Lea and Blanchard
Philadelphia
1840
The Mrs. Robert C. Taylor Collection of Popular American Fiction
Note: Volume I in fragile condition; back cover nearly detached.
Prepared for the The Electronic Archive of Early American Fiction at the University of Virginia Library. Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Virginia.
Published: 1840
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Lillian Gary Taylor; Robert C. Taylor; Eveline V. Maydell, N. York 1923.
TALES
OF THE
GROTESQUE AND ARABESQUE.
BY EDGAR A. POE.
Seltsamen tochter Jovis Seinem schosskinde Der Phantasie
Goethe
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
PHILADELPHIA:
LEA AND BLANCHARD.
sylvania.
Printed by
Haswell, Barrington, and Haswell.
These Volumes are Inscribed
TO
COLONEL WILLIAM DRAYTON,
OF PHILADELPHIA,
WITH EVERY SENTIMENT OF RESPECT, GRATITUDE,
AND ESTEEM,
BY HIS OBLIGED FRIEND AND SERVANT,
THE AUTHOR.
PREFACE.
The epithets "Grotesque" and "Arabesque" will be found to indicate with sufficient precision the prevalent tenor of the tales here published. But from the fact that, during a period of some two or three years, I have written five-and-twenty short stories whose general character may be so briefly defined, it can- not be fairly inferred -- at all events it is not truly inferred -- that I have, for this species of writing, any inordinate, or indeed any peculiar taste or pre- possession. I may have written with an eye to this republication in volume form, and may, therefore, have desired to preserve, as far as a certain point, a certain unity of design. This is, indeed, the fact; and it may even happen that, in this manner, I shall never compose anything again. I speak of these things here, because I am led to think it is this pre- valence of the "Arabesque" in my serious tales, which has induced one or two critics to tax me, in all friendliness, with what they have been pleased to term "Germanism" and gloom. The charge is in bad taste, and the grounds of the accusation have not been sufficiently considered. Let us admit, for the moment, that the "phantasy-pieces" now given -6- are Germanic, or what not. Then Germanism is "the vein" for the time being. To morrow I may be any- thing but German, as yesterday I was everything else. These many pieces are yet one book. My friends would be quite as wise in taxing an astronomer with too much astronomy, or an ethical author with treat- ing too largely of morals. But the truth is that, with a single exception, there is no one of these stories in which the scholar should recognise the distinctive features of that species of pseudo-horror which we are taught to call Germanic, for no better reason than that some of the secondary names of German litera- ture have become identified with its folly. If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I main- tain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul, -- that I have deduced this terror only from its legitimate sources, and urged it only to its legitimate results.
There are one or two of the articles here, ( con-
ceived and executed in the purest spirit of extrava-
ganza,) to which I expect no serious attention, and
of which I shall speak no farther. But for the rest I
cannot conscientiously claim indulgence on the score
of hasty effort. I think it best becomes me to say,
therefore, that if I have sinned, I have deliberately
sinned. These brief compositions are, in chief part,
the results of matured purpose and very careful
elaboration.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
Page
MORELLA...
LIONIZING...
WILLIAM WILSON...
THE MAN THAT WAS USED UP...
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER...
THE DUC DE L'OMELETTE...
MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE...
BON-BON...
SHADOW...
THE DEVIL IN THE BELFRY...
LIGEIA...
KING PEST...
THE SIGNORA ZENOBIA...
THE SCYTHE OF TIME...
Page 009
TALES
OF
THE GROTESQUE AND ARABESQUE.
MORELLA.
'
,
'
Itself, alone by itself, eternally one, and single.
Plato. Sympos.
With a feeling of deep yet most singular affection I regarded my friend Morella. Thrown by accident into her society many years ago, my soul, from our first meeting, burned with fires it had never before known; but the fires were not of Eros; and bitter and tormenting to my spirit was the gradual convic- tion that I could in no manner define their unusual meaning, or regulate their vague intensity. Yet we met; and fate bound us together at the altar; and I -10- never spoke of passion, nor thought of love. She, however, shunned society, and, attaching herself to me alone, rendered me happy. It is a happiness to wonder; -- it is a happiness to dream.
Morella's erudition was profound. As I hope to
live, her talents were of no common order -- her
powers of mind were gigantic. I felt this, and, in
many matters, became her pupil. I soon, however,
found that, perhaps on account of her Presburg
education, she placed before me a number of those
mystical writings which are usually considered the
mere dross of the early German literature. These,
for what reasons I could not imagine, were her
favorite and constant study -- and that in process of
time they became my own should be attributed to
the simple but effectual influence of habit and ex-
ample.
In all this, if I err not, my reason had little to do.
My convictions, or I forget myself, were in no man-
ner acted upon by the ideal, nor was any tincture of
the mysticism which I read to be discovered, unless
I am greatly mistaken, either in my deeds or in my
thoughts. Feeling deeply persuaded of this, I aban-
doned myself implicitly to the guidance of my wife,
and entered with an unflinching heart into the intri-
cacies of her studies. And then -- then, when, poring
over forbidden pages, I felt a forbidden spirit enkind-
ling within me -- would Morella place her cold hand
upon my own, and rake up from the ashes of a dead
philosophy some low, singular words, whose strange
meaning burned themselves in upon my memory -- and
then hour after hour would I linger by her side and
dwell upon the music of her voice -- until, at length, its
melody was tainted with terror -- and fell like a shadow
upon my soul -- and I grew pale, and shuddered in-
wardly at those too unearthly tones. And thus joy
suddenly faded into horror, and the most beautiful
became the most hideous, as Hinnon became Ge-
Henna.
It is unnecessary to state the exact character of
those disquisitions which, growing out of the volumes
I have mentioned, formed, for so long a time, almost
the sole conversation of Morella and myself. By the
learned in what might be termed theological morality
they will be readily conceived, and by the unlearned
they would, at all events, be little understood. The
wild Pantheism of Fichte; the modified 
of the Pythagoreans; and, above all, the doctrines of
Identity as urged by Schelling, were generally the
points of discussion presenting the most of beauty to
the imaginative Morella. That identity which is
termed personal, Mr. Locke, I think, truly defines to
consist in the sameness of a rational being. And
since by person we understand an intelligent essence
having reason, and since there is a consciousness
which always accompanies thinking, it is this which
makes us all to be that which we call ourselves -- there-
by distinguishing us from other beings that think, and
giving us our personal identity. But the principium
individuationis -- the notion of that identity which at
death is or is not lost forever, was to me, at all times,
a consideration of intense interest, not more from the
mystical and exciting nature of its consequences, than
from the marked and agitated manner in which
Morella mentioned them.
But, indeed, the time had now arrived when the
mystery of my wife's manner oppressed me as a spell.
I could no longer bear the touch of her wan fingers,
nor the low tone of her musical language, nor the
lustre of her melancholy eyes. And she knew all
this but did not upbraid -- she seemed conscious of my
weakness or my folly, and, smiling, called it Fate.
She seemed, also, conscious of a cause, to me un-
known, for the gradual alienation of my regard; but
she gave me no hint or token of its nature. Yet was
she woman, and pined away daily. In time, the
crimson spot settled steadily upon the cheek, and the
blue veins upon the pale forehead became prominent;
and, one instant, my nature melted into pity, but, in
the next, I met the glance of her meaning eyes, and
then my soul sickened and became giddy with the
giddiness of one who gazes downward into some
dreary and unfathomable abyss.
Shall I then say that I longed with an earnest and
consuming desire for the moment of Morella's de-
cease? I did; but the fragile spirit clung to its tene-
ment of clay for many days -- for many weeks and
irksome months -- until my tortured nerves obtained
the mastery over my mind, and I grew furious through
delay, and, with the heart of a fiend, cursed the days,
and the hours, and the bitter moments, which seemed
to lengthen and lengthen as her gentle life declined --
like shadows in the dying of the day.
But one autumnal evening, when the winds lay
still in heaven, Morella called me to her side. There
was a dim mist over all the earth, and a warm glow
upon the waters, and, amid the rich October leaves
of the forest, a rainbow from the firmament had surely
fallen. As I came she was murmuring, in a low
under tone, which trembled with fervor, the words of
a Catholic hymn:
Sancta Maria! turn thine eyes
Upon a sinner's sacrifice
Of fervent prayer and humble love
From thy holy throne above.
At morn, at noon, at twilight dim,
Maria! thou hast heard my hymn,
In joy and wo, in good and ill,
Mother of God! be with me still.
When my hours flew gently by,
And no storms were in the sky,
My soul, lest it should truant be,
Thy love did guide to thine and thee.
Now when clouds of Fate o'ercast
All my Present and my Past,
Let my Future radiant shine
With sweet hopes of thee and thine.
"It is a day of days," said Morella; "a day of
all days either to live or die. It is a fair day for the
sons of earth and life -- ah! more fair for the daughter's
of heaven and death."
I turned towards her, and she continued.
"I am dying -- yet shall I live. Therefore for me,
Morella, thy wife, hath the charnel-house no terrors --
mark me! -- not even the terrors of the worm. The
days have never been when thou couldst love me;
but her whom in life thou didst abhor, in death thou
shalt adore."
"Morella!"
"I repeat that I am dying. But within me is a
pledge of that affection -- ah, how little! -- which you
felt for me, Morella. And when my spirit departs
shall the child live -- thy child and mine, Morella's.
But thy days shall be days of sorrow -- that sorrow
which is the most lasting of impressions, as the cypress
is the most enduring of trees. For the hours of thy
happiness are over; and joy is not gathered twice in
a life, as the roses of Pæstum twice in a year. Thou
shalt no longer, then, play the Teian with time, but,
being ignorant of the myrtle and the vine, thou shalt
bear about with thee thy shroud on earth, as do the
Moslemin at Mecca."
"Morella!" I cried, "Morella! how knowest thou
this?" -- but she turned away her face upon the
pillow, and, a slight tremor coming over her limbs,
she thus died, and I heard her voice no more.
Yet, as she had foretold, her child -- to which in
dying she had given birth, and which breathed not
until the mother breathed no more -- her child, a
daughter, lived. And she grew strangely in stature
and intellect, and was the perfect resemblance of her
who had departed, and I loved her with a love more
fervent and more intense than I had believed it pos-
sible to feel for any denizen of earth.
But, ere long, the heaven of this pure affection
became overcast, and gloom, and horror, and grief,
swept over it in clouds. I said the child grew
strangely in stature and intelligence. Strange indeed
was her rapid increase in bodily size -- but terrible,
oh! terrible were the tumultuous thoughts which
crowded upon me while watching the development
of her mental being. Could it be otherwise, when I
daily discovered in the conceptions of the child the
adult powers and faculties of the woman? -- when the
lessons of experience fell from the lips of infancy?
and when the wisdom or the passions of maturity I
found hourly gleaming from its full and speculative
eye? When, I say, all this became evident to my
appalled senses -- when I could no longer hide it from
my soul, nor throw it off from those perceptions which
trembled to receive it -- is it to be wondered at that
suspicions, of a nature fearful and exciting, crept in
upon my spirit, or that my thoughts fell back aghast
upon the wild tales and thrilling theories of the en-
tombed Morella? I snatched from the scrutiny of the
world a being whom destiny compelled me to adore,
and, in the rigorous seclusion of my old ancestral
home, watched with an agonizing anxiety over all
which concerned the beloved.
And, as years rolled away, and I gazed, day after
day, upon her holy, and mild, and eloquent face, and
pored over her maturing form, day after day did I
discover new points of resemblance in the child to her
mother, the melancholy and the dead. And, hourly,
grew darker these shadows of similitude, and more
full, and more definite, and more perplexing, and more
hideously terrible in their aspect. For that her smile
was like her mother's I could bear; but then I shud-
dered at its too perfect identity -- that her eyes were
like Morella's I could endure; but then they too often
looked down into the depths of my soul with Morella's
own intense and bewildering meaning. And in the
contour of the high forehead, and in the ringlets of
the silken hair, and in the wan fingers which buried
themselves therein, and in the sad musical tones of
her speech, and above all -- oh, above all -- in the
phrases and expressions of the dead on the lips of
the loved and the living, I found food for consuming
thought and horror -- for a worm that would not die.
Thus passed away two lustrums of her life, but my
daughter remained nameless upon the earth. "My
child" and "my love" were the designations usually
prompted by a father's affection, and the rigid seclusion
of her days precluded all other intercourse. Morella's
name died with her at her death. Of the mother I
had never spoken to the daughter -- it was impossible
to speak. Indeed, during the brief period of her exist-
tence the latter had received no impressions from the
outward world but such as might have been afforded
by the narrow limits of her privacy. But at length
the ceremony of baptism presented to my mind, in its
unnerved and agitated condition, a present deliverance
from the terrors of my destiny. And at the baptismal
font I hesitated for a name. And many titles of the
wise and beautiful, of old and modern times, of my
own and foreign lands, came thronging to my lips --
and many, many fair titles of the gentle, and the
happy, and the good. What prompted me then to
disturb the memory of the buried dead? What
demon urged me to breathe that sound, which, in its
very recollection, was wont to make ebb the purple
blood in torrents from the temples to the heart?
What fiend spoke from the recesses of my soul, when,
amid those dim aisles, and in the silence of the night,
I shrieked within the ears of the holy man the syllables
-- Morella? What more than fiend convulsed the
features of my child, and overspread them with the
hues of death, as, starting at that sound, she turned
her glassy eyes from the earth to heaven, and, falling
prostrate on the black slabs of our ancestral vault,
responded -- "I am here!"
Distinct, coldly, calmly distinct -- like a knell of
death -- horrible, horrible death -- sank the eternal
sounds within my soul. Years -- years may roll away,
but the memory of that epoch -- never! Now was I
indeed ignorant of the flowers and the vine -- but the
hemlock and the cypress overshadowed me night
and day. And I kept no reckoning of time or place,
and the stars of my fate faded from heaven, and,
therefore, the earth grew dark, and its figures passed
by me like flitting shadows, and among them all I
beheld only -- Morella. The winds of the firmament
breathed but one sound within my ears, and the rip-
ples upon the sea murmured evermore -- Morella.
But she died; and with my own hands I bore her to
the tomb; and I laughed with a long and bitter laugh
as I found no traces of the first, in the charnel where
I laid the second -- Morella.
Page 019
LIONIZING.
-- all people went
Upon their ten toes in wild wonderment.
