-- a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons
of bygone times are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself
will offer me no key. To a mind constituted like my own, the latter
consideration is an evil. I shall never -- I know that I shall never
-- be satisfied with regard to the nature of my conceptions. Yet it
is not wonderful that these conceptions are indefinite, since they
have their origin in sources so utterly novel. A new sense -- a new
entity is added to my soul.
* * * * * * * *
It is long since I first trod the deck of this terrible ship, and the
rays of my destiny are, I think, gathering to a focus.
Incomprehensible men! Wrapped up in meditations of a kind which I
cannot divine, they pass me by unnoticed. Concealment is utter folly
on my part, for the people will not see. It was but just now that I
passed directly before the eyes of the mate -- it was no long while
ago that I ventured into the captain's own private cabin, and took
thence the materials with which I write, and have written. I shall
from time to time continue this Journal. It is true that I may not
find an opportunity of transmitting it to the world, but I will not
fall to make the endeavour. At the last moment I will enclose the MS.
in a bottle, and cast it within the sea.
* * * * * * * *
An incident has occurred which has given me new room for meditation.
Are such things the operation of ungoverned Chance? I had ventured
upon deck and thrown myself down, without attracting any notice,
among a pile of ratlin-stuff and old sails in the bottom of the yawl.
While musing upon the singularity of my fate, I unwittingly daubed
with a tar-brush the edges of a neatly-folded studding-sail which lay
near me on a barrel. The studding-sail is now bent upon the ship, and
the thoughtless touches of the brush are spread out into the word
DISCOVERY.
I have made many observations lately upon the structure of the
vessel. Although well armed, she is not, I think, a ship of war. Her
rigging, build, and general equipment, all negative a supposition of
this kind. What she is not, I can easily perceive -- what she is I
fear it is impossible to say. I know not how it is, but in
scrutinizing her strange model and singular cast of spars, her huge
size and overgrown suits of canvas, her severely simple bow and
antiquated stern, there will occasionally flash across my mind a
sensation of familiar things, and there is always mixed up with such
indistinct shadows of recollection, an unaccountable memory of old
foreign chronicles and ages long ago.
* * * * * * * *
I have been looking at the timbers of the ship. She is built of a
material to which I am a stranger. There is a peculiar character
about the wood which strikes me as rendering it unfit for the purpose
to which it has been applied. I mean its extreme porousness,
considered independently by the worm-eaten condition which is a
consequence of navigation in these seas, and apart from the
rottenness attendant upon age. It will appear perhaps an observation
somewhat over-curious, but this wood would have every, characteristic
of Spanish oak, if Spanish oak were distended by any unnatural means.
In reading the above sentence a curious apothegm of an old
weather-beaten Dutch navigator comes full upon my recollection. "It
is as sure," he was wont to say, when any doubt was entertained of
his veracity, "as sure as there is a sea where the ship itself will
grow in bulk like the living body of the seaman."
* * * * * * * *
About an hour ago, I made bold to thrust myself among a group of the
crew. They paid me no manner of attention, and, although I stood in
the very midst of them all, seemed utterly unconscious of my
presence. Like the one I had at first seen in the hold, they all bore
about them the marks of a hoary old age. Their knees trembled with
infirmity; their shoulders were bent double with decrepitude; their
shrivelled skins rattled in the wind; their voices were low,
tremulous and broken; their eyes glistened with the rheum of years;
and their gray hairs streamed terribly in the tempest. Around them,
on every part of the deck, lay scattered mathematical instruments of
the most quaint and obsolete construction.
* * * * * * * *
I mentioned some time ago the bending of a studding-sail. From that
period the ship, being thrown dead off the wind, has continued her
terrific course due south, with every rag of canvas packed upon her,
from her trucks to her lower studding-sail booms, and rolling every
moment her top-gallant yard-arms into the most appalling hell of
water which it can enter into the mind of a man to imagine. I have
just left the deck, where I find it impossible to maintain a footing,
although the crew seem to experience little inconvenience. It appears
to me a miracle of miracles that our enormous bulk is not swallowed
up at once and forever. We are surely doomed to hover continually
upon the brink of Eternity, without taking a final plunge into the
abyss. From billows a thousand times more stupendous than any I have
ever seen, we glide away with the facility of the arrowy sea-gull;
and the colossal waters rear their heads above us like demons of the
deep, but like demons confined to simple threats and forbidden to
destroy. I am led to attribute these frequent escapes to the only
natural cause which can account for such effect. -- I must suppose
the ship to be within the influence of some strong current, or
impetuous under-tow.
