Saturnus. The peculiar spirit of the skies, if I mistake not greatly,
made itself manifest, not only in the physical orb of the earth, but
in the souls, imaginations, and meditations of mankind.
Over some flasks of the red Chian wine, within the walls of a noble
hall, in a dim city called Ptolemais, we sat, at night, a company of
seven. And to our chamber there was no entrance save by a lofty door
of brass: and the door was fashioned by the artisan Corinnos, and,
being of rare workmanship, was fastened from within. Black draperies,
likewise, in the gloomy room, shut out from our view the moon, the
lurid stars, and the peopleless streets -- but the boding and the
memory of Evil they would not be so excluded. There were things
around us and about of which I can render no distinct account --
things material and spiritual -- heaviness in the atmosphere -- a
sense of suffocation -- anxiety -- and, above all, that terrible
state of existence which the nervous experience when the senses are
keenly living and awake, and meanwhile the powers of thought lie
dormant. A dead weight hung upon us. It hung upon our limbs -- upon
the household furniture -- upon the goblets from which we drank; and
all things were depressed, and borne down thereby -- all things save
only the flames of the seven lamps which illumined our revel.
Uprearing themselves in tall slender lines of light, they thus
remained burning all pallid and motionless; and in the mirror which
their lustre formed upon the round table of ebony at which we sat,
each of us there assembled beheld the pallor of his own countenance,
and the unquiet glare in the downcast eyes of his companions. Yet we
laughed and were merry in our proper way -- which was hysterical; and
sang the songs of Anacreon -- which are madness; and drank deeply --
although the purple wine reminded us of blood. For there was yet
another tenant of our chamber in the person of young Zoilus. Dead,
and at full length he lay, enshrouded; the genius and the demon of
the scene. Alas! he bore no portion in our mirth, save that his
countenance, distorted with the plague, and his eyes, in which Death
had but half extinguished the fire of the pestilence, seemed to take
such interest in our merriment as the dead may haply take in the
merriment of those who are to die. But although I, Oinos, felt that
the eyes of the departed were upon me, still I forced myself not to
perceive the bitterness of their expression, and gazing down steadily
into the depths of the ebony mirror, sang with a loud and sonorous
voice the songs of the son of Teios. But gradually my songs they
ceased, and their echoes, rolling afar off among the sable draperies
of the chamber, became weak, and undistinguishable, and so faded
away. And lo! from among those sable draperies where the sounds of
the song departed, there came forth a dark and undefined shadow -- a
shadow such as the moon, when low in heaven, might fashion from the
figure of a man: but it was the shadow neither of man nor of God, nor
of any familiar thing. And quivering awhile among the draperies of
the room, it at length rested in full view upon the surface of the
door of brass. But the shadow was vague, and formless, and
indefinite, and was the shadow neither of man nor of God -- neither
God of Greece, nor God of Chaldaea, nor any Egyptian God. And the
shadow rested upon the brazen doorway, and under the arch of the
entablature of the door, and moved not, nor spoke any word, but there
became stationary and remained. And the door whereupon the shadow
rested was, if I remember aright, over against the feet of the young
Zoilus enshrouded. But we, the seven there assembled, having seen the
shadow as it came out from among the draperies, dared not steadily
behold it, but cast down our eyes, and gazed continually into the
depths of the mirror of ebony. And at length I, Oinos, speaking some
low words, demanded of the shadow its dwelling and its appellation.
And the shadow answered, "I am SHADOW, and my dwelling is near to the
Catacombs of Ptolemais, and hard by those dim plains of Helusion
which border upon the foul Charonian canal." And then did we, the
seven, start from our seats in horror, and stand trembling, and
shuddering, and aghast, for the tones in the voice of the shadow were
not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, and,
varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable fell duskly upon
our ears in the well-remembered and familiar accents of many thousand
departed friends.