Bishop Hall's Satires.
neither the author of Junius, nor the man in the mask,
for my name is Thomas Smith, and I was born
somewhere in the city of Fum-Fudge. The first
action of my life was the taking hold of my nose with
both hands; my mother saw this, and called me a
genius; my father wept for joy, and bought me a
treatise on Nosology. Before I was breeched I had
not only mastered the treatise, but had collected into
a common-place book all that is said on the subject
by Pliny, Aristotle, Alexander Ross, Minutius Felix,
Hermanus Pictorius, Del Rio, Villarêt, Bartholinus,
and Sir Thomas Browne.
I now began to feel my way in the science, and
soon came to understand that, provided a man had a
nose sufficiently big, he might, by merely following
it, arrive at a lionship. But my attention was not
confined to theories alone; every morning I took a
dram or two, and gave my proboscis a couple of
pulls. When I came of age my father asked me, one
day, if I would step with him into his study.
"My son," said he, when we got there, "what
is the chief end of your existence?"
"Father," I said, "it is the study of Nosology."
"And what, Thomas," he continued, "is no-
sology?"
"Sir," I replied, "it is the Science of Noses."
"And can you tell me," he asked, "what is the
meaning of a nose?"
"A nose, my father," said I, "has been vari-
ously 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 com-
mence, then. The nose, according to Bartholinus,
is that protuberance, that bump, that excrescence,
that -- "
"That will do, Thomas," said the old gentleman.
"I am thunderstruck at the extent of your informa-
tion -- I am positively -- upon my soul. Come here!
(and he took me by the arm). Your education may
now be considered as finished, and it is high time
that you should scuffle for yourself -- 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, and
determined to follow my nose. So I gave it a pull
Fum-Fudge was in an uproar.
"Wonderful genius!" said the Quarterly.
"Superb physiologist!" said the New Monthly.
"Fine writer!" said the Edinburgh.
"Great man!" 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 them no manner of attention, and walked
into the shop of an artist.
The Duchess of Bless-my-Soul was sitting for her
portrait; the Marchioness of So-and-So was holding
the Duchess's poodle; the Earl of This-and-That was
flirting with her salts; and his Royal Highness of
Touch-me-Not was standing behind her chair. I
merely walked towards the artist, and held up my
proboscis.
"O beautiful!" sighed the Duchess.
"O pretty!" lisped the Marshiness.
"O horrible!" groaned the Earl.
"O abominable!" growled his Royal Highness.
"What will you take for it?" said the artist.
"A thousand pounds," said I, sitting down.
"A thousand pounds?" he inquired, turning the
nose to the light.
"Precisely," said I.
"Beautiful!" said he, looking at the nose.
"A thousand pounds," said I, twisting it to one
side.
"Admirable!" said he.
"A thousand pounds," said I.
"You shall have them," said he, "what a piece
of virtu!" So he paid me the money, and made a
sketch of my nose. I took rooms in Jermyn street,
sent her Majesty the ninety-ninth edition of the
Nosology with a portrait of the author's nose, and
his Royal Highness of Touch-me-Not invited me to
dinner.
We were all lions and recherchés.
There was a Grand Turk from Stamboul. He
said that the angels were horses, cocks, and bulls --
that somebody in the sixth heaven had seventy thou-
sand heads and seventy thousand tongues -- and that
the earth was held up by a sky-blue cow, having
four hundred horns.
There was Sir Positive Paradox. He said that
all fools were philosophers, and all philosophers were
fools.
There was a writer on ethics. He talked of fire,
unity, and atoms; bi-part, and pre-existent soul;
affinity and discord; primitive intelligence and ho-
moomeria.
There was Theologos Theology. He talked of
Eusebius and Arianus; heresy and the Council of
Nice; consubstantialism, Homousios, and Homouioi-
sios.
There was Fricassée from the Rocher de Cancale.
He mentioned Latour, Markbrunnen, and Mares-
chino; muriton of red tongue, and cauliflowers with
velouté sauce; veal à la St. Menehoult, marinade
à la St. Florentin, and orange jellies en mosaiques.
There was Signor Tintontintino from Florence.
He spoke of Cimabué, Arpino, Carpaccio, and Ar-
gostino; the gloom of Caravaggio, the amenity of
Albano, the golden glories of Titian, the frows of
Rubens, and the waggeries of Jan Steen.
There was the great geologist Feltzpar. He talked
of internal fires and tertiary formations; of aëriforms,
fluidiforms, and solidiforms; of quartz and marl; of
schist and schorl; of gypsum, hornblende, mica-
slate, and pudding-stone.
There was the President of the Fum-Fudge Uni-
versity. He said that the moon was called Bendis in
Thrace, Bubastis in Egypt, Dian in Rome, and Arte-
mis in Greece.
There was Delphinus Polyglott. He told us what
had become of the eighty-three lost tragedies of
Æschylus; of the fifty-four orations of Isoeus; 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 the five-
and-forty tragedies of Homer Junior.
There was a modern Platonist. He quoted Por-
phyry, Iamblicus, Plotinus, Proclus, Hierocles, Maxi-
mus 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 myself. I spoke of Pictorius, Del Rio,
Alexander Ross, Minutius Felix, Bartholinus, Sir
Thomas Browne, and the Science of Noses.
"Marvellous clever man!" said his Highness.
"Superb!" said his guests; and the next morning
her grace of Bless-my-Soul paid me a visit.
"Will you go to Almack's, pretty creature?" she
said, chucking 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
pull 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 further up.
"He is coming!" said somebody further still.
"He is come!" said the Duchess; "he is come,
the little love!" and she caught me by both hands,
and looked me in the nose.
"Ah joli!" said Mademoiselle Pas Seul.
"Dios guarda!" said Don Stiletto.
"Diavolo!" said Count Capricornuto.
"Tousand teufel!" said Baron Bludennuff.
"Tweedle-dee -- tweedle-dee -- tweedle-dum!" said
the Orchestra.
"Ah joli! Dios guarda! Diavolo! and Tousand
teufel!" repeated Mademoiselle Pas Seul, Don Sti-
letto, Count Capricornuto, and Baron Bludennuff.
This applause -- it was obstreperous; it was not the
grew angry.
"Sir!" said I to the Baron, "you are a baboon."
"Sir!" he replied after a pause, "Donner und
blitzen!" This was sufficient. We exchanged cards.
The next morning I shot off his nose at six o'clock,
and then called upon my friends.
"Bête!" said the first.
"Fool!" said the second.
"Ninny!" said the third.
"Dolt!" said the fourth.
"Noodle!" said the fifth.
"Ass!" said the sixth.
"Be off!" said the seventh.
At all this I felt mortified, and so called upon my
father.
"Father," I said, "what is the chief end of my
existence?"
"My son," he replied, "it is still the study of
Nosology; but in hitting the Baron's nose, you have
overshot your mark. You have a fine nose, it is true;
but then Bludennuff has none. You are d -- d; and
he has become the lion of the day. In Fum-Fudge
great is a lion with a big proboscis, but greater by
far is a lion with no proboscis at all."
Page 027
WILLIAM WILSON.
What say of it? what say of CONSCIENCE grim,
That spectre in my path?
Chamberlaine's Pharronida.
son. 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 utter-
most 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. I
shrouded my nakedness in triple guilt. From com-
paratively 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 allow-
ing -- that, although temptation may have erewhile
existed as great, man was never thus, at least, tempted
before -- certainly, never thus fell. And therefore
has he 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 come of a race whose imaginative and easily
excitable temperament has at all times rendered them
remarkable; and, in my earliest infancy, I gave evi-
dence of having fully inherited the family character.
As I advanced in years it was more strongly deve-
loped; 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 pas-
sions. 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 con-
nected with a large, rambling, cottage-built, and some-
what decayed building in a misty-looking village of
England, where were a vast number of gigantic and
gnarled trees, and where all the houses were exces-
sively ancient and inordinately tall. In truth, it was
a dream-like and spirit-soothing place, that venerable
old town. At this moment, in fancy, I feel the re-
freshing 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 old, 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, ad-
ventitious importance as connected with a period and
a locality, when and where I recognise the first am-
biguous monitions of the destiny which afterwards so
fully overshadowed me. Let me then remember.
The house, I have said, was old, irregular, and
cottage-built. The grounds were extensive, and an
enormously 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, admin-
istered, ferule in hand, the Draconian laws of the
academy? Oh, gigantic paradox, too utterly mon-
strous 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 it inspired! 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 holydays.
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 in-
comprehensible subdivisions. It was impossible, 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 "Dominie," 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, meaningless gashes, gro-
tesque figures, and other multiplied efforts of the
knife, as to have entirely lost what little of original
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 outré.
Upon mankind at large the events of very early
existence rarely leave in mature age any definite im-
pression. 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 con-
nings, 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.
de fer!"
In truth, the ardency, the enthusiasm, and the im-
periousness of my disposition, soon rendered me a
marked character among my schoolmates, and by
slow, but natural gradations, gave me an ascendency
over all not greatly older than myself -- over all with
one single exception. This exception was found in
the person of a scholar, who, although no relation,
bore the same Christian and surname as myself -- a
circumstance, in fact, little remarkable, for, notwith-
standing a noble descent, mine was one of those
every-day appellations which seem, by prescriptive
right, to have been, time out of mind, the common
property of the mob. In this narrative I have there-
fore designated myself as William Wilson -- a fictitious
title not very dissimilar to the real. My namesake
alone, of those who in school phraseology constituted
"our set," presumed to compete with me in the studies
of the class, in the sports and broils of the play-ground
-- to refuse implicit belief in my assertions, and sub-
mission to my will -- indeed to interfere with my
arbitrary dictation in any respect whatsoever. If
there be on earth a supreme and unqualified despotism,
it is the despotism of a master mind in boyhood over
the less energetic spirits of its companions.
Wilson's rebellion was to me a source of the greatest
embarrassment -- the more so as, in spite of the bravado
with which in public I made a point of treating him
and his pretensions, I secretly felt that I feared him,
and could not help thinking the equality which he
maintained so easily with myself, a proof of his true
superiority, since not to be overcome cost me a per-
petual struggle. Yet this superiority -- even this
equality -- was in truth acknowledged by no one but
myself; our associates, by some unaccountable blind-
ness, seemed not even to suspect it. Indeed, his com-
petition, his resistance, and especially his impertinent
and dogged interference with my purposes, were not
more pointed than private. He appeared to be utterly
destitute alike of the ambition which urged, and of
the passionate energy of mind which enabled me to
excel. In his rivalry he might have been supposed
actuated solely by a whimsical desire to thwart,
astonish, or mortify myself; although there were
times when I could not help observing, with a feeling
made up of wonder, abasement, and pique, that he
mingled with his injuries, his insults, or his contradic-
tions, a certain most inappropriate, and assuredly
most unwelcome affectionateness of manner. I could
only conceive this singular behaviour to arise from a
consummate self-conceit assuming the vulgar airs of
patronage and protection.
Perhaps it was this latter trait in Wilson's conduct,
conjoined with our identity of name, and the mere
accident of our having entered the school upon the
same day, which set afloat the notion that we were
brothers, among the senior classes in the academy.
These do not usually inquire with much strictness
into the affairs of their juniors. I have before said,
or should have said, that Wilson was not, in the most
remote degree, connected with my family. But as-
suredly if we had been brothers we must have been
twins, for, after leaving Dr. Bransby's, I casually
learned that my namesake -- a somewhat remarkable
coincidence -- was born on the nineteenth of January,
1809 -- and this is precisely the day of my own
nativity.
It may seem strange that in spite of the continual
anxiety occasioned me by the rivalry of Wilson,
and his intolerable spirit of contradiction, I could
not bring myself to hate him altogether. We had,
to be sure, nearly every day a quarrel, in which,
yielding me publicly the palm of victory, he, in some
manner, contrived to make me feel that it was he
who had deserved it; yet a sense of pride upon my
part, and a veritable dignity upon his own, kept us
always upon what are called "speaking terms,"
while there were many points of strong congeniality
in our tempers, operating to awake in me a sentiment
which our position alone, perhaps, prevented from
ripening into friendship. It is difficult, indeed, to
define, or even to describe, my real feelings towards
him. They were formed of a heterogeneous mixture
-- some petulant animosity, which was not yet hatred,
some esteem, more respect, much fear, with a world
of uneasy curiosity. To the moralist fully acquainted
with the minute spirings of human action, it will be
unnecessary to say, in addition, that Wilson and my-
self were the most inseparable of companions.
It was no doubt the anomalous state of affairs ex-
isting between us which turned all my attacks upon
the channel of banter or practical joke (giving pain
while assuming the aspect of mere fun) rather than
into that of a more serious and determined hostility.
But my endeavors on this head were by no means
uniformly successful, even when my plans were the
most wittily concocted; for my namesake had much
about him, in character, of that unassuming and quiet
austerity which, while enjoying the poignancy of its
own jokes, has no heel of Achilles in itself, and ab-
solutely refuses to be laughed at. I could find,
indeed, but one vulnerable point, and that, lying in a
personal peculiarity, arising, perhaps, from constitu-
tional disease, would have been spared by any an-
tagonist less at his wit's end than myself -- my rival
had a weakness in the faucial or guttural organs,
which precluded him from raising his voice at any
time above a very low whisper. Of this defect I did
not fail to take what poor advantage lay in my
power.
Wilson's retaliations in kind were many, and there
was one form of his practical wit that disturbed me
beyond measure. How his sagacity first discovered
at all that so petty a thing would vex me is a ques-
tion I never could solve -- but, having discovered, he
habitually practised the annoyance. I had always
felt aversion to my uncourtly patronymic, and its very
common, if not plebeian praenomen. The words
were venom in my ears; and when, upon the day of
my arrival, a second William Wilson came also to
the academy, I felt angry with him for bearing the
name, and doubly disgusted with the name because
a stranger bore it, who would be the cause of its
twofold repetition, who would be constantly in my
presence, and whose concerns, in the ordinary
routine of the school business, must, inevitably, on
account of the detestable coincidence, be often con-
founded with my own.
