successfully, all the wide areas of moral, physical, and mathematical
science? I saw not then what I now clearly perceive, that the
acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic, were astounding; yet I was
sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself, with a
child-like confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of
metaphysical investigation at which I was most busily occupied during
the earlier years of our marriage. With how vast a triumph -- with
how vivid a delight -- with how much of all that is ethereal in hope
-- did I feel, as she bent over me in studies but little sought --
but less known -- that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding
before me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path, I might
at length pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious
not to be forbidden!
How poignant, then, must have been the grief with which, after some
years, I beheld my well-grounded expectations take wings to
themselves and fly away! Without Ligeia I was but as a child groping
benighted. Her presence, her readings alone, rendered vividly
luminous the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were
immersed. Wanting the radiant lustre of her eyes, letters, lambent
and golden, grew duller than Saturnian lead. And now those eyes shone
less and less frequently upon the pages over which I pored. Ligeia
grew ill. The wild eyes blazed with a too -- too glorious effulgence;
the pale fingers became of the transparent waxen hue of the grave,
and the blue veins upon the lofty forehead swelled and sank
impetuously with the tides of the gentle emotion. I saw that she must
die -- and I struggled desperately in spirit with the grim Azrael.
And the struggles of the passionate wife were, to my astonishment,
even more energetic than my own. There had been much in her stern
nature to impress me with the belief that, to her, death would have
come without its terrors; -- but not so. Words are impotent to convey
any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which she wrestled
with the Shadow. I groaned in anguish at the pitiable spectacle.
would have soothed -- I would have reasoned; but, in the intensity of
her wild desire for life, -- for life -- but for life -- solace and
reason were the uttermost folly. Yet not until the last instance,
amid the most convulsive writhings of her fierce spirit, was shaken
the external placidity of her demeanor. Her voice grew more gentle --
grew more low -- yet I would not wish to dwell upon the wild meaning
of the quietly uttered words. My brain reeled as I hearkened
entranced, to a melody more than mortal -- to assumptions and
aspirations which mortality had never before known.
That she loved me I should not have doubted; and I might have been
easily aware that, in a bosom such as hers, love would have reigned
no ordinary passion. But in death only, was I fully impressed with
the strength of her affection. For long hours, detaining my hand,
would she pour out before me the overflowing of a heart whose more
than passionate devotion amounted to idolatry. How had I deserved to
be so blessed by such confessions? -- how had I deserved to be so
cursed with the removal of my beloved in the hour of her making them,
But upon this subject I cannot bear to dilate. Let me say only, that
in Ligeia's more than womanly abandonment to a love, alas! all
unmerited, all unworthily bestowed, I at length recognized the
principle of her longing with so wildly earnest a desire for the life
which was now fleeing so rapidly away. It is this wild longing -- it
is this eager vehemence of desire for life -- but for life -- that I
have no power to portray -- no utterance capable of expressing.
At high noon of the night in which she departed, beckoning me,
peremptorily, to her side, she bade me repeat certain verses composed
by herself not many days before. I obeyed her. -- They were these:
Lo! 'tis 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
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,
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
Invisible Wo!
That motley drama! -- oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased forever more,
By a crowd that seize it not,
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,
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,
And the 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,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.
"O God!" half shrieked Ligeia, leaping to her feet and extending her
arms aloft with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of these lines
-- "O God! O Divine Father! -- shall these things be undeviatingly
so? -- shall this Conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part
and parcel in Thee? Who -- who knoweth the mysteries of the will with
its vigor? Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death
utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will."
And now, as if exhausted with emotion, she suffered her white arms to
fall, and returned solemnly to her bed of death. And as she breathed
her last sighs, there came mingled with them a low murmur from her
lips. I bent to them my ear and distinguished, again, the concluding
words of the passage in Glanvill -- "Man doth not yield him to the
angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his
feeble will."
