Poe, Edgar Allen - The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe

by Volume 01-05 (lit)

  -- 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