The feeling of vexation thus engendered grew
stronger with every circumstance tending to show
resemblance, moral or physical, between my rival
and myself. I had not then discovered the remark-
able fact that we were of the same age; but I saw
that we were of the same height, and I perceived
that we were not altogether unlike in general con-
tour of person and outline of feature. I was galled,
too, by the rumor touching a relationship which had
grown current in the upper forms. In a word,
nothing could more seriously disturb me, (although
I scrupulously concealed such disturbance,) than any
allusion to a similarity of mind, person, or condition
existing between us. But, in truth, I had no reason
to believe that (with the exception of the matter of
relationship, and in the case of Wilson himself), this
similarity had ever been made a subject of comment,
or even observed at all by our schoolfellows. That
he observed it in all its bearings, and as fixedly as I,
was apparent, but that he could discover in such cir-
cumstances so fruitful a field of annoyance for my-
self can only be attributed, as I said before, to his
more than ordinary penetration.
His cue, which was to perfect an imitation of
myself, lay both in words and in actions; and most
admirably did he play his part. My dress it was an
easy matter to copy; my gait and general manner,
were, without difficulty, appropriated; in spite of his
constitutional defect, even my voice did not escape
him. My louder tones were, of course, unattempted,
but then the key, it was identical; and his singular
whisper, it grew the very echo of my own.
How greatly this most exquisite portraiture harassed
me, (for it could not justly be termed a caricature,)
I will not now venture to describe. I had but one
consolation -- in the fact that the imitation, ap-
parently, was noticed by myself alone, and that I
had to endure only the knowing and strangely sar-
castic smiles of my namesake himself. Satisfied
with having produced in my bosom the intended
effect, he seemed to chuckle in secret over the sting
he had inflicted, and was characteristically disre-
gardful of the public applause which the success of
his witty endeavors might have so easily elicited.
That the school, indeed, did not feel his design,
perceive its accomplishment, and participate in his
sneer, was, for many anxious months, a riddle I
could not resolve. Perhaps the gradation of his
copy rendered it not so readily perceptible, or, more
possibly, I owed my security to the masterly air of
the copyist, who, disdaining the letter, which in a
painting is all the obtuse can see, gave but the full
spirit of his original for my individual contemplation
and chagrin.
I have already more than once spoken of the dis-
gusting air of patronage which he assumed towards
me, and of his frequent officious interference with
my will. This interference often took the ungracious
character of advice; advice not openly given, but
hinted or insinuated. I received it with a repug-
nance which gained strength as I grew in years.
Yet, at this distant day, let me do him the simple
justice to acknowledge that I can recall no occasion
when the suggestions of my rival were on the side of
those errors or follies so usual to his immature age,
and seeming inexperience; that his moral sense, at
least, if not his general talents and worldly wisdom,
was far keener than my own; and that I might, to-
day, have been a better, and thus a happier man,
had I more seldom rejected the counsels embodied
in those meaning whispers which I then but too
cordially hated, and too bitterly derided.
As it was, I at length grew restive in the extreme,
under his distasteful supervision, and daily resented
more and more openly what I considered his in-
tolerable arrogance. I have said that, in the first
years of our connexion as schoolmates, my feelings
in regard to him might have been easily ripened
into friendship; but, in the latter months of my
residence at the academy, although the intrusion of
his ordinary manner had, beyond doubt, in some
measure, abated, my sentiments, in nearly similar
proportion, partook very much of positive hatred.
Upon one occasion he saw this, I think, and after-
wards avoided, or made a show of avoiding me.
It was about the same period, if I remember aright,
that, in an altercation of violence with him, in which
he was more than usually thrown off his guard, and
spoke and acted with an openness of demeanor
rather foreign to his nature, I discovered, or fancied
I discovered, in his accent, his air, and general ap-
pearance, a something which first startled, and then
deeply interested me, by bringing to mind dim visions
of my earliest infancy -- wild, confused and throng-
ing memories of a time when memory herself was
yet unborn. I cannot better describe the sensation
which oppressed me than by saying that I could
with difficulty shake off the belief that myself and
the being who stood before me had been acquainted
at some epoch very long ago; some point of the past
even infinitely remote. The delusion, however, faded
rapidly as it came; and I mention it at all but to
define the day of the last conversation I there held
with my singular namesake.
The huge old house, with its countless subdivisions,
had several enormously large chambers communica-
ting with each other, where slept the greater number
of the students. There were, however, as must
necessarily happen in a building so awkwardly
planned, many little nooks or recesses, the odds and
ends of the structure; and these the economic in-
genuity of Dr. Bransby had also fitted up as dormi-
tories -- although, being the merest closets, they
were capable of accommodating only a single indi-
vidual. One of these small apartments was occupied
by Wilson.
It was upon a gloomy and tempestuous night of
an early autumn, about the close of my fifth year at
the school, and immediately after the altercation just
mentioned, that, finding every one wrapped in sleep,
I arose from bed, and, lamp in hand, stole through a
wilderness of narrow passages from my own bed-
room to that of my rival. I had been long plotting
one of those ill-natured pieces of practical wit at his
expense in which I had hitherto been so uniformly
unsuccessful. It was my intention, now, to put my
scheme in operation, and I resolved to make him feel
the whole extent of the malice with which I was
imbued. Having reached his closet, I noiselessly
entered, leaving the lamp, with a shade over it, on the
outside. I advanced a step, and listened to the sound
of his tranquil breathing. Assured of his being asleep,
I returned, took the light, and with it again approach-
ed the bed. Close curtains were around it, which,
in the prosecution of my plan, I slowly and quietly
withdrew, when the bright rays fell vividly upon the
sleeper, and my eyes, at the same moment, upon his
countenance. I looked, and a numbness, an iciness
of feeling instantly pervaded my frame. My breast
heaved, my knees tottered, my whole spirit became
possessed with an objectless yet intolerable horror.
Gasping for breath, I lowered the lamp in still nearer
proximity to the face. Were these -- these the linea-
ments of William Wilson? I saw, indeed, that they
were his, but I shook as with a fit of the ague in
fancying they were not. What was there about them
to confound me in this manner? I gazed -- while my
brain reeled with a multitude of incoherent thoughts.
Not thus he appeared -- assuredly not thus -- in the
vivacity of his waking hours. The same name; the
same contour of person; the same day of arrival at
the academy! And then his dogged and meaningless
imitation of my gait, my voice, my habits, and my
manner! Was it, in truth, within the bounds of
human possibility that what I now witnessed was the
result of the habitual practice of this sarcastic imita-
tion? Awe-stricken, and with a creeping shudder, I
extinguished the lamp, passed silently from the cham-
ber, and left, at once, the halls of that old academy,
never to enter them again.
After a lapse of some months, spent at home in
mere idleness, I found myself a student at Eton. The
brief interval had been sufficient to enfeeble my re-
membrance of the events at Dr. Bransby's, or at least
to effect a material change in the nature of the feel-
ings with which I remembered them. The truth --
the tragedy -- of the drama was no more. I could
now find room to doubt the evidence of my senses:
and seldom called up the subject at all but with
wonder at the extent of human credulity, and a smile
at the vivid force of the imagination which I heredi-
tarily possessed. Neither was this species of scep-
ticism likely to be diminished by the character of the
life I led at Eton. The vortex of thoughtless folly
into which I there so immediately and so recklessly
plunged, washed away all but the froth of my past
hours -- engulfed at once every solid or serious im-
pression, and left to memory only the veriest levities
of a former existence.
I do not wish, however, to trace the course of my
miserable profligacy here -- a profligacy which set at
defiance the laws, while it eluded the vigilance of
the institution. Three years of folly, passed without
profit, had but given me rooted habits of vice, and
added, in a somewhat unusual degree, to my bodily
stature, when, after a week of soulless dissipation, I
invited a small party of the most dissolute students to
a secret carousal in my chamber. We met at a late
hour of the night, for our debaucheries were to be
faithfully protracted until morning. The wine flowed
freely, and there were not wanting other, perhaps
more dangerous, seductions; so that the gray dawn
had already faintly appeared in the east, while our
delirious extravagance was at its height. Madly
flushed with cards and intoxication, I was in the act
of insisting upon a toast of more than intolerable
profanity, when my attention was suddenly diverted
by the violent, although partial unclosing of the door
of the apartment, and by the eager voice from with-
out of a servant. He said that some person, ap-
parently in great haste, demanded to speak with me
in the hall.
Wildly excited with the potent Vin de Barac, the
unexpected interruption rather delighted than sur-
prised me. I staggered forward at once, and a few
steps brought me to the vestibule of the building. In
this low and small room there hung no lamp; and
now no light at all was admitted, save that of the
exceedingly feeble dawn which made its way through
a semicircular window. As I put my foot over the
about my own height, and (what then peculiarly
struck my mad fancy) habited in a white cassimere
morning frock, cut in the novel fashion of the one I
myself wore at the moment. This the faint light
enabled me to perceive -- but the features of his face
I could not distinguish. Immediately upon my en-
tering he strode hurriedly up to me, and, seizing me
by the arm with a gesture of petulant impatience,
whispered the words "William Wilson!" in my ear.
I grew perfectly sober in an instant.
There was that in the manner of the stranger, and
in the tremulous shake of his uplifted finger, as he
held it between my eyes and the light, which filled
me with unqualified amazement -- but it was not this
which had so violently moved me. It was the preg-
nancy of solemn admonition in the singular, low,
hissing utterance; and, above all, it was the character,
the tone, the key, of those few, simple, and familiar,
yet whispered, syllables, which came with a thousand
thronging memories of by-gone days, and struck upon
my soul with the shock of a galvanic battery. Ere
I could recover the use of my senses he was gone.
Although this event failed not of a vivid effect
upon my disordered imagination, yet was it evanes-
cent as vivid. For some weeks, indeed, I busied
myself in earnest inquiry, or was wrapped in a
cloud of morbid speculation. I did not pretend to
disguise from my perception the identity of the
singular individual who thus perseveringly interfered
with my affairs, and harassed me with his insinuated
counsel. But who and what was this Wilson? --
and whence came he? -- and what were his pur-
poses? Upon neither of these points could I be
satisfied -- merely ascertaining, in regard to him,
that a sudden accident in his family had caused his
removal from Dr. Bransby's academy on the after-
noon of the day in which I myself had eloped. But
in a brief period I ceased to think upon the subject;
my attention being all absorbed in a contemplated
departure for Oxford. Thither I soon went; the
uncalculating vanity of my parents furnishing me
with an outfit, and annual establishment, which
would enable me to indulge at will in the luxury
already so dear to my heart -- to vie in profuseness
of expenditure with the haughtiest heirs of the
wealthiest earldoms in Great Britain.
Excited by such appliances to vice, my constitu-
tional temperament broke forth with redoubled ardor,
and I spurned even the common restraints of decency
in the mad infatuation of my revels. But it were
absurd to pause in the detail of my extravagance.
Let it suffice, that among spendthrifts I out-heroded
Herod, and that, giving name to a multitude of novel
follies, I added no brief appendix to the long cata-
logue of vices then usual in the most dissolute uni-
versity of Europe.
It could hardly be credited, however, that I had,
even here, so utterly fallen from the gentlemanly
estate as to seek acquaintance with the vilest arts of
the gambler by profession, and, having become an
adept in his despicable science, to practise it habitu-
ally as a means of increasing my already enormous
income at the expense of the weak-minded among
my fellow-collegians. Such, nevertheless, was the
fact. And the very enormity of this offence against
all manly and honourable sentiment proved, beyond
doubt, the main, if not the sole reason of the impunity
with which it was committed. Who, indeed, among
my most abandoned associates, would not rather
have disputed the clearest evidence of his senses,
than have suspected of such courses the gay, the
frank, the generous William Wilson -- the noblest
and most liberal commoner at Oxford -- him whose
follies (said his parasites) were but the follies of
youth and unbridled fancy -- whose errors but in-
imitable whim -- whose darkest vice but a careless
and dashing extravagance?
I had been now two years successfully busied in
this way, when there came to the university a
young parvenu nobleman, Glendinning -- rich, said
report, as Herodes Atticus -- his riches, too, as easily
acquired. I soon found him of weak intellect, and,
of course, marked him as a fitting subject for my
skill. I frequently engaged him in play, and con-
trived, with a gambler's usual art, to let him win
considerable sums, the more effectually to entangle
him in my snares. At length, my schemes being
ripe, I met him (with the full intention that this meet-
ing should be final and decisive) at the chambers of
a fellow-commoner, (Mr. Preston,) equally intimate
with both, but who, to do him justice, entertained
not even a remote suspicion of my design. To give
to this a better coloring, I had contrived to have
assembled a party of some eight or ten, and was
solicitously careful that the introduction of cards
should appear accidental, and originate in the pro-
posal of my contemplated dupe himself. To be brief
upon a vile topic, none of the low finesse was omitted,
so customary upon similar occasions that it is a just
matter for wonder how any are still found so besotted
as to fall its victim.
We had protracted our sitting far into the night,
and I had at length effected the manoeuvre of getting
Glendinning as my sole antagonist. The game, too,
was my favorite écarté. The rest of the company,
interested in the extent of our play, had abandoned
their own cards, and were standing around us as
spectators. The parvenu, who had been induced by
my artifices in the early part of the evening to drink
deeply, now shuffled, dealt, or played, with a wild
nervousness of manner for which his intoxication, I
thought, might partially, but could not altogether
account. In a very short period he had become my
debtor to a large amount of money, when, having
taken a long draught of port, he did precisely what
I had been coolly anticipating, he proposed to double
our already extravagant stakes. With a well-feigned
show of reluctance, and not until after my repeated
refusal had seduced him into some angry words
which gave a color of pique to my compliance, did I
finally comply. The result, of course, did but prove
how entirely the prey was in my toils -- in less than
a single hour he had quadrupled his debt. For some
lent it by the wine -- but now, to my astonishment,
I perceived that it had grown to a palor truly fear-
ful. I say to my astonishment. Glendinning had
been represented to my eager inquiries as immeasur-
ably wealthy; and the sums which he had as yet
lost, although in themselves vast, could not, I sup-
posed, very seriously annoy, much less so violently
affect him. That he was overcome by the wine just
swallowed, was the idea which most readily presented
itself; and, rather with a view to the preservation of
my own character in the eyes of my associates, than
from any less interested motive, I was about to insist,
peremptorily, upon a discontinuance of the play,
when some expressions at my elbow from among
the company, and an ejaculation evincing utter
despair on the part of Glendinning, gave me to
understand that I had effected his total ruin under
circumstances which, rendering him an object for
the pity of all, should have protected him from the
ill offices even of a fiend.