End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe V. 4
Volume 5
THE WORKS OF
EDGAR ALLAN POE
IN FIVE VOLUMES
Contents
Philosophy of Furniture
A Tale of Jerusalem
The Sphinx
Hop Frog
The Man of the Crowd
Never Bet the Devill Your Head
Thou Art the Man
Why the Little Frenchman Wears his Hand in a Sling
Bon-Bon
Some words with a Mummy
The Poetic Principle
Old English Poetry
POEMS
Dedication
Preface
Poems of Later Life
The Raven
The Bells
Ulalume
To Helen
Annabel Lee
A Valentine
An Enigma
To my Mother
For Annie
To F----
To Frances S. Osgood
Eldorado
Eulalie
A Dream within a Dream
To Marie Louise (Shew)
To the Same
The City in the Sea
The Sleeper
Bridal Ballad
Notes
Poems of Manhood
Lenore
To One in Paradise
The Coliseum
The Haunted Palace
The Conqueror Worm
Silence
Dreamland
Hymn
To Zante
Scenes from "Politian"
Note
Poems of Youth
Introduction (1831)
Sonnet--To Science
Al Aaraaf
Tamerlane
To Helen
The Valley of Unrest
Israfel
To -- ("The Bowers Whereat, in Dreams I See")
To -- ("I Heed not That my Earthly Lot")
To the River --
Song
A Dream
Romance
Fairyland
The Lake To--
"The Happiest Day"
Imitation
Hymn. Translation from the Greek
"In Youth I Have Known One"
A Paean
Notes
Doubtful Poems
Alone
To Isadore
The Village Street
The Forest Reverie
Notes
PHILOSOPHY OF FURNITURE.
In the internal decoration, if not in the external architecture of
their residences, the English are supreme. The Italians have but little
sentiment beyond marbles and colours. In France, _meliora probant,
deteriora _sequuntur - the
people are too much a race of gadabouts to
maintain those household proprieties of which, indeed, they have a
delicate appreciation, or at least the elements of a proper sense. The
Chinese and most of the eastern races have a warm but inappropriate fancy.
The Scotch are _poor _decorists. The Dutch have, perhaps, an indeterminate
idea that a curtain is not a cabbage. In Spain they are _all _curtains - a
nation of hangmen. The Russians do not furnish. The Hottentots and
Kickapoos are very well in their way. The Yankees alone are preposterous.
How this happens, it is not difficult to see. We have no aristocracy
of blood, and having therefore as a natural, and indeed as an inevitable
thing, fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars, the _display of
wealth _has here to take the place and perform the office of the heraldic
display in monarchical countries. By a transition readily understood, and
which might have been as readily foreseen, we have been brought to merge
in simple _show _our notions of taste itself
To speak less abstractly. In England, for example, no mere parade of
costly appurtenances would be so likely as with us, to create an
impression of the beautiful in respect to the appurtenances themselves -
or of taste as regards the proprietor: - this for the reason, first, that
wealth is not, in England, the loftiest object of ambition as constituting
a nobility; and secondly, that there, the true nobility of blood,
confining itself within the strict limits of legitimate taste, rather
avoids than affects that mere costliness in which a _parvenu _rivalry may
at any time be successfully attempted.
The people _will _imitate the nobles, and the result is a thorough
diffusion of the proper feeling. But in America, the coins current being
the sole arms of the aristocracy, their display may be said, in general,
to be the sole means of the aristocratic distinction; and the populace,
looking always upward for models,,are insensibly led to confound the two
entirely separate ideas of magnificence and beauty. In short, the cost of
an article of furniture has at length come to be, with us, nearly the sole
test of its merit in a decorative point of view - and this test, once
established, has led the way to many analogous errors, readily traceable
to the one primitive folly.
There could be nothing more directly offensive to the eye of an artist
than the interior of what is termed in the United States - that is to say,
in Appallachia - a well-furnished apartment. Its most usual defect is a
want of keeping. We speak of the keeping of a room as we would of the
keeping of a picture - for both the picture and the room are amenable to
those undeviating principles which regulate all varieties of art; and very
nearly the same laws by which we decide on the higher merits of a
painting, suffice for decision on the adjustment of a chamber.
A want of keeping is observable sometimes in the character of the
several pieces of furniture, but generally in their colours or modes of
adaptation to use _Very _often the eye is offended by their inartistic
arrangement. Straight lines are too prevalent - too uninterruptedly
continued - or clumsily interrupted at right angles. If curved lines
occur, they are repeated into unpleasant uniformity. By undue precision,
the appearance of many a fine apartment is utterly spoiled.