She died; -- and I, crushed into the very dust with sorrow, could no
longer endure the lonely desolation of my dwelling in the dim and
decaying city by the Rhine. I had no lack of what the world calls
wealth. Ligeia had brought me far more, very far more than ordinarily
falls to the lot of mortals. After a few months, therefore, of weary
and aimless wandering, I purchased, and put in some repair, an abbey,
which I shall not name, in one of the wildest and least frequented
portions of fair England. The gloomy and dreary grandeur of the
building, the almost savage aspect of the domain, the many melancholy
an
d time-honored memories connected with both, had much in unison
with the feelings of utter abandonment which had driven me into that
remote and unsocial region of the country. Yet although the external
abbey, with its verdant decay hanging about it, suffered but little
alteration, I gave way, with a child-like perversity, and perchance
with a faint hope of alleviating my sorrows, to a display of more
than regal magnificence within. -- For such follies, even in
childhood, I had imbibed a taste and now they came back to me as if
in the dotage of grief. Alas, I feel how much even of incipient
madness might have been discovered in the gorgeous and fantastic
draperies, in the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wild cornices and
furniture, in the Bedlam patterns of the carpets of tufted gold! I
had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my labors
and my orders had taken a coloring from my dreams. But these
absurdities must not pause to detail. Let me speak only of that one
chamber, ever accursed, whither in a moment of mental alienation, I
led from the altar as my bride -- as the successor of the unforgotten
Ligeia -- the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of
Tremaine.
There is no individual portion of the architecture and decoration of
that bridal chamber which is not now visibly before me. Where were
the souls of the haughty family of the bride, when, through thirst of
gold, they permitted to pass the threshold of an apartment so
bedecked, a maiden and a daughter so beloved? I have said that I
minutely remember the details of the chamber -- yet I am sadly
forgetful on topics of deep moment -- and here there was no system,
no keeping, in the fantastic display, to take hold upon the memory.
The room lay in a high turret of the castellated abbey, was
pentagonal in shape, and of capacious size. Occupying the whole
southern face of the pentagon was the sole window -- an immense sheet
of unbroken glass from Venice -- a single pane, and tinted of a
leaden hue, so that the rays of either the sun or moon, passing
through it, fell with a ghastly lustre on the objects within. Over
the upper portion of this huge window, extended the trellice-work of
an aged vine, which clambered up the massy walls of the turret. The
ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and
elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of
a semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device. From out the most central
recess of this melancholy vaulting, depended, by a single chain of
gold with long links, a huge censer of the same metal, Saracenic in
pattern, and with many perforations so contrived that there writhed
in and out of them, as if endued with a serpent vitality, a continual
succession of parti-colored fires.
Some few ottomans and golden candelabra, of Eastern figure, were in
various stations about -- and there was the couch, too -- bridal
couch -- of an Indian model, and low, and sculptured of solid ebony,
with a pall-like canopy above. In each of the angles of the chamber
stood on end a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite, from the tombs
of the kings over against Luxor, with their aged lids full of
immemorial sculpture. But in the draping of the apartment lay, alas!
the chief phantasy of all. The lofty walls, gigantic in height --
even unproportionably so -- were hung from summit to foot, in vast
folds, with a heavy and massive-looking tapestry -- tapestry of a
material which was found alike as a carpet on the floor, as a
covering for the ottomans and the ebony bed, as a canopy for the bed,
and as the gorgeous volutes of the curtains which partially shaded
the window. The material was the richest cloth of gold. It was
spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with arabesque figures,
about a foot in diameter, and wrought upon the cloth in patterns of
the most jetty black. But these figures partook of the true character
of the arabesque only when regarded from a single point of view. By a
contrivance now common, and indeed traceable to a very remote period
of antiquity, they were made changeable in aspect. To one entering
the room, they bore the appearance of simple monstrosities; but upon
a farther advance, this appearance gradually departed; and step by
step, as the visitor moved his station in the chamber, he saw himself
surrounded by an endless succession of the ghastly forms which belong
to the superstition of the Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of
the monk. The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the
artificial introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind
the draperies -- giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole.