What now might have been my conduct it is diffi-
cult to say. The pitiable condition of my dupe had
thrown an air of embarrassed gloom over all, and,
for some moments, a profound and unbroken silence
was maintained, during which I could not help feel-
ing my cheeks tingle with the many burning glances
of scorn or reproach cast upon me by the less aban-
doned of the party. I will even own that an in-
tolerable weight of anxiety was for a brief instant
lifted from my bosom by the sudden and extraor-
dinary interruption which ensued. The wide, heavy,
folding doors of the apartment were all at once
thrown open, to their full extent, with a vigorous
and rushing impetuosity that extinguished, as if by
magic, every candle in the room. Their light, in
dying, enabled us just to perceive that a stranger had
entered, of about my own height, and closely muffled
in a cloak. The darkness, however, was now total;
and we could only feel that he was standing in our
midst. Before any one of us could recover from the
extreme astonishment into which this rudeness had
thrown all, we heard the voice of the intruder.
"Gentlemen," he said, in a low, distinct, and never-
to-be-forgotten whisper which thrilled to the very
marrow of my bones, "Gentlemen, I make no apo-
logy for this behaviour, because in thus behaving I
am but fulfilling a duty. You are, beyond doubt,
uninformed of the true character of the person who
has to-night won at écarté a large sum of money from
Lord Glendinning. I will therefore put you upon an
expeditious and decisive plan of obtaining this very
necessary information. Please to examine, at your
leisure, the inner linings of the cuff of his left sleeve,
and the several little packages which may be found
in the somewhat capacious pockets of his embroidered
morning wrapper."
While he spoke, so profound was the stillness that
one might have heard a pin dropping upon the floor.
In ceasing, he at once departed, and as abruptly as
he had entered. Can I -- shall I describe my sensa-
tions? -- must I say that I felt all the horrors of the
damned? Most assuredly I had little time given for
reflection. Many hands roughly seized me upon the
spot, and lights were immediately reprocured. A
search ensued. In the lining of my sleeve were
found all of the court-cards essential in écarté, and,
in the pockets of my wrapper, a number of packs,
fac-similes of those used at our sittings, with the single
exception that mine were of the species called, tech-
nically, arrondées; the honors being slightly convex
at the ends, the lower cards slightly convex at the
sides. In this disposition, the dupe who cuts, as cus-
tomary, at the breadth of the pack, will invariably
find that he cuts his antagonist an honor; while the
gambler, cutting at the length, will, as certainly, cut
nothing for his victim which may count in the
records of the game.
Any outrageous burst of indignation upon this
shameful discovery would have affected me less than
the silent contempt, or the sarcastic composure with
which it was received.
"Mr. Wilson," said our host, stooping to remove
from beneath his feet an exceedingly luxurious cloak
of rare furs, "Mr. Wilson, this is your property." (The
weather was cold; and, upon quitting my own room,
I had thrown a cloak over my dressing wrapper,
putting it off upon reaching the scene of play.) "I
presume it is supererogatory to seek here (eyeing the
folds of the garment with a bitter smile), for any
farther evidence of your skill. Indeed we have had
enough. You will see the necessity, I hope, of
quitting Oxford -- at all events, of quitting, instantly,
my chambers."
Abased, humbled to the dust as I then was, it is
probable that I should have resented this galling
language by immediate personal violence, had not
my whole attention been at the moment arrested, by
a fact of the most startling character. The cloak
which I had worn was of a rare description of fur;
how rare, how extravagantly costly, I shall not
venture to say. Its fashion, too, was of my own
fantastic invention; for I was fastidious, to a degree
of absurd coxcombry, in matters of this frivolous
nature. When, therefore, Mr. Preston reached me
that which he had picked up upon the floor, and near
the folding doors of the apartment, it was with an
astonishment nearly bordering upon terror, that I per-
ceived my own already hanging on my arm, (where
I had no doubt unwittingly placed it,) and that the
one presented me was but its exact counterpart in
every, in even the minutest possible particular.
The singular being who had so disastrously exposed
me, had been muffled, I remembered, in a cloak;
and none had been worn at all by any of the mem-
bers of our party with the exception of myself. Re-
taining some presence of mind, I took the one offered
me by Preston, placed it, unnoticed, over my own,
left the apartment with a resolute scowl of defiance,
and, next morning ere dawn of day, commenced a
hurried journey from Oxford to the continent, in a
perfect agony of horror and of shame.
I fled in vain. My evil destiny pursued me as if
in exultation, and proved, indeed, that the exercise
of its mysterious dominion had as yet only begun.
Scarcely had I set foot in Paris ere I had fresh
evidence of the detestable interest taken by this
Wilson in my concerns. Years flew, while I ex-
perienced no relief. Villain! -- at Rome, with how
untimely, yet with how spectral an officiousness,
stepped he in between me and my ambition! At
Vienna, too, at Berlin, and at Moscow! Where, in
truth, had I not bitter cause to curse him within my
heart? From his inscrutable tyranny did I at length
flee, panic-stricken, as from a pestilence; and to the
very ends of the earth I fled in vain.
And again, and again, in secret communion with
my own spirit, would I demand the questions "Who
is he? -- whence came he? -- and what are his ob-
jects?" But no answer was there found. And now
I scrutinized, with a minute scrutiny, the forms, and
the methods, and the leading traits of his impertinent
supervision. But even here there was very little
upon which to base a conjecture. It was noticeable,
indeed, that, in no one of the multiplied instances in
which he had of late crossed my path, had he so
crossed it except to frustrate those schemes, or to
disturb those actions, which, fully carried out, might
have resulted in bitter mischief. Poor justification
this, in truth, for an authority so imperiously assumed!
Poor indemnity for natural rights of self-agency so
pertinaciously, so insultingly denied!
I had also been forced to notice that my tormentor,
for a very long period of time, (while scrupulously
and with miraculous dexterity maintaining his whim
of an identity of apparel with myself,) had so con-
trived it, in the execution of his varied interference
with my will, that I saw not, at any moment, the
features of his face. Be Wilson what he might, this,
at least, was but the veriest of affectation, or of folly.
Could he, for an instant, have supposed that, in my
admonisher at Eton, in the destroyer of my honor
at Oxford, in him who thwarted my ambition at
Rome, my revenge in Paris, my passionate love at
Naples, or what he falsely termed my avarice in
Egypt, that in this, my arch-enemy and evil genius,
I could fail to recognise the William Wilson of my
schoolboy days, the namesake, the companion, the
rival, the hatred and dreaded rival at Dr. Bransby's?
Impossible! -- But let me hasten to the last eventful
scene of the drama.
Thus far I had succumbed supinely to this im-
perious domination. The sentiments of deep awe
with which I habitually regarded the elevated
character, the majestic wisdom, the apparent omni-
presence and omnipotence of Wilson, added to a
feeling of even terror, with which certain other traits
in his nature and assumptions inspired me, had
operated, hitherto, to impress me with an idea of my
own utter weakness and helplessness, and to suggest
an implicit, although bitterly reluctant submission to
his arbitrary will. But, of late days, I had given
myself up entirely to wine; and its maddening in-
fluence upon my hereditary temper rendered me more
and more impatient of control. I began to murmur, to
hesitate, to resist. And was it only fancy which
induced me to believe that, with the increase of my
own firmness, that of my tormentor underwent a
proportional diminution? Be this as it may, I now
began to feel the inspiration of a burning hope, and
at length nurtured in my secret thoughts a stern and
desperate resolution that I would submit no longer
to be enslaved.
It was at Rome, during the carnival of 18 -- , that
I attended a masquerade in the palazzo of the
Neapolitan Duke Di Broglio. I had indulged more
freely than usual in the excesses of the wine-table;
and now the suffocating atmosphere of the crowded
rooms irritated me beyond endurance. The dif-
ficulty, too, of forcing my way through the mazes of
the company contributed not a little to the ruffling
of my temper; for I was anxiously seeking, let me
not say with what unworthy motive, the young, the
gay, the beautiful wife of the aged and doting Di
Broglio. With a too unscrupulous confidence she
had previously communicated to me the secret of
the costume in which she would be habited, and
now, having caught a glimpse of her person, I was
hurrying to make my way into her presence. At
this moment I felt a light hand placed upon my
shoulder, and that ever-remembered, low, damnable
whisper within my ear.
In a perfect whirlwind of wrath, I turned at once
upon him who had thus interrupted me, and seized
him violently by the collar. He was attired, as I
had expected, like myself; wearing a large Spanish
cloak, and a mask of black silk which entirely covered
his features.
"Scoundrel!" I said, in a voice husky with rage,
while every syllable I uttered seemed as new fuel to
my fury, "scoundrel! impostor! accursed villain!
you shall not -- you shall not dog me unto death!
Follow me, or I stab you where you stand," and I
broke my way from the room into a small ante-
chamber adjoining, dragging him unresistingly with
me as I went.
Upon entering, I thrust him furiously from me.
He staggered against the wall, while I closed the
door with an oath, and commanded him to draw. He
hesitated but for an instant, then, with a slight sigh,
drew in silence, and put himself upon his defence.
The contest was brief indeed. I was frantic with
every species of wild excitement, and felt within my
single arm the energy and the power of a multitude.
In a few seconds I forced him by sheer strength
against the wainscoting, and thus, getting him at
mercy, plunged my sword, with brute ferocity, re-
peatedly through and through his bosom.
At this instant some person tried the latch of the
door. I hastened to prevent an intrusion, and then
immediately returned to my dying antagonist. But
what human language can adequately portray that
astonishment, that horror which possessed me at the
spectacle then presented to view. The brief moment
in which I averted my eyes had been sufficient to
produce, apparently, a material change in the ar-
A large mirror, it appeared to me, now stood where
none had been perceptible before; and, as I stepped
up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but
with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced,
with a feeble and tottering gait, to meet me.
Thus it appeared, I say, but was not. It was my
antagonist -- it was Wilson, who then stood before
me in the agonies of his dissolution. Not a line in
all the marked and singular lineaments of that face
which was not, even identically, mine own! His
mask and cloak lay where he had thrown them,
upon the floor.
It was Wilson, but he spoke no longer in a whisper,
and I could have fancied that I myself was speaking
while he said --
"You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, hence-
forward art thou also dead -- dead to the world and
its hopes. In me didst thou exist -- and, in my death,
see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou
hast murdered thyself."
Page 059
THE MAN THAT WAS USED UP.
A TALE OF THE LATE BUGABOO AND KICKAPOO CAMPAIGN.
made the acquaintance of that truly fine-looking
fellow, Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C.
Smith. Some one did introduce me to the gentle-
man, I am sure -- at some public meeting, I know
very well -- held about something of great import-
ance, no doubt -- and at some place or other, of this
I feel convinced -- whose name I have unaccount-
ably forgotten. The truth is -- that the introduction
was attended, upon my part, with a degree of anxious
and tremulous embarrassment which operated to
prevent any definite impressions of either time or
place. I am constitutionally nervous -- this, with
me, is a family failing, and I can't help it. In
especial, the slightest appearance of mystery -- of
any point I cannot exactly comprehend -- puts me
at once into a pitiable state of agitation.
There was something, as it were, remarkable --
yes, remarkable, although this is but a feeble term to
express my full meaning -- about the entire indi-
viduality of the personage in question. What this
something was, however, I found it impossible to
say. He was, perhaps, six feet in height, and of a
presence singularly commanding. There was an
air distingué pervading the whole man, which spoke
of high breeding, and hinted at high birth. Upon
this topic -- the topic of Smith's personal appearance
-- I have a kind of melancholy satisfaction in being
minute. His head of hair would have done honor
to a Brutus -- nothing could be more richly flowing,
or possess a brighter gloss. It was of a jetty black
-- which was also the color, or more properly the
no color, of his unimaginable whiskers. You per-
ceive I cannot speak of these latter without en-
thusiasm; it is not too much to say that they were
the handsomest pair of whiskers under the sun. At
all events, they encircled, and at times partially
overshadowed, a mouth utterly unequalled. Here
were the most entirely even, and the most brilliantly
white of all conceivable teeth. From between them,
upon every proper occasion, issued a voice of sur-
passing clearness, melody, and strength. In the
matter of eyes, my acquaintance was, also, pre-
eminently endowed. Either one of such a pair was
worth a couple of the ordinary ocular organs. They
were of a deep hazel, exceedingly large and lustrous:
and there was perceptible about them, ever and
anon, just that amount of interesting obliquity which
gives pregnancy to expression.
The bust of the General was unquestionably the
have found a fault with its wonderful proportion.
This rare peculiarity set off to great advantage a
pair of shoulders which would have called up a blush
of conscious inferiority into the countenance of the
marble Apollo. I have a passion for fine shoulders,
and may say that I never beheld them in perfec-
tion before. His arms altogether were admirably
modelled, and the fact of his wearing the right in a
sling, gave a greater decision of beauty to the left.
Nor were the lower limbs less marvellously superb.
These were, indeed, the ne plus ultra of good legs.
Every connoisseur in such matters admitted the legs
to be good. There was neither too much flesh, nor
too little -- neither rudeness nor fragility. I could
not imagine a more graceful curve than that of the
os femoris, and there was just that due gentle
prominence in the rear of the fibula which goes to
the conformation of a properly proportioned calf.
I wish to God my young and talented friend Chi-
ponchipino, the sculptor, had but seen the legs of
Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith.
But although men so absolutely fine-looking are
neither as plenty as reasons or blackberries, still I
could not bring myself to believe that the remarkable
something to which I alluded just now -- that the
odd air of je ne sais quoi which hung about my
new acquaintance -- lay altogether, or indeed at all,
in the supreme excellence of his bodily endowments.
Perhaps it might be traced to the manner -- yet
here again I could not pretend to be positive. There
was a primness, not to say stiffness, in his carriage --
a degree of measured, and, if I may so express it, of
rectangular precision, attending his every movement,
which, observed in a more petite figure, would have
had the least little savor in the world of affectation,
pomposity, or constraint, but which, noticed in a
gentleman of his undoubted dimension, was readily
placed to the account of reserve, hauteur, of a com-
mendable sense, in short, of what is due to the dignity
of colossal proportion.