Curtains are rarely well disposed, or well chosen in respect to other
decorations. With formal furniture, curtains are out of place; and an
extensive volume of drapery of any kind is, under any circumstance,
irreconcilable with good taste - the proper quantum, as well as the proper
adjustment, depending upon the character of the general effect.
Carpets are better understood of late than of ancient days, but we
still very frequently err in their patterns and colours. The soul of the
apartment is the carpet. From it are deduced not only the hues but the
forms of all objects incumbent. A judge at common law may be an ordinary
man; a good judge of a carpet _must be _a genius. Yet we have heard
discoursing of carpets, with the air "_d'un mouton qui reve," _fellows who
should not and who could not be entrusted with the management of their own
_moustaches. _Every one knows that a large floor _may _have a covering of
large figures, and that a small one must have a covering of small - yet
this is not all the knowledge in the world. As regards texture, the Saxony
is alone admissible. Brussels is the preterpluperfect tense of fashion,
and Turkey is taste in its dying agonies. Touching pattern - a carpet
should _not _be bedizzened out like a Riccaree Indian - all red chalk,
yellow ochre, and cock's feathers. In brief - distinct grounds, and vivid
circular or cycloid figures, _of no meaning, _are here Median laws. The
abomination of flowers, or representations of well-known objects of any
kind, should not be endured within the limits of Christendom. Indeed,
whether on carpets, or curtains, or tapestry, or ottoman coverings, all
upholstery of this nature should be rigidly Arabesque. As for those
antique floor-cloth & still occasionally seen in the dwellings of the
rabble - cloths of huge, sprawling, and radiating devises,
stripe-interspersed, and glorious with all hues, among which no ground is
intelligible-these are but the wicked invention of a race of time-servers
and money-lovers - children of Baal and worshippers of Mammon - Benthams,
who, to spare thought and economize fancy, first cruelly invented the
Kaleidoscope, and then established joint-stock companies to twirl it by
steam.
_ Glare is _a leading error in the philosophy of American household
decoration - an error easily recognised as deduced from the perversion of
taste just specified., We are violently enamoured of gas and of glass. The
former is totally inadmissible within doors. Its harsh and unsteady light
offends. No one having both brains and eyes will use it. A mild, or what
artists term a cool light, with its consequent warm shadows, will do
wonders for even an ill-furnished apartment. Never was a more lovely
thought than that of the astral lamp. We mean, of course, the astral lamp
proper - the lamp of Argand, with its original plain ground-glass shade,
and its tempered and uniform moonlight rays. The cut-glass shade is a weak
invention of the enemy. The eagerness with which we have adopted it,
partly on account of its _flashiness, _but principally on account of its
_greater rest, is _a good commentary on the proposition with which we
began. It is not too much to say, that the deliberate employer of a
cut-glass shade, is either radically deficient in taste, or blindly
subservient to the caprices of fashion. The light proceeding from one of
these gaudy abominations is unequal broken, and painful. It alone is
sufficient to mar a world of good effect in the furniture subjected to its
influence. Female loveliness, in especial, is more than one-half
disenchanted beneath its evil eye.
In the matter of glass, generally, we proceed upon false principles.
Its leading feature is _glitter - _an
d in that one word how much of all
that is detestable do we express ! Flickering, unquiet lights, are
_sometimes _pleasing - to children and idiots always so - but in the
embellishment of a room they should be scrupulously avoided. In truth,
even strong _steady _lights are inadmissible. The huge and unmeaning glass
chandeliers, prism-cut, gas-lighted, and without shade, which dangle in
our most fashionable drawing-rooms, may be cited as the quintessence of
all that is false in taste or preposterous in folly.
The rage for _glitter-_because its idea has become as we before
observed, confounded with that of magnificence in the abstract-has led us,
also, to the exaggerated employment of mirrors. We line our dwellings with
great British plates, and then imagine we have done a fine thing. Now the
slightest thought will be sufficient to convince any one who has an eye at
all, of the ill effect of numerous looking-glasses, and especially of
large ones. Regarded apart from its reflection, the mirror presents a
continuous, flat, colourless, unrelieved surface, - a thing always and
obviously unpleasant. Considered as a reflector, it is potent in producing
a monstrous and odious uniformity: and the evil is here aggravated, not in
Poe, Edgar Allen - The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe Page 147