* * * * * * * *
I have seen the captain face to face, and in his own cabin -- but, as
I expected, he paid me no attention. Although in his appearance there
is, to a casual observer, nothing which might bespeak him more or
less than man-still a feeling of irrepressible reverence and awe
mingled with the sensation of wonder with which I regarded him. In
stature he is nearly my own height; that is, about five feet eight
inches. He is of a well-knit and compact frame of body, neither
robust nor remarkably otherwise. But it is the singularity of the
expression which reigns upon the face -- it is the intense, the
wonderful, the thrilling evidence of old age, so utter, so extreme,
which excites within my spirit a sense -- a sentiment ineffable. His
forehead, although little wrinkled, seems to bear upon it the stamp
of a myriad of years. -- His gray hairs are records of the past, and
his grayer eyes are Sybils of the future. The cabin floor was thickly
strewn with strange, iron-clasped folios, and mouldering instruments
of science, and obsolete long-forgotten charts. His head was bowed
down upon his hands, and he pored, with a fiery unquiet eye, over a
paper which I took to be a commission, and which, at all events, bore
the signature of a monarch. He muttered to himself, as did the first
seaman whom I saw in the hold, some low peevish syllables of a
foreign tongue, and although the speaker was close at my e
lbow, his
voice seemed to reach my ears from the distance of a mile.
* * * * * * * *
The ship and all in it are imbued with the spirit of Eld. The crew
glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries; their eyes have
an eager and uneasy meaning; and when their fingers fall athwart my
path in the wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I feel as I have never
felt before, although I have been all my life a dealer in
antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at
Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a
ruin.
* * * * * * * *
When I look around me I feel ashamed of my former apprehensions. If I
trembled at the blast which has hitherto attended us, shall I not
stand aghast at a warring of wind and ocean, to convey any idea of
which the words tornado and simoom are trivial and ineffective? All
in the immediate vicinity of the ship is the blackness of eternal
night, and a chaos of foamless water; but, about a league on either
side of us, may be seen, indistinctly and at intervals, stupendous
ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking
like the walls of the universe.
* * * * * * * *
As I imagined, the ship proves to be in a current; if that
appellation can properly be given to a tide which, howling and
shrieking by the white ice, thunders on to the southward with a
velocity like the headlong dashing of a cataract.
* * * * * * * *
To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly
impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful
regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to
the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident that we are hurrying
onwards to some exciting knowledge -- some never-to-be-imparted
secret, whose attainment is destruction. Perhaps this current leads
us to the southern pole itself. It must be confessed that a
supposition apparently so wild has every probability in its favor.
* * * * * * * *
The crew pace the deck with unquiet and tremulous step; but there is
upon their countenances an expression more of the eagerness of hope
than of the apathy of despair.
In the meantime the wind is still in our poop, and, as we carry a
crowd of canvas, the ship is at times lifted bodily from out the sea
-- Oh, horror upon horror! the ice opens suddenly to the right, and
to the left, and we are whirling dizzily, in immense concentric
circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic amphitheatre, the
summit of whose walls is lost in the darkness and the distance. But
little time will be left me to ponder upon my destiny -- the circles
rapidly grow small -- we are plunging madly within the grasp of the
whirlpool -- and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of
ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering, oh God! and -- going
down.
NOTE. -- The "MS. Found in a Bottle," was originally published in
1831, and it was not until many years afterwards that I became
acquainted with the maps of Mercator, in which the ocean is
represented as rushing, by four mouths, into the (northern) Polar
Gulf, to be absorbed into the bowels of the earth; the Pole itself
being represented by a black rock, towering to a prodigious height.