The kind friend who presented me to General
Smith whispered in my ear, at the instant, some few
words of comment upon the man. He was a re-
markable man -- a very remarkable man -- indeed
one of the most remarkable men of the age. He
was an especial favorite, too, with the ladies --
chiefly on account of his high reputation for
courage.
"In that point he is unrivalled -- indeed he is a
perfect desperado -- a downright fire-eater, and no
mistake," said my friend, here dropping his voice
excessively low, and thrilling me with the mystery
of his tone.
"A downright fire-eater, and no mistake -- showed
that, I should say, to some purpose, in the late
tremendous swamp-fight away down south, with the
Bugaboo and Kickapoo Indians. (Here my friend
placed his forefinger to the side of his nose, and
opened his eyes to some extent.) Bless my soul! --
blood and thunder, and all that! -- prodigies of valor!
-- heard of him, of course? -- you know he's the
man" --
"Man alive, how do you do? why how are ye?
very glad to see ye, indeed!" here interrupted the
General himself, seizing my companian by the hand
as he drew near, and bowing stiffly, but profoundly,
as I was presented. I then thought, (and I think so
still,) that I never heard a clearer nor a stronger
voice, nor beheld a finer set of teeth -- but I must
say that I was sorry for the interruption just at that
moment, as, owing to the whispers and insinuations
aforesaid, my interest had been greatly excited in
the hero of the Bugaboo and Kickapoo campaign.
However, the delightfully luminous conversation
of Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith
soon completely dissipated this chagrin. My friend
leaving us immediately, we had quite a long tête-à-tête,
and I was not only pleased but really instructed. I
never heard a more fluent talker, or a man of greater
general information. With becoming modesty, he
forbore, nevertheless, to touch upon the theme I had
just then most at heart -- I mean the mysterious
circumstances attending the Bugaboo war -- and,
on my own part, what I conceive to be a proper
sense of delicacy forbade me to broach the subject,
although, in truth, I was exceedingly tempted to do
so. I perceived, too, that the gallant soldier pre-
ferred topics of philosophical interest, and that he
delighted, especially, in commenting upon the rapid
march of mechanical invention. Indeed -- lead him
where I would -- this was a point to which he in-
variably came back.
"There is nothing at all like it," he would say;
"we are a wonderful people, and live in a wonder-
ful age. Parachutes and rail-roads -- man-traps and
spring-guns! Our steam-boats are upon every sea,
and the Nassau balloon packet is about to run regular
trips (fare either way only twenty pounds sterling)
between London and Timbuctoo. And who shall
calculate the immense influence upon social life --
upon arts -- upon commerce -- upon literature --
which will be the immediate result of the application
of the great principles of electro-magnetics? Nor is
this all, let me assure you! There is really no end
to the march of invention. The most wonderful --
the most ingenious -- and let me add, Mr. -- Mr. --
Thompson, I believe, is your name -- let me add, I
say, the most useful -- the most truly useful me-
chanical contrivances, are daily springing up like
mushrooms, if I may so express myself, or, more
figuratively, like -- grasshoppers -- like grasshoppers,
Mr. Thompson -- about us and -- ah -- around us!"
Thompson, to be sure, is not my name; but it is
needless to say that I left General Smith with a
heightened interest in the man, with an exalted
opinion of his conversational powers, and a deep
sense of the valuable privileges we enjoy in living in
this age of mechanical invention. My curiosity,
however, had not been altogether satisfied, and I
resolved to prosecute immediate inquiry among my
acquaintances touching the Brevet Brigadier General
himself, and particularly respecting the tremendous
events in which he performed so conspicuous a part
--
and Kickapoo campaign.
The first opportunity which presented itself, and
which (horresco referens) I did not in the least
scruple to seize, occurred at the church of the
Reverend Doctor Drummummupp, where I found
myself established, one Sunday, just at sermon time,
not only in the pew, but by the side, of that worthy and
communicative little friend of mine, Miss Tabitha T.
Thus seated, I congratulated myself, and with much
reason, upon the very flattering state of affairs.
If any person knew anything about Brevet Bri-
gadier General John A. B. C. Smith, that person, it
was clear to me, was Miss Tabitha T. We tele-
graphed a few signals, and then commenced, sotto
voce, a brisk tête-à-tête.
"Smith!" said she, in reply to my very earnest
inquiry; "Smith! -- why, not General John A. B. C.?
Bless me, I thought you knew all about him! This
is a wonderfully inventive age! Horrid affair that!
-- a bloody set of wretches, those Kickapoos! --
fought like a hero -- prodigies of valor -- immortal
renown. Smith! -- Brevet Brigadier General John
A. B. C.! -- why, you know he's the man" --
"Man," here broke in Doctor Drummummupp,
at the top of his voice, and with a thump that came
near knocking down the pulpit about our ears;
"man that is born of a woman hath but a short time
to live -- he cometh up and is cut down like a
flower!" I started to the extremity of the pew, and
perceived by the animated looks of the divine, that
the wrath which had proved so nearly fatal to the
pulpit had been excited by the whispers of the lady
and myself. There was no help for it -- so I sub-
mitted with a good grace, and listened, in all the
martyrdom of a dignified silence, to the balance of
that very capital discourse.
Next evening found me a somewhat late visitor at
the Rantipole theatre, where I felt sure of satisfying
my curiosity at once, by merely stepping into the
box of those exquisite specimens of affability and om-
niscience, the Misses Arabella and Miranda Cognos-
centi. That fine tragedian, Climax, however, was do-
ing Iago to a very crowded house, and I experienced
some little difficulty in making my wishes under-
stood; especially, as our box was next to the slips,
and completely overlooked the stage.
"Smith?" said Miss Arabella, as she at length
comprehended the purport of my query; "Smith? --
why, not General John A. B. C.?"
"Smith?" inquired Miranda, musingly. "God
bless me, did you ever behold a finer figure?"
"Never, madam; but do tell me" --
"Or so inimitable grace?"
"Never, upon my word! -- but pray inform
me" --
"Or so just an appreciation of stage effect?"
"Madam!"
"Or a more delicate sense of the true beauties
of Shakspeare? Be so good as to look at that
leg!"
"The devil!" and I turned again to her sister.
"Smith?" said she, "why, not General John
A. B. C.? Horrid affair that, was'nt it? -- great
wretches, those Bugaboos -- savage and so on --
but we live in a wonderfully inventive age! -- Smith!
-- O yes! great man! -- perfect desperado -- im-
mortal renown -- prodigies of valor! Never heard!
(This was given in a scream.) Bless my soul! --
why he's the man" --
here roared out Climax just in my ear, and shaking
-- "mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owd'st yesterday!"
his fist in my face all the time, in a way that I
couldn't stand, and I wouldn't. I left the Misses
Cognoscenti immediately, and went behind the scenes
for the purpose of giving the scoundrel a sound
thrashing.
At the soirée of the lovely widow, Mrs. Kathleen
O'Trump, I was very confident that I should meet
with no similar disappointment. Accordingly, I
was no sooner seated at the card table, with my
pretty hostess for a partner, than I propounded those
questions whose solution had become a matter so
essential to my peace.
"Smith?" said my partner, "why, not General
John A. B. C.? Horrid affair that, wasn't it? --
diamonds, did you say? -- terrible wretches, those
Kickapoos! -- we are playing whist, if you please,
Mr. Tattle -- however, this is the age of invention,
most certainly -- the age, one may say -- the age
par excellence -- speak French? -- oh, quite a hero
-- perfect desperado! -- no hearts, Mr. Tattle! -- I
don't believe it -- immortal renown and all that --
prodigies of valor! Never heard!! -- why, bless
me, he's the man" --
"Mann? -- Captain Mann?" here screamed some
little feminine interloper from the farthest corner of
the room. "Are you talking about Captain Mann
and the duel? -- oh, I must hear -- do tell -- go on,
Mrs. O'Trump! -- do now go on!" And go on
Mrs. O'Trump did -- all about a certain Captain
Mann who was either shot or hung, or should have
been both shot and hung. Yes! Mrs. O'Trump, she
went on, and I -- I went off. There was no chance
of hearing anything farther that evening in regard
to Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith.
Still, I consoled myself with the reflection that the
tide of ill luck would not run against me for ever,
and so determined to make a bold push for informa-
tion at the rout of that bewitching little angel, the
graceful Mrs. Pirouette.
"Smith?" said Mrs. P., as we twirled about
together in a pas de zephyr, "Smith? -- why not
General John A. B. C.? Dreadful business that of
the Bugaboos, wasn't it? -- terrible creatures, those
of you -- man of great courage, poor fellow -- but
this is a wonderful age for invention -- O dear me,
I'm out of breath -- quite a desperado -- prodigies of
valor -- never heard!! -- can't believe it -- I shall
have to sit down and tell you -- Smith! why he's the
man" --
"Man-fred, I tell you!" here bawled out Miss
Bas-Bleu, as I led Mrs. Pirouette to a seat. "Did
ever any body hear the like? It's Man-fred, I say,
and not at all by any means Man-Friday." Here
Miss Bas-Bleu beckoned to me in a very peremptory
manner; and I was obliged, will I nill I, to leave
Mrs. P. for the purpose of deciding a dispute touch-
ing the title of a certain poetical drama of Lord
Byron's. Although I pronounced, with great prompt-
ness, that the true title was Man-Friday, and not by
any means Man-fred, yet when I returned to seek
for Mrs. Pirouette she was not to be discovered, and
I made my retreat from the house in a very bitter
spirit of animosity against the whole race of the
Bas-Bleus.
Matters had now assumed a really serious aspect,
and I resolved to call at once upon my particular
friend, Mr. Theodore Sinivate -- for I knew that
here at least I should get something like definite in-
formation.
"Smith?" said he, in his well known peculiar
way of drawling out his syllables; "Smith? -- why,
not General John A -- B -- C.? Savage affair that
with the Kickapo-o-o-o-os, was'nt it? Say! don't
you think so? -- perfect despera-a-ado -- great pity,
'pon my honor! -- wonderfully inventive age! --
pro-o-odigies of valor! By the by, did you ever
hear about Captain Mann?"
"Captain Mann be d -- d!" said I, "please to
go on with your story."
"Hem! -- oh well! -- toute la même cho-o-ose, as
we say in France. Smith, eh? Brigadier General
John A -- B -- C.? I say -- (here Mr. S. thought
proper to put his finger to the side of his nose) -- I
say, you don't mean to insinuate now, really, and
truly, and conscientiously, that you don't know all
about that affair of Smith's as well as I do, eh?
Smith? John A -- B -- C.? Why, bless me, he's the
ma-a-an" --
"Mr. Sinivate," said I, imploringly, "is he the
man in the mask?"
"No-o-o!" said he, looking wise, "nor the man in
the mo-o-o-on."
This reply I considered a pointed and positive
insult, and I left the house at once in high dudgeon,
with a firm resolve to call my friend, Mr. Sinivate,
to a speedy account for his ungentlemanly conduct
and ill breeding.
In the meantime, however, I had no notion of
being thwarted touching the information I desired.
There was one resource left me yet. I would go to
the fountain head. I would call forthwith upon the
General himself, and demand, in explicit terms, a
solution of this abominable piece of mystery. Here
at least there should be no chance for equivocation.
I would be plain, positive, peremptory -- as short as
pie-crust -- as concise as Tacitus or Montesquieu.
It was early when I called, and the General was
dressing; but I pleaded urgent business, and was
shown at once into his bed-room by an old negro
valet, who remained in attendance during my visit
As I entered the chamber, I looked about, of course,
for the occupant, but did not immediately perceive
him. There was a large and exceedingly odd-look-
ing bundle of something which lay close by my feet,
on the floor, and, as I was not in the best humour
in the world, I gave it a kick out of the way.
"Hem! ahem! rather civil that, I should say!"
said the bundle, in one of the smallest, the weakest,
and altogether the funniest little voices, between a
squeak and a whistle, that ever I heard in all the
days of my existence.
"Ahem! rather civil that, I should observe!" -- I
fairly shouted with terror, and made off at a tangent,
into the farthest extremity of the room.
"God bless me, my dear fellow," here again
whistled the bundle, "what -- what -- what -- why,
what is the matter? I really believe you don't know
me at all."
"No -- no -- no!" said I, getting as close to the
wall as possible, and holding up both hands in the
way of expostulation; "don't know you -- know you
-- know you -- don't know you at all! Where's
your master?" here I gave an impatient squint to-
wards the negro, still keeping a tight eye upon the
bundle.
"He! he! he! he-aw! he-aw!" cachinnated that
delectable specimen of the human family, with his
mouth fairly extended from ear to ear, and with his
forefinger held up close to his face, and levelled at
the object of my apprehension, as if he was taking
aim at it with a pistol.
"He! he! he! he-aw! he-aw! he-aw! -- what? you
want Mass Smif? Why, dar's him!"
What could I say to all this -- what could I?" I
staggered into an arm-chair, and, with staring eyes
and open mouth, awaited the solution of the wonder.
"Strange you shouldn't know me though, isn't
it?" presently re-squeaked the bundle, which I now
perceived was performing, upon the floor, some in-
explicable evolution, very analogous to the drawing
on of a stocking. There was only a single leg,
however, apparent.
"Strange you shouldn't know me, though, isn't it?
Pompey, bring me that leg!" Here Pompey handed
the bundle a very capital cork leg, all ready dressed,
which it screwed on in a trice, and then it stood up-
right before my eyes. Devil the word could I say.
"And a bloody action it was," continued the thing,
as if in a soliloquy; "but then one musn't fight with
the Bugaboos and Kickapoos, and think of coming
off with a mere scratch. Pompey, I'll thank you
now for that arm. Thomas (turning to me) is de-
cidedly the best hand at a cork leg; he lives in Race
street, No. 79 -- stop, I'll give you his card; but if
you should ever want an arm, my dear fellow, you
Here Pompey screwed on an arm.
"We had rather hot work of it, that you may
say. Now, you dog, slip on my shoulders and bosom
-- Pettitt makes the best shoulders, but for a bosom
you will have to go to Ducrow."
"Bosom!" said I.
"Pompey, will you never be ready with that
wig? Scalping is a rough process after all; but
then you can procure such a capital scratch at De
L'Orme's."
"Scratch!"
"Now, you nigger, my teeth! For a good set of
these you had better go to Parmly's at once; high
prices, but excellent work. I swallowed some very
capital articles, though, when the big Bugaboo
rammed me down with the butt end of his rifle."
