Works of Edgar Allan Poe

by Эдгар Аллан По

  "My son," said he, when we were seated, "what is the chief end of your existence?"

  "My father," I answered, "it is the study of Nosology."

  "And what, Robert," he inquired, "is Nosology?"

  "Sir," I said, "it is the Science of Noses."

  "And can you tell me," he demanded, "what is the meaning of a nose?"

  "A nose, my father;" I replied, greatly softened, "has been variously defined by about a thousand different authors." [Here I pulled out my watch.] "It is now noon or thereabouts - we shall have time enough to get through with them all before midnight. To commence then: - The nose, according to Bartholinus, is that protuberance -- that bump - that excrescence - that - "

  "Will do, Robert," interrupted the good old gentleman. "I am thunderstruck at the extent of your information - I am positively -- upon my soul." [Here he closed his eyes and placed his hand upon his heart.] "Come here!" [Here he took me by the arm.] "Your education may now be considered as finished - it is high time you should scuffle for yourself - and you cannot do a better thing than merely follow your nose -- so - so - so - " [Here he kicked me down stairs and out of the door] - "so get out of my house, and God bless you!"

  As I felt within me the divine afflatus, I considered this accident rather fortunate than otherwise. I resolved to be guided by the paternal advice. I determined to follow my nose. I gave it a pull or two upon the spot, and wrote a pamphlet on Nosology forthwith.

  All Fum-Fudge was in an uproar.

  "Wonderful genius!" said the Quarterly.

  "Superb physiologist!" said the Westminster.

  "Clever fellow!" said the Foreign.

  "Fine writer!" said the Edinburgh.

  "Profound thinker!" said the Dublin.

  "Great man!" said Bentley.

  "Divine soul!" said Fraser.

  "One of us!" said Blackwood.

  "Who can he be?" said Mrs. Bas-Bleu.

  "What can he be?" said big Miss Bas-Bleu.

  "Where can he be?" said little Miss Bas-Bleu. - But I paid these people no attention whatever - I just stepped into the shop of an artist.

  The Duchess of Bless-my-Soul was sitting for her portrait; the Marquis of So-and-So was holding the Duchess' poodle; the Earl of This-and-That was flirting with her salts; and his Royal Highness of Touch-me-Not was leaning upon the back of her chair.

  I approached the artist and turned up my nose.

  "Oh, beautiful!" sighed her Grace.

  "Oh my!" lisped the Marquis.

  "Oh, shocking!" groaned the Earl.

  "Oh, abominable!" growled his Royal Highness.

  "What will you take for it?" asked the artist.

  "For his nose!" shouted her Grace.

  "A thousand pounds," said I, sitting down.

  "A thousand pounds?" inquired the artist, musingly.

  "A thousand pounds," said I.

  "Beautiful!" said he, entranced.

  "A thousand pounds," said I.

  "Do you warrant it?" he asked, turning the nose to the light.

  "I do," said I, blowing it well.

  "Is it quite original?" he inquired; touching it with reverence.

  "Humph!" said I, twisting it to one side.

  "Has no copy been taken?" he demanded, surveying it through a microscope.

  "None," said I, turning it up.

  "Admirable!" he ejaculated, thrown quite off his guard by the beauty of the manoeuvre.

  "A thousand pounds," said I.

  "A thousand pounds?" said he.

  "Precisely," said I.

  "A thousand pounds?" said he.

  "Just so," said I.

  "You shall have them," said he. "What a piece of virtu!" So he drew me a check upon the spot, and took a sketch of my nose. I engaged rooms in Jermyn street, and sent her Majesty the ninety-ninth edition of the "Nosology," with a portrait of the proboscis. - That sad little rake, the Prince of Wales, invited me to dinner.

  We were all lions and recherchés.

  There was a modern Platonist. He quoted Porphyry, Iamblicus, Plotinus, Proclus, Hierocles, Maximus Tyrius, and Syrianus.

  There was a human-perfectibility man. He quoted Turgot, Price, Priestly, Condorcet, De Stael, and the "Ambitious Student in Ill Health."

  There was Sir Positive Paradox. He observed that all fools were philosophers, and that all philosophers were fools.

  There was Æstheticus Ethix. He spoke of fire, unity, and atoms; bi-part and pre-existent soul; affinity and discord; primitive intelligence and homöomeria.

  There was Theologos Theology. He talked of Eusebius and Arianus; heresy and the Council of Nice; Puseyism and consubstantialism; Homousios and Homouioisios.

  There was Fricassée from the Rocher de Cancale. He mentioned Muriton of red tongue; cauliflowers with velouté sauce; veal à la St. Menehoult; marinade à la St. Florentin; and orange jellies en mosäiques.