In halls such as these -- in a bridal chamber such as this -- I
passed, with the Lady of Tremaine, the unhallowed hours of the first
month of our marriage -- passed them with but little disquietude.
That my wife dreaded the fierce moodiness of my temper -- that she
shunned me and loved me but little -- I could not help perceiving;
but it gave me rather pleasure than otherwise. I loathed her with a
hatred belonging more to demon than to man. My memory flew back, (oh,
with what intensity of regret!) to Ligeia, the beloved, the august,
the beautiful, the entombed. I revelled in recollections of her
purity, of her wisdom, of her lofty, her ethereal nature, of her
passionate, her idolatrous love. Now, then, did my spirit fully and
freely burn with more than all the fires of her own. In the
excitement of my opium dreams (for I was habitually fettered in the
shackles of the drug) I would call aloud upon her name, during the
silence of the night, or among the sheltered recesses of the glens by
day, as if, through the wild eagerness, the solemn passion, the
consuming ardor of my longing for the departed, I could restore her
to the pathway she had abandoned -- ah, could it be forever? -- upon
the earth.
About the commencement of the second month of the marriage, the Lady
Rowena was attacked with sudden illness, from which her recovery was
slow. The fever which consumed her rendered her nights uneasy; and in
her perturbed state of half-slumber, she spoke of sounds, and of
motions, in and about the chamber of the turret, which I concluded
had no origin save in the distemper of her fancy, or perhaps in the
phantasmagoric influences of the chamber itself. She became at length
convalescent -- finally well. Yet but a brief period elapsed, ere a
second more violent disorder again threw her upon a bed of suffering;
and from this attack her frame, at all times feeble, never altogether
recovered. Her illnesses were, after this epoch, of alarming
character, and of more alarming recurrence, defying alike the
knowledge and the great exertions of her physicians. With the
increase of the chronic disease which had thus, apparently, taken too
sure hold upon her constitution to be eradicated by human means, I
could not fall to observe a similar increase in the nervous
irritation of her temperament, and in he
r excitability by trivial
causes of fear. She spoke again, and now more frequently and
pertinaciously, of the sounds -- of the slight sounds -- and of the
unusual motions among the tapestries, to which she had formerly
alluded.
One night, near the closing in of September, she pressed this
distressing subject with more than usual emphasis upon my attention.
She had just awakened from an unquiet slumber, and I had been
watching, with feelings half of anxiety, half of vague terror, the
workings of her emaciated countenance. I sat by the side of her ebony
bed, upon one of the ottomans of India. She partly arose, and spoke,
in an earnest low whisper, of sounds which she then heard, but which
I could not hear -- of motions which she then saw, but which I could
not perceive. The wind was rushing hurriedly behind the tapestries,
and I wished to show her (what, let me confess it, I could not all
believe) that those almost inarticulate breathings, and those very
gentle variations of the figures upon the wall, were but the natural
effects of that customary rushing of the wind. But a deadly pallor,
overspreading her face, had proved to me that my exertions to
reassure her would be fruitless. She appeared to be fainting, and no
attendants were within call. I remembered where was deposited a
decanter of light wine which had been ordered by her physicians, and
hastened across the chamber to procure it. But, as I stepped beneath
the light of the censer, two circumstances of a startling nature
attracted my attention. I had felt that some palpable although
invisible object had passed lightly by my person; and I saw that
there lay upon the golden carpet, in the very middle of the rich
lustre thrown from the censer, a shadow -- a faint, indefinite shadow
of angelic aspect -- such as might be fancied for the shadow of a
shade. But I was wild with the excitement of an immoderate dose of
opium, and heeded these things but little, nor spoke of them to
Rowena. Having found the wine, I recrossed the chamber, and poured
out a gobletful, which I held to the lips of the fainting lady. She
had now partially recovered, however, and took the vessel herself,
Poe, Edgar Allen - The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe Page 102