"Butt end! -- ram down! -- my eye!"
"O yes, by the by, my eye -- here, Pompey, you
scamp, screw it in! Those Kickapoos are not so
very slow at a gouge -- but he's a belied man, that
Dr. Williams, after all; you can't imagine how well
I see with the eyes of his make."
I now began very clearly to perceive that the
object before me was nothing more or less than my
new acquaintance, Brevet Brigadier General John
A. B. C. Smith. The manipulations of Pompey had
made, I must confess, a very striking difference in
the appearance of the personal man. The voice,
however, still puzzled me no little; but even this ap-
parent mystery was speedily cleared up.
"Pompey, you black rascal," squeaked the General,
"I really do believe you would let me go out without
my palate."
Hereupon the negro, grumbling out an apology,
went up to his master, opened his mouth with the
knowing air of a horse-jockey, and adjusted therein a
somewhat singular looking machine, in a very dex-
terous manner that I could not altogether com-
prehend. The alteration, however, in the whole
expression of the countenance of the General was in-
stantaneous and surprising. When he again spoke,
his voice had resumed the whole of that rich melody
and strength which I had noticed upon our original
introduction.
"D -- n the vagabonds!" said he, in so clear a
tone that I positively started at the change, "d -- n
the vagabonds! they not only knocked in the roof of
my mouth, but took the trouble to cut off at least
seven-eighths of my tongue. There isn't Bonfanti's
equal, however, in America, for really good articles of
this description. I can recommend you to him with
confidence, (here the General bowed,) and assure
you that I have the greatest pleasure in so doing."
I acknowledged this kindness in my best manner,
and now took leave of my friend at once, with a
perfect understanding of the state of affairs -- with a
full comprehension of the mystery which had troubled
me so long. It was evident. It was a clear case.
Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith was
the man -- was
THE MAN THAT WAS USED UP.
Page 075
THE
FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER.
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melan- choly House of Usher. I know not how it was -- but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insuf- ferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me -- upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain -- upon the bleak walls -- upon the vacant eye-like windows -- upon a few rank sedges -- and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees -- with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium -- the bitter lapse into common life -- the -76- hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart -- an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goad- ing of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it -- I paused to think -- what was it that so unnerved me in the contempla- tion of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory con- clusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are com- binations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the reason, and the analysis, of this power, lie among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be suf- ficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down -- but with a shudder even more thrilling than before -- upon the re-model- led and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now pro-
posed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its pro-
prietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon
companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed
since our last meeting. A letter, however, had
lately reached me in a distant part of the country --
a letter from him -- which, in its wildly importunate
nature, had admitted of no other than a personal
reply. The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation.
The writer spoke of acute bodily illness -- of a
pitiable mental idiosyncrasy which oppressed him --
and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best, and
indeed, his only personal friend, with a view of
attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some
alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in
which all this, and much more, was said -- it was
the apparent heart that went with his request --
which allowed me no room for hesitation -- and I
accordingly obeyed, what I still considered a very
singular summons, forthwith.
Although, as boys, we had been even intimate as-
sociates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His
reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I
was aware, however, that his very ancient family had
been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility
of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages,
in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of
late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive
charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the
intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox
and easily recognisable beauties, of musical science.
I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the
stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was,
had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch;
in other words, that the entire family lay in the
direct line of descent, and had always, with very
trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It
was this deficiency, I considered, while running over
in thought the perfect keeping of the character of
the premises with the accredited character of the
people, and while speculating upon the possible in-
fluence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries,
might have exercised upon the other -- it was this
deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the con-
sequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son,
of the patrimony with the name, which had, at
length, so identified the two as to merge the original
title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appella-
tion of the "House of Usher" -- an appellation which
seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who
used it, both the family and the family mansion.
I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat
childish experiment, of looking down within the tarn,
had been to deepen the first singular impression.
There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the
rapid increase of my superstition -- for why should
I not so term it? -- served mainly to accelerate the
increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the
paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a
basis. And it might have been for this reason only,
that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house
itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my
mind a strange fancy -- a fancy so ridiculous, indeed,
that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the
sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked
upon my imagination as really to believe that around
about the whole mansion and domain there hung an
atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their im-
mediate vicinity -- an atmosphere which had no
affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked
up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and
the silent tarn, in the form of an inelastic vapor or
gas -- dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-
hued. Shaking off from my spirit what must have
been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real
aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed
to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discolora-
tion of ages had been great. Minute fungi over-
spread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled
web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart
from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of
the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a
wild inconsistency between its still perfect adapta-
tion of parts, and the utterly porous, and evidently
decayed condition of the individual stones. In this
there was much that reminded me of the specious
totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long
years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance
from the breath of the external air. Beyond this
indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric
gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a
scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely
perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof
of the building in front, made its way down the wall
in a zig-zag direction, until it became lost in the
sullen waters of the tarn.
Noticing these things, I rode over a short cause-
way to the house. A servant in waiting took my
horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall.
A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in
silence, through many dark and intricate passages
in my progress to the studio of his master. Much
that I encountered on the way contributed, I know
not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which
I have already spoken. While the objects around
me -- while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre
tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the
floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies
which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which,
or to such as which, I had been accustomed from
my infancy -- while I hesitated not to acknowledge
how familiar was all this -- I still wondered to find
how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary
images were stirring up. On one of the staircases, I
met the physician of the family. His countenance,
I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning
and perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation
and passed on. The valet now threw open a door
and ushered me into the presence of his master.
The room in which I found myself was very large
and excessively lofty. The windows were long,
narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from
the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible
from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light
made their way through the trelliced panes, and
served to render sufficiently distinct the more
prominent objects around; the eye, however, strug-
gled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the
chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted
general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique,
and tattered. Many books and musical instruments
lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to
the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of
sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable
gloom hung over and pervaded all.
Upon my entrance, Usher arose from a sofa upon
which he had been lying at full length, and greeted
me with a vivacious warmth which had much in it,
I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality -- of the
constrained effort of the ennuyé man of the world.
A glance, however, at his countenance convinced
me of his perfect sincerity. We sat down; and for
some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon
him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely,
man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief
a period, as had Roderick Usher! It was with dif-
ficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity
of the wan being before me with the companion of
my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face had
been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of
complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous be-
yond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very
pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose
of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of
nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded
chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want
of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like soft-
ness and tenuity; these features, with an inordinate
expansion above the regions of the temple, made up
altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten.
And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing
character of these features, and of the expression
they were wont to convey, lay so much of change
that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly
pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of
the eye, above all things startled and even awed me.
The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all
unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it
floated rather than fell about the face, I could not,
even with effort, connect its arabesque expression
with any idea of simply humanity.
In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with
an incoherence -- an inconsistency; and I soon found
this to arise from a series of feeble and futile strug-
gles to overcome an habitual trepidancy, an excessive
nervous agitation. For something of this nature I
had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter, than
by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by
conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical con-
formation and temperament. His action was alter-
nately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly
from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits
seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of ener-
getic concision -- that abrupt, weighty, unhurried,
and hollow-sounding enunciation -- that leaden, self-
balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance,
which may be observed in the moments of the in-
tensest excitement of the lost drunkard, or the irre-
claimable eater of opium.
It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit,
of his earnest desire to see me, and of the solace he
expected me to afford him. He entered, at some
length, into what he conceived to be the nature of
his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a
family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a
remedy -- a mere nervous affection, he immediately
added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It
displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations.
Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and
bewildered me -- although, perhaps, the terms, and
the general manner of the narration had their weight.
He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the
senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable;
he could wear only garments of certain texture; the
odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were
tortured by even a faint light; and there were but
peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments,
which did not inspire him with horror.
To an anomalous species of terror I found him
a bounden slave. "I shall perish," said he, "I
must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and
not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events
of the future, not in themselves, but in their results.
I shudder at the thought of any, even the most
trivial, incident, which may operate upon this in-
tolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no ab-
horrence of danger, except in its absolute effect --
in terror. In this unnerved -- in this pitiable condi-
tion -- I feel that I must inevitably abandon life and
reason together in my struggles with some fatal
demon of fear."
I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken
and equivocal hints, another singular feature of his
mental condition. He was enchained by certain
superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling
which he tenanted, and from which, for many years,
he had never ventured forth -- in regard to an influ-
ence whose supposititious force was conveyed in
terms too shadowy here to be restated -- an influence
which some peculiarities in the mere form and sub-
stance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long
sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit -- an
effect which the physique of the gray walls and
turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked
down, had, at length, brought about upon the morale
of his existence.
He admitted, however, although with hesitation,
that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted
him could be traced to a more natural and far more
palpable origin -- to the severe and long-continued
illness -- indeed to the evidently approaching disso-
lution -- of a tenderly beloved sister; his sole com-
panion for long years -- his last and only relative on
earth. "Her decease," he said, with a bitterness
which I can never forget, "would leave him (him
the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race
of the Ushers." As he spoke the lady Madeline (for
so was she called) passed slowly through a remote
portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed
my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an
utter astonishment not unmingled with dread. Her
figure, her air, her features -- all, in their very
(I can use no other sufficient term,) were identically
those of the Roderick Usher who sat beside me. A
feeling of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed
her retreating steps. As a door, at length, closed
upon her exit, my glance sought instinctively and
eagerly the countenance of the brother -- but he had
buried his face in his hands, and I could only perceive
that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread
the emaciated fingers through which trickled many
passionate tears.
The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled
the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a
gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent
although transient affections of a partially cataleptical
character, were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto
she had steadily borne up against the pressure of her
malady, and had not betaken herself finally to bed;
but, on the closing in of the evening of my arrival at
the house, she succumbed, as her brother told me at
night with inexpressible agitation, to the prostrating
power of the destroyer -- and I learned that the
glimpse I had obtained of her person would thus
probably be the last I should obtain -- that the
lady, at least while living, would be seen by me no
more.
For several days ensuing, her name was unmention-
ed by either Usher or myself; and during this period,
I was busied in earnest endeavors to alleviate the
melancholy of my friend. We painted and read
together -- or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild
improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as
a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more
unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more
bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at
cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inhe-
rent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of
the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing
radiation of gloom.
I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many
solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of
the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any attempt
to convey an idea of the exact character of the
studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved
me, or led me the way. An excited and highly dis-
tempered ideality threw a sulphurous lustre over all.
His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my
ears. Among other things, I bear painfully in mind
a certain singular perversion and amplification of the
wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. From the
paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded,
and which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses
at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I
shuddered knowing not why, from these paintings
(vivid as their images now are before me) I would
in vain endeavor to educe more than a small portion
which should lie within the compass of merely written
words. By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of
his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If
ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roder-
ick Usher. For me at least -- in the circumstances
then surrounding me -- there arose out of the pure
abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to
throw upon his canvas, an intensity of intolerable
awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the con-
templation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete
reveries of Fuseli.
One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend,
partaking not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction,
may be shadowed forth, although feebly, in words.
A small picture presented the interior of an immensely
long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls,
smooth, white, and without interruption or device.
Certain accessory points of the design served well to
convey the idea that this excavation lay at an ex-
ceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No
outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent,
and no torch, or other artificial source of light was
discernible -- yet a flood of intense rays rolled
throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and
inappropriate splendor.
I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the
auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable
to the sufferer, with the exception of certain effects
of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps, the narrow
limits to which he thus confined himself upon the
guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the
fantastic character of his performances. But the
fervid facility of his impromptus could not be so ac-
counted for. They must have been, and were, in the
notes, as well as in the words of his wild fantasias,
(for he not unfrequently accompanied himself with
rhymed verbal improvisations,) the result of that
intense mental collectedness and concentration to
which I have previously alluded as observable only
in particular moments of the highest artificial excite-
ment. The words of one of these rhapsodies I have
easily borne away in memory. I was, perhaps, the
more forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because,
in the under or mystic current of its meaning, I
fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full
consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering
of his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses,
which were entitled "The Haunted Palace," ran very
nearly, if not accurately, thus:
I.
In the greenest of our valleys,
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace --
Snow-white palace -- reared its head.
In the monarch Thought's dominion --
It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair.
II.
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow;
(This -- all this -- was in the olden
Time long ago)
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A winged odor went away.
III.
Wanderers in that happy valley
Through two luminous windows saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute's well-tuned law,
Round about a throne, where sitting
(Porphyrogene!)
In state his glory well befitting,
The sovereign of the realm was seen.
IV.
And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.
V.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)
And, round about his home, the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.
VI.
And travellers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh -- but smile no more.
I well remember that suggestions arising from
this ballad led us into a train of thought wherein there
became manifest an opinion of Usher's which I men-
tion not so much on account of its novelty, (for other
men have thought thus,) as on account of the per-
tinacity with which he maintained it. This opinion,
in its general form, was that of the sentience of all
vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the
idea had assumed a more daring character, and
trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the king-
dom of inorganization. I lack words to express the
full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion.
The belief, however, was connected (as I have pre-
viously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of
his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had
been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of col-
location of these stones -- in the order of their ar-
rangement, as well as in that of the many fungi
which overspread them, and of the decayed trees
which stood around -- above all, in the long undis-
turbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its
reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its evi-
dence -- the evidence of the sentience -- was to be
seen, he said, (and I here started as he spoke,) in
the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmos-
phere of their own about the waters and the walls.
The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent,
yet importunate and terrible influence which for
centuries had moulded the destinies of his family,
and which made him what I now saw him -- what
he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I
will make none.
Our books -- the books which, for years, had
formed no small portion of the mental existence of
the invalid -- were, as might be supposed, in strict
keeping with this character of phantasm. We pored
together over such works as the Ververt et Char-
treuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli; the
Selenography of Brewster; the Heaven and Hell of
Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas
Klimm de Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud,
of Jean d'Indaginé, and of De la Chambre; the
Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck; and the
City of the Sun of Campanella. One favorite volume
was a small octavo edition of the Directorium In-
quisitorium, by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne;
and there were passages in Pomponius Mela, about
the old African Satyrs and Ægipans, over which
Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief
delight, however, was found in the earnest and re-
peated perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious
book in quarto Gothic -- the manual of a forgotten
church -- the Vigilae Mortuorum secundum Chorum
Ecclesiae Maguntinae.