  There was Bibulus O'Bumper. He touched upon Latour and Markbrünnen; upon Mousseux and Chambertin; upon Richbourg and St. George; upon Haubrion, Leonville, and Medoc; upon Barac and Preignac; upon Grâve, upon Sauterne, upon Lafitte, and upon St. Peray. He shook his head at Clos de Vougeot, and told, with his eyes shut, the difference between Sherry and Amontillado.

  There was Signor Tintontintino from Florence. He discoursed of Cimabué, Arpino, Carpaccio, and Argostino - of the gloom of Caravaggio, of the amenity of Albano, of the colors of Titian, of the frows of Rubens, and of the waggeries of Jan Steen.

  There was the President of the Fum-Fudge University. He was of opinion that the moon was called Bendis in Thrace, Bubastis in Egypt, Dian in Rome, and Artemis in Greece. There was a Grand Turk from Stamboul. He could not help thinking that the angels were horses, cocks, and bulls; that somebody in the sixth heaven had seventy thousand heads; and that the earth was supported by a sky-blue cow with an incalculable number of green horns.

  There was Delphinus Polyglott. He told us what had become of the eighty-three lost tragedies of Æschylus; of the fifty-four orations of Isæus; of the three hundred and ninety-one speeches of Lysias; of the hundred and eighty treatises of Theophrastus; of the eighth book of the conic sections of Apollonius; of Pindar's hymns and dithyrambics; and of the five and forty tragedies of Homer Junior.

  There was Ferdinand Fitz-Fossillus Feltspar. He informed us all about internal fires and tertiary formations; about äeriforms, fluidiforms, and solidiforms; about quartz and marl; about schist and schorl; about gypsum and trap; about talc and calc; about blende and horn-blende; about mica-slate and pudding-stone; about cyanite and lepidolite; about hematite and tremolite; about antimony and calcedony; about manganese and whatever you please.

  There was myself. I spoke of myself; - of myself, of myself, of myself; - of Nosology, of my pamphlet, and of myself. I turned up my nose, and I spoke of myself.

  "Marvellous clever man!" said the Prince.

  "Superb!" said his guests: - and next morning her Grace of Bless-my-Soul paid me a visit.

  "Will you go to Almack's, pretty creature?" she said, tapping me under the chin.

  "Upon honor," said I.

  "Nose and all?" she asked.

  "As I live," I replied.

  "Here then is a card, my life. Shall I say you will be there?"

  "Dear Duchess, with all my heart."

  "Pshaw, no! - but with all your nose?"

  "Every bit of it, my love," said I: so I gave it a twist or two, and found myself at Almack's. The rooms were crowded to suffocation.

  "He is coming!" said somebody on the staircase.

  "He is coming!" said somebody farther up.

  "He is coming!" said somebody farther still.

  "He is come!" exclaimed the Duchess. "He is come, the little love!" - and, seizing me firmly by both hands, she kissed me thrice upon the nose. A marked sensation immediately ensued.

  "Diavolo!" cried Count Capricornutti.

  "Dios guarda!" muttered Don Stiletto.

  "Mille tonnerres!" ejaculated the Prince de Grenouille.


  "Tousand teufel!" growled the Elector of Bluddennuff.

  It was not to be borne. I grew angry. I turned short upon Bluddennuff.

  "Sir!" said I to him, "you are a baboon."

  "Sir," he replied, after a pause, "Donner und Blitzen!"

  This was all that could be desired. We exchanged cards. At Chalk-Farm, the next morning, I shot off his nose - and then called upon my friends.

  "Bête!" said the first.

  "Fool!" said the second.

  "Dolt!" said the third.

  "Ass!" said the fourth.

  "Ninny!" said the fifth.

  "Noodle!" said the sixth.

  "Be off!" said the seventh.

  At all this I felt mortified, and so called upon my father.

  "Father," I asked, "what is the chief end of my existence?"

  "My son," he replied, "it is still the study of Nosology; but in hitting the Elector upon the nose you have overshot your mark. You have a fine nose, it is true; but then Bluddennuff has none. You are damned, and he has become the hero of the day. I grant you that in Fum-Fudge the greatness of a lion is in proportion to the size of his proboscis - but, good heavens! there is no competing with a lion who has no proboscis at all."

  WILLIAM WILSON

  What say of it? what say of CONSCIENCE grim, That spectre in my path?

  Chamberlayne's 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 recognise 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 neighbouring 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 holy-days.

  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 "Dominic," 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-bethumbed 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 outre. 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 siecle de fer!"