and torn to such a degree as if bristles grew upon
them. This plainly shows the bottom to consist of craggy rocks, among
which they are whirled to and fro. This stream is regulated by the
flux and reflux of the sea--it being constantly high and low water
every six hours. In the year 1645, early in the morning of Sexagesima
Sunday, it raged with such noise and impetuosity that the very stones
of the houses on the coast fell to the ground."
In regard to the depth of the water, I could not see how this could
have been ascertained at all in the immediate vicinity of the
vortex. The "forty fathoms" must have reference only to portions of
the channel close upon the shore either of Moskoe or Lofoden. The
depth in the centre of the Moskoe-ström must be immeasurably greater;
and no better proof of this fact is necessary than can be obtained
from even the sidelong glance into the abyss of the whirl which may be
had from the highest crag of Helseggen. Looking down from this
pinnacle upon the howling Phlegethon below, I could not help smiling
at the simplicity with which the honest Jonas Ramus records, as a
matter difficult of belief, the anecdotes of the whales and the bears;
for it appeared to me, in fact, a self-evident thing that the largest
ships of the line in existence, coming within the influence of that
deadly attraction, could resist it as little as a feather the
hurricane, and must disappear bodily and at once.
The attempts to account for the phenomenon--some of which, I remember,
seemed to me sufficiently plausible in perusal--now wore a very
different and unsatisfactory aspect. The idea generally received is
that this, as well as three smaller vortices among the Feroe Islands,
"have no other cause than the collision of waves rising and falling,
at flux and reflux, against a ridge of rocks and shelves, which
confines
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