I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this
work, and of its probable influence upon the hypo-
chondriac, when, one evening, having informed me
abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he
stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a
fortnight, (previously to its final interment,) in one of
the numerous vaults within the main walls of the
building. The wordly reason, however, assigned
for this singular proceeding, was one which I did
not feel at liberty to dispute. The brother had been
led to his resolution (so he told me) by considerations
of the unusual character of the malady of the de-
ceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on
the part of her medical men, and of the remote and
exposed situation of the burial-ground of the family.
I will not deny that when I called to mind the sinister
countenance of the person whom I met upon the
staircase, on the day of my arrival at the house, I
had no desire to oppose what I regarded as at best
but a harmless, and not by any means an unnatural,
precaution.
At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in
the arrangements for the temporary entombment.
The body having been encoffined, we two alone bore
it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it (and
which had been so long unopened that our torches,
half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us
little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp,
and entirely without means of admission for light;
lying, at great depth, immediately beneath that por-
tion of the building in which was my own sleeping
apartment. It had been used, apparently, in remote
feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep,
and, in later days, as a place of deposit for powder,
or other highly combustible substance, as a portion
through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed
with copper. The door, of massive iron, had been,
also, similarly protected. Its immense weight caused
an unusually sharp grating sound, as it moved upon
its hinges.
Having deposited our mournful burden upon tres-
sels within this region of horror, we partially turned
aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked
upon the face of the tenant. The exact similitude
between the brother and sister even here again
startled and confounded me. Usher, divining, per-
haps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words
from which I learned that the deceased and himself
had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely
intelligible nature had always existed between them.
Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead
-- for we could not regard her unawed. The dis-
ease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity
of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly
cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush
upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously
lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in
death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and,
having secured the door of iron, made our way, with
toil, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the
upper portion of the house.
And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed,
an observable change came over the features of the
mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner
had vanished. His ordinary occupations were
neglected or forgotten. He roamed from chamber
to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless
step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed,
if possible, a more ghastly hue -- but the luminous-
ness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once
occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more;
and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror,
habitually characterized his utterance. -- There were
times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated
mind was laboring with an oppressive secret, to di-
vulge which he struggled for the necessary courage.
At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the
mere inexplicable vagaries of madness, as I beheld
him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an atti-
tude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to
some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his
condition terrified -- that it infected me. I felt creep-
ing upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild
influences of his own fantastic yet impressive super-
stitions.
It was, most especially, upon retiring to bed late
in the night of the seventh or eighth day after the
placing of the lady Madeline within the donjon, that
I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep
came not near my couch -- while the hours waned
and waned away. I struggled to reason off the
nervousness which had dominion over me. I en-
deavoured to believe that much, if not all of what I
felt, was due to the phantasmagoric influence of the
gloomy furniture of the room -- of the dark and
tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by
the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and
fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the
decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruit-
less. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded
my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very
heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shak-
ing this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted
myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly with-
in the intense darkness of the chamber, harkened --
I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit
prompted me -- to certain low and indefinite sounds
which came, through the pauses of the storm, at
long intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered
by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet
unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste, for
I felt that I should sleep no more during the night,
and endeavored to arouse myself from the pitiable
condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly
to and fro through the apartment.
I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a
light step on an adjoining staircase arrested my at-
tention. I presently recognised it as that of Usher.
In an instant afterwards he rapped, with a gentle
touch, at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp.
His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan --
but there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes
-- an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole de-
meanor. His air appalled me -- but anything was
preferable to the solitude which I had so long en-
dured, and I even welcomed his presence as a relief.
"And you have not seen it?" he said abruptly,
after having stared about him for some moments in
silence -- "you have not then seen it? -- but, stay!
you shall." Thus speaking, and having carefully
shaded his lamp, he hurried to one of the gigantic
casements, and threw it freely open to the storm.
The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly
lifted us from our feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous
yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular
in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had ap-
parently collected its force in our vicinity; for there
were frequent and violent alterations in the direction
of the wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds
(which hung so low as to press upon the turrets of
the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-like
velocity with which they flew careering from all
points against each other, without passing away into
the distance. I say that even their exceeding density
did not prevent our perceiving this -- yet we had no
glimpse of the moon or stars -- nor was there any
flashing forth of the lightning. But the under sur-
faces of the huge masses of agitated vapor, as well
as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were
glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous
and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung
about and enshrouded the mansion.
"You must not -- you shall not behold this!" said
I, shudderingly, to Usher, as I led him, with a gentle
violence, from the window to a seat. "These ap-
pearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical
phenomena not uncommon -- or it may be that they
have their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the
ing and dangerous to your frame. Here is one of
your favorite romances. I will read, and you shall
listen -- and so we will pass away this terrible night
together.
The antique volume which I had taken up was the
"Mad Trist" of Sir Launcelot Canning -- but I had
called it a favorite of Usher's more in sad jest than
in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth
and unimaginative prolixity which could have had
interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend.
It was, however, the only book immediately at hand;
and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement
which now agitated the hypochondriac might find
relief (for the history of mental disorder is full of
similar anomalies) even in the extremeness of the
folly which I should read. Could I have judged, in-
deed by the wild overstrained air of vivacity with
which he hearkened, or apparently hearkened, to the
words of the tale, I might have well congratulated
myself upon the success of my design.
I had arrived at that well-known portion of the
story where Ethelred, the hero of the Trist, having
sought in vain for peaceable admission into the
dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an
entrance by force. Here, it will be remembered, the
words of the narrative run thus: --
"And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty
heart, and who was now mighty withal, on account
of the powerfulness of the wine which he had drunken,
waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who,
in sooth, was of an obstinate and maliceful turn, but,
feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and fearing the
rising of the tempest, uplifted his mace outright, and,
with blows, made quickly room in the plankings of the
door for his gauntleted hand, and now pulling there-
with sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore all
asunder, that the noise of the dry and hollow-sound-
ing wood alarummed and reverberated throughout
the forest."
At the termination of this sentence I started, and
for a moment, paused; for it appeared to me (although
I at once concluded that my excited fancy had de-
ceived me) -- it appeared to me that, from some
very remote portion of the mansion or of its vicinity,
there came, indistinctly, to my ears, what might have
been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo
(but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very
cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had
so particularly described. It was, beyond doubt, the
coincidence alone which had arrested my attention;
for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements,
and the ordinary commingled noises of the still in-
creasing storm, the sound, in itself, had nothing, surely,
which should have interested or disturbed me. I
continued the story.
"But the good champion Ethelred, now entering
within the door, was sore enraged and amazed to
perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit; but, in
the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious
demeanor, and of a fiery tongue, which sate in guard
before a palace of gold, with a floor of silver; and
upon the wall there hung a shield of shining brass
with this legend enwritten --
And Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the
Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin,
Who slayeth the dragon the shield he shall win.
head of the dragon, which fell before him, and gave
up his pesty breath, with a shriek so horrid and
harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had fain
to close his ears with his hands against the dreadful
noise of it, the like whereof was never before
heard."
Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a
feeling of wild amazement -- for there could be no
doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually
hear (although from what direction it proceeded
I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently
distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual
screaming or grating sound -- the exact counterpart
of what my fancy had already conjured up as the
sound of the dragon's unnatural shriek as described
by the romancer.
Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence
of this second and most extraordinary coincidence,
by a thousand conflicting sensations, in which wonder
and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained
sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any
observation, the sensitive nervousness of my com-
panion. I was by no means certain that he had
noticed the sounds in question; although, assuredly,
a strange alteration had, during the last few minutes,
taken place in his demeanor. From a position
fronting my own, he had gradually brought round
his chair, so as to sit with his face to the door of the
chamber, and thus I could but partially perceive his
features, although I saw that his lips trembled as if
he were murmuring inaudibly. His head had dropped
upon his breast -- yet I knew that he was not asleep,
from the wide and rigid opening of the eye as I
caught a glance of it in profile. The motion of his
body, too, was at variance with this idea -- for he
rocked from side to side with a gentle yet constant
and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken notice of
all this, I resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot,
which thus proceeded: --
"And now, the champion, having escaped from the
terrible fury of the dragon, bethinking himself of the
brazen shield, and of the breaking up of the enchant-
ment which was upon it, removed the carcass from
out of the way before him, and approached valorously
over the silver pavement of the castle to where the
shield was upon the wall; which in sooth tarried
not for his full coming, but fell down at his feet upon
the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible
ringing sound."
No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than
-- as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment,
fallen heavily upon a floor of silver -- I became aware
of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet
apparently muffled reverberation. Completely un-
nerved, I started convulsively to my feet; but the
measured rocking movement of Usher was undis-
turbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His
eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout
his whole countenance there reigned a more than
stony rigidity. But, as I laid my hand upon his
shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his frame;
a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that
he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur,
as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely
over his person, I at length drank in the hideous
import of his words.
"Not hear it? -- yes, I hear it, and have heard it.
Long -- long -- long -- many minutes, many hours,
many days, have I heard it -- yet I dared not -- oh,
pity me, miserable wretch that I am! -- I dared not
-- I dared not speak! We have put her living in
the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute?
I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements
in the hollow coffin. I heard them -- many, many
days ago -- yet I dared not -- I dared not speak!
And now -- to-night -- Ethelred -- ha! ha! -- the
breaking of the hermit's door, and the death-cry of
the dragon, and the clangor of the shield -- say,
rather, the rending of the coffin, and the grating of
the iron hinges, and her struggles within the coppered
archway of the vault! Oh whither shall I fly?
Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to
upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her
footsteps on the stair? Do I not distinguish that
heavy and horrible beating of her heart? Madman!"
-- here he sprung violently to his feet, and shrieked
out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up
his soul -- "Madman! I tell you that she now
stands without the door!"
As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance
there had been found the potency of a spell -- the
huge antique pannels to which the speaker pointed,
threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous
and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing
gust -- but then without those doors there did stand
the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline
of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes,
and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every
portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she
remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the
threshold -- then, with a low moaning cry, fell
heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and
in her horrible and now final death-agonies, bore him
to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he
had dreaded.
From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled
aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath
as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Sud-
denly there shot along the path a wild light, and I
turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have
issued -- for the vast house and its shadows were
alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full,
setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly
through that once barely-discernible fissure, of which
I have before spoken, as extending from the roof of
the building, in a zigzag direction to the base. While
I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened -- there came a
fierce breath of the whirlwind -- the entire orb of the
satellite burst at once upon my sight -- my brain
reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder --
there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the
voice of a thousand waters -- and the deep and dank
tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the
fragments of the "House of Usher."
Page 105
THE DUC DE L'OMELETTE.
And stepped at once into a cooler clime.
Cowper .
The Andromache?1 Ignoble souls! -- De L'Ome-
lette perished of an ortolan.
-- assist me Spirit of Apicius!
A golden cage bore the little winged wanderer, ena-
mored, melting, indolent, to the Chaussée D'Antin,
from its home in far Peru. From its queenly pos-
sessor La Bellissima, to the Duc De L'Omelette, six
peers of the empire conveyed the happy bird. It
was "All for Love."
That night the Duc was to sup alone. In the
privacy of his bureau he reclined languidly on that
ottoman for which he sacrificed his loyalty in out-
bidding his king -- the notorious ottoman of Cadêt.
He buries his face in the pillow -- the clock
strikes! Unable to restrain his feelings, his Grace
swallows an olive. At this moment the door gently
opens to the sound of soft music, and lo! the most
delicate of birds is before the most enamored of men!
But what inexpressible dismay now overshadows the
countenance of the Duc? -- "
-- Baptiste! -- l'oiseau! ah, bon Dieu! cet oiseau
modeste que tu as deshabillé de ses plumes, et que tu
as servi sans papier!" It is superfluous to say more
-- the Duc expired in a paroxysm of disgust.
* * * * * *
"Ha! ha! ha!" -- said his Grace on the third day
after his decease.
"He! he! he!" -- replied the Devil faintly, draw-
ing himself up with an air of hauteur.
"Why, surely you are not serious" -- retorted
De L'Omelette. "I have sinned -- c'est vrai -- but,
my good sir, consider! -- you have no actual inten-
tion of putting such -- such -- barbarous threats into
execution."
"No what?" -- said his Majesty -- "come, sir,
strip!"
"Strip, indeed! -- very pretty i' faith! -- no, sir, I
shall not strip. Who are you, pray, that I, Duc De
L'Omelette, Prince de Foie-Gras, just come of age,
author of the `Mazurkiad,' and Member of the
Academy, should divest myself at your bidding of
the sweetest pantaloons ever made by Bourdon, the
daintiest robe-de-chambre ever put together by Rom-
bêrt -- to say nothing of the taking my hair out of
paper -- not to mention the trouble I should have in
drawing off my gloves?"
"Who am I? -- ah, true! I am Baal-Zebub, Prince
of the Fly. I took thee just now from a rose-wood
coffin inlaid with ivory. Thou wast curiously scented,
and labelled as per invoice. Belial sent thee -- my
Inspector of Cemeteries. The pantaloons, which
thou sayest were made by Bourdon, are an excellent
pair of linen drawers, and thy robe-de-chambre is a
shroud of no scanty dimensions."
"Sir!" replied the Duc, "I am not to be insulted
with impunity! -- Sir! I shall take the earliest op-
portunity of avenging this insult! -- Sir! you shall
hear from me! In the meantime au revoir!" -- and
the Duc was bowing himself out of the Satanic
presence, when he was interrupted and brought back
by a gentleman in waiting. Hereupon his Grace
rubbed his eyes, yawned, shrugged his shoulders,
reflected. Having become satisfied of his identity,
he took a bird's eye view of his whereabouts.
The apartment was superb. Even De L'Ome-
lette pronounced it bien comme il faut. It was not
very long, nor very broad, -- but its height -- ah,
that was appalling! There was no ceiling -- cer-
tainly none -- but a dense whirling mass of fiery-
colored clouds. His Grace's brain reeled as he
glanced upwards. From above, hung a chain of an
unknown blood-red metal -- its upper end lost, like
C -- , parmi les nues. From its nether extremity
hung a large cresset. The Duc knew it to be a
ruby -- but from it there poured a light so intense,
so still, so terrible, Persia never worshipped such
-- Gheber never imagined such -- Mussulman never
dreamed of such when, drugged with opium, he has
tottered to a bed of poppies, his back to the flowers,
and his face to the god Apollo! The Duc muttered
a slight oath, decidedly approbatory.