~~~ End of Text ~~~
========
The Oval Portrait
THE chateau into which my valet had ventured to make forcible
entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition,
to pass a night in the open air, was one of those piles of commingled
gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among the Appennines,
not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe. To all
appearance it had been temporarily and very lately abandoned. We
established ourselves in one of the smallest and least sumptuously
furnished apartments. It lay in a remote turret of the building. Its
decorations were rich, yet tattered and antique. Its walls were hung
with tapestry and bedecked with manifold and multiform armorial
trophies, together with an unusually great number of very spirited
modern paintings in frames of rich golden arabesque. In these
paintings, which depended from the walls not only in their main
surfaces, but in very many nooks which the bizarre architecture of
the chateau rendered necessary -- in these paintings my incipient
delirium, perhaps, had caused me to take deep interest; so that I
bade Pedro to close the heavy shutters of the room -- since it was
already night -- to light the tongues of a tall candelabrum which
stood by the head of my bed -- and to throw open far and wide the
fringed curtains of black velvet which enveloped the bed itself. I
wished all this done that I might resign myself, if not to sleep, at
least alternately to the contemplation of these pictures, and the
perusal of a small volume which had been found upon the pillow, and
which purported to criticise and describe them.
Long -- long I read -- and devoutly, devotedly I gazed. Rapidly and
gloriously the hours flew by and the deep midnight came. The position
of the candelabrum displeased me, and outreaching my hand with
difficulty, rather than disturb my slumbering valet, I placed it so
as to throw its rays more fully upon the book.
But the action produced an effect altogether unanticipated. The rays
of the numerous candles (for there were many) now fell within a niche
of the room which had hitherto been thrown into deep shade by one of
the bed-posts. I thus saw in vivid light a picture all unnoticed
before. It was the portrait of a young girl just ripening into
womanhood. I glanced at the painting hurriedly, and then closed my
eyes. Why I did this was not at first apparent even to my own
perception. But while my lids remained thus shut, I ran over in my
mind my reason for so shutting them. It was an impulsive movement to
gain time for thought -- to make sure that my vision had not deceived
me -- to calm and subdue my fancy for a more sober and more certain
gaze. In a very few moments I again looked fixedly at the painting.
That I now saw aright I could not and would not doubt; for the first
flashing of the candles upon that canvas had seemed to dissipate the
dreamy stupor which was stealing over my senses, and to startle me at
once into waking life.
The portrait, I have already said, was that of a young girl. It was a
mere head and shoulders, done in what is technically termed a
vignette manner; much in the style of the favorite heads of Sully.
The arms, the bosom, and even the ends of the radiant hair melted
imperceptibly into the vague yet deep shadow which formed the
back-ground of the whole. The frame was oval, richly gilded and
filigreed in Moresque. As a thing of art nothing could be more
admirable than the painting itself. But it could have been neither
the execution of the work, nor the immortal beauty of the
countenance, which had so suddenly and so vehemently moved me. Least
of all, could it ha
ve been that my fancy, shaken from its half
slumber, had mistaken the head for that of a living person. I saw at
once that the peculiarities of the design, of the vignetting, and of
the frame, must have instantly dispelled such idea -- must have
prevented even its momentary entertainment. Thinking earnestly upon
these points, I remained, for an hour perhaps, half sitting, half
reclining, with my vision riveted upon the portrait. At length,
satisfied with the true secret of its effect, I fell back within the
bed. I had found the spell of the picture in an absolute
life-likeliness of expression, which, at first startling, finally
confounded, subdued, and appalled me. With deep and reverent awe I
replaced the candelabrum in its former position. The cause of my deep
agitation being thus shut from view, I sought eagerly the volume
which discussed the paintings and their histories. Turning to the
number which designated the oval portrait, I there read the vague and
quaint words which follow:
"She was a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of
glee. And evil was the hour when she saw, and loved, and wedded the
painter. He, passionate, studious, austere, and having already a
bride in his Art; she a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely
than full of glee; all light and smiles, and frolicsome as the young
fawn; loving and cherishing all things; hating only the Art which was
her rival; dreading only the pallet and brushes and other untoward
instruments which deprived her of the countenance of her lover. It
was thus a terrible thing for this lady to hear the painter speak of
his desire to portray even his young bride. But she was humble and
obedient, and sat meekly for many weeks in the dark, high
turret-chamber where the light dripped upon the pale canvas only from
overhead. But he, the painter, took glory in his work, which went on
Poe, Edgar Allen - The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe Page 33