The corners of the room were rounded into niches.
Three of these were filled with statues of gigantic
proportions. Their beauty was Grecian, their de-
formity Egyptian, their tout ensemble French. In
the fourth niche the statue was veiled -- it was not
colossal. But then there was a taper ankle, a
sandalled foot. De L'Omelette laid his hand upon
his heart, closed his eyes, raised them, and caught
his Satanic Majesty -- in a blush.
But the paintings! -- Kupris! Astarte! Astoreth!
-- a thousand and the same! And Rafaelle has
beheld them! Yes, Rafaelle has been here; for did
he not paint the -- ? and was he not consequently
damned? The paintings! -- the paintings! O luxury!
O love! -- who gazing on those forbidden beauties
shall have eyes for the dainty devices of the golden
frames that lie imbedded and asleep against those
swelling walls of eider down?
But the Duc's heart is fainting within him. He
is not, however, as you suppose, dizzy with magnifi-
cence, nor drunk with the ecstatic breath of those
innumerable censers.
choses il a pensé beaucoup -- mais! The Duc De
L'Omelette is terror-stricken; for through the lurid
vista which a single uncurtained window is afford-
ing, lo! gleams the most ghastly of all fires!
Le pauvre Duc! He could not help imagining
that the glorious, the voluptuous, the never-dying
melodies which pervaded that hall, as they passed
enchanted window-panes, were the wailings and the
howlings of the hopeless and the damned! And there,
too -- there -- upon that ottoman! -- who could he
be? -- he, the petit-maitre -- no, the Deity -- who
sat as if carved in marble, et qui sourit, with his pale
countenance, si amerement.
* * * * *
Mais il faut agir -- that is to say, a Frenchman
never faints outright. Besides, his Grace hated a
scene -- De L'Omelette is himself again. There
were some foils upon a table -- some points also.
The Duc had studied under B -- , il avait tué ses
six hommes. Now, then, il peut s'echapper. He
measures two points, and, with a grace inimitable,
offers his Majesty the choice. Horreur! his Majesty
does not fence!
Mais il joue! -- what a happy thought! But his
Grace had always an excellent memory. He had
dipped in the "Diable" of the Abbé Gualtier. There-
in it is said "
d'Ecarté."
But the chances -- the chances! True -- desperate:
but not more desperate than the Duc. Besides, was
he not in the secret? -- had he not skimmed over
Père Le Brun? was he not a member of the Club
Vingt-un? "Si je perds," said he, "je serai deux
fois perdu, I shall be doubly damned -- voila tout!
(Here his Grace shrugged his shoulders)
je serai libre, -- que les cartes soient préparées!
* * * * * *
His Grace was all care, all attention -- his Majesty
all confidence. A spectator would have thought of
Francis and Charles. His Grace thought of his
game. His Majesty did not think -- he shuffled.
The Duc cut.
The cards are dealt. The trump is turned -- it is
-- it is -- the king! No -- it was the queen. His
Majesty cursed her masculine habiliments. De
L'Omelette laid his hand upon his heart.
They play. The Duc counts. The hand is out.
His Majesty counts heavily, smiles, and is taking
wine. The Duc slips a card.
"C'est à vous à faire" -- said his Majesty, cut-
ting. His Grace bowed, dealt, and arose from the
table en presentant le Roi.
His Majesty looked chagrined.
Had Alexander not been Alexander, he would
have been Diogenes; and the Duc assured his Majesty
in taking leave "
il n'aurait point d'objection d'etre le Diable."
1. Montfleury. The author of the Parnasse Réformé makes
him thus express himself in the shades. "The man then who
would know of what I died, let him not ask if it were of the
fever, the dropsy, or the gout; but let him know that it was of
The Andromache."
Page 111
MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE.
say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me
from the one, and estranged me from the other.
Hereditary wealth afforded me an education of no
common order, and a contemplative turn of mind
enabled me to methodize the stores which early
study very diligently garnered up. Beyond all
things the works of the German moralists gave me
great delight; not from any ill-advised admiration of
their eloquent madness, but from the ease with which
my habits of rigid thought enabled me to detect their
falsities. I have often been reproached with the
aridity of my genius -- a deficiency of imagination
has been imputed to me as a crime -- and the Pyr-
rhonism of my opinions has at all times rendered
me notorious. Indeed a strong relish for physical
philosophy has, I fear, tinctured my mind with a
very common error of this age -- I mean the habit
of referring occurrences, even the least susceptible
of such reference, to the principles of that science.
Upon the whole, no person could be less liable than
myself to be led away from the severe precincts of
truth by the ignes fatui of superstition. I have
thought proper to premise thus much lest the incredi-
ble tale I have to tell should be considered rather the
raving of a crude imagination, than the positive ex-
perience of a mind to which the reveries of fancy
have been a dead letter and a nullity.
After many years spent in foreign travel, I sailed
in the year 18 -- , from the port of Batavia, in the
rich and populous island of Java, on a voyage to the
Archipelago of the Sunda islands. I went as pas-
senger -- having no other inducement than a kind of
nervous restlessness which haunted me like a fiend.
Our vessel was a beautiful ship of about four hun-
dred tons, copper-fastened, and built at Bombay of
Malabar teak. She was freighted with cotton-wool
and oil, from the Lachadive islands. We had also
on board coir, jaggeree, ghee, cocoa-nuts, and a
few cases of opium. The stowage was clumsily
done, and the vessel consequently crank.
We got under way with a mere breath of wind,
and for many days stood along the eastern coast of
Java, without any other incident to beguile the
monotony of our course than the occasional meeting
with some of the small grabs of the Archipelago to
which we were bound.
One evening, leaning over the taffrail, I observed
a very singular, isolated cloud, to the N. W. It
was remarkable, as well for its color, as from its
being the first we had seen since our departure from
Batavia. I watched it attentively until sunset, when
it spread all at once to the eastward and westward,
girting in the horizon with a narrow strip of vapor,
and looking like a long line of low beach. My
notice was soon afterwards attracted by the dusky-
red appearance of the moon, and the peculiar cha-
racter of the sea. The latter was undergoing a
rapid change, and the water seemed more than
usually transparent. Although I could distinctly see
the bottom, yet, heaving the lead, I found the ship in
fifteen fathoms. The air now became intolerably
hot, and was loaded with spiral exhalations similar
to those arising from heated iron. As night came
on, every breath of wind died away, and a more
entire calm it is impossible to conceive. The flame
of a candle burned upon the poop without the least
perceptible motion, and a long hair, held between the
finger and thumb, hung without the possibility of
detecting a vibration. However, as the captain said
he could perceive no indication of danger, and as
we were drifting in bodily to shore, he ordered the
sails to be furled, and the anchor let go. No watch
was set, and the crew, consisting principally of
Malays, stretched themselves deliberately upon deck.
I went below -- not without a full presentiment of
evil. Indeed every appearance warranted me in ap-
prehending a Simoom. I told the captain my fears
-- but he paid no attention to what I said, and left
me without deigning to give a reply. My uneasi-
ness, however, prevented me from sleeping, and about
midnight I went upon deck. As I placed my foot
upon the upper step of the companion-ladder, I was
startled with a loud, humming noise, like that oc-
casioned by the rapid revolution of a mill-wheel, and
before I could ascertain its meaning, I found the ship
quivering to its centre. In the next instant, a wilder-
ness of foam hurled us upon our beam-ends, and,
rushing over us fore and aft, swept the entire decks
from stem to stern.
The extreme fury of the blast proved in a great
measure the salvation of the ship. Although com-
pletely water-logged, yet, as all her masts had gone
by the board, she rose, after a minute, heavily from
the sea, and, staggering awhile beneath the immense
pressure of the tempest, finally righted.
By what miracle I escaped destruction, it is im-
possible to say. Stunned by the shock of the water,
I found myself, upon recovery, jammed in between
the stern-post and rudder. With great difficulty I
gained my feet, and looking dizzily around, was, at
first, struck with the idea of our being among
breakers, so terrific beyond the wildest imagination
was the whirlpool of mountainous and foaming
ocean within which we were engulfed. After a
while, I heard the voice of an old Swede, who had
shipped with us at the moment of our leaving port.
I hallooed to him with all my strength, and presently
he came reeling aft. We soon discovered that we
were the sole survivors of the accident. All on
deck, with the exception of ourselves, had been swept
overboard, and the captain and mates must have
perished as they slept, for the cabins were deluged
with water. Without assistance, we could expect
to do little for the security of the ship, and our exer-
tions were at first paralyzed by the momentary ex-
pectation of going down. Our cable had, of course,
parted like pack-thread, at the first breath of the
hurricane, or we should have been instantaneously
overwhelmed. We scudded with frightful velocity
before the sea, and the water made clear breaches
over us. The frame-work of our stern was shattered
excessively, and, in almost every respect, we had
received considerable injury -- but to our extreme
joy we found the pumps unchoked, and that we had
made no great shifting of our ballast. The main fury
of the Simoom had already blown over, and we ap-
prehended little danger from the violence of the wind
-- but we looked forward to its total cessation with
dismay, well believing, that, in our shattered condi-
tion, we should inevitably perish in the tremendous
swell which would ensue. But this very just ap-
prehension seemed by no means likely to be soon
verified. For five entire days and nights -- during
which our only subsistence was a small quantity of
jaggeree, procured with great difficulty from the
forecastle -- the hulk flew at a rate defying compu-
tation, before rapidly succeeding flaws of wind,
which, without equalling the first violence of the
Simoom, were still more terrific than any tempest I
had before encountered. Our course for the first
four days was, with trifling variations, S. E. and by
South; and we must have run down the coast of
New Holland. On the fifth day the cold became
extreme, although the wind had hauled round a point
more to the northward. The sun arose with a
sickly yellow lustre, and clambered a very few
degrees above the horizon -- emitting no decisive
light. There were no clouds whatever apparent,
yet the wind was upon the increase, and blew with
a fitful and unsteady fury. About noon, as nearly
as we could guess, our attention was again arrested
by the appearance of the sun. It gave out no light,
properly so called, but a dull and sullen glow un-
accompanied by any ray. Just before sinking with-
in the turgid sea its central fires suddenly went out,
as if hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable
power. It was a dim, silver-like rim, alone, as it
rushed down the unfathomable ocean.
We waited in vain for the arrival of the sixth day
-- that day to me has not arrived -- to the Swede, never
did arrive. Thenceforward we were enshrouded in
pitchy darkness, so that we could not have seen an
object at twenty paces from the ship. Eternal night
continued to envelop us, all unrelieved by the phos-
phoric sea-brilliancy to which we had been accustomed
in the tropics. We observed too, that, although the
tempest continued to rage with unabated violence,
there was no longer to be discovered the usual ap-
pearance of surf, or foam, which had hitherto at-
tended us. All around was horror, and thick gloom,
and a black sweltering desert of ebony. Superstitious
terror crept by degrees into the spirit of the old
Swede, and my own soul was wrapped up in silent
wonder. We neglected all care of the ship, as worse
than useless, and securing ourselves as well as pos-
sible to the stump of the mizen-mast, looked out bit-
calculating time, nor could we form any guess of
our situation. We were, however, well aware of
having made farther to the southward than any pre-
vious navigators, and felt extreme amazement at not
meeting with the usual impediments of ice. In the
meantime every moment threatened to be our last
-- every mountainous billow hurried to overwhelm
us. The swell surpassed anything I had ima-
gined possible, and that we were not instantly
buried is a miracle. My companion spoke of the
lightness of our cargo, and reminded me of the ex-
cellent qualities of our ship -- but I could not help
feeling the utter hopelessness of hope itself, and pre-
pared myself gloomily for that death which I thought
nothing could defer beyond an hour, as, with every
knot of way the ship made, the swelling of the black
stupendous seas became more dismally appalling.
At times we gasped for breath at an elevation be-
yond the Albatross -- at times became dizzy with the
velocity of our descent into some watery hell, where
the air grew stagnant, and no sound disturbed the
slumbers of the Kraken.
We were at the bottom of one of these abysses,
when a quick scream from my companion broke fear-
fully upon the night. "See! see!" -- cried he, shriek-
ing in my ears, -- "Almighty God! see! see!" As
he spoke, I became aware of a dull, sullen glare
of red light which streamed down the sides of
the vast chasm where we lay, and threw a fitful
brilliancy upon our deck. Casting my eyes upwards,
I beheld a spectacle which froze the current of my
blood. At a terrific height directly above us, and
upon the very verge of the precipitous descent,
hovered a gigantic ship of nearly four thousand tons.
Although upreared upon the summit of a wave of
more than a hundred times her own altitude, her ap-
parent size still exceeded that of any ship of the line
or East Indiaman in existence. Her huge hull was
of a deep dingy black, unrelieved by any of the cus-
tomary carvings of a ship. A single row of brass
cannon protruded from her open ports, and dashed
off from their polished surfaces the fires of innumer-
able battle-lanterns, which swung to and fro about
her rigging. But what mainly inspired us with hor-
ror and astonishment, was that she bore up under a
press of sail in the very teeth of that supernatural
sea, and of that ungovernable hurricane. When we
first discovered her, her stupendous bows were alone
to be seen, as she rose up, like a demon of the deep,
slowly from the dim and horrible gulf beyond her.
For a moment of intense terror she paused upon the
giddy pinnacle, as if in contemplation of her own sub-
limity, then trembled and tottered, and -- came down.
At this instant, I know not what sudden self-pos-
session came over my spirit. Staggering as far aft
as I could, I awaited fearlessly the ruin that was to
overwhelm. Our own vessel was at length ceasing
from her struggles, and sinking with her head to the
sea. The shock of the descending mass struck her,
consequently, in that portion of her frame which
was already under water, and the inevitable result
was to hurl me with irresistible violence upon the
rigging of the stranger.
As I fell, the ship hove in stays, and went about,
and to the confusion ensuing I attributed my escape
from the notice of the crew. With little difficulty I
made my way unperceived to the main hatchway,
which was partially open, and soon found an oppor-
tunity of secreting myself in the hold. Why I did so
I can hardly tell. A nameless and indefinite sense
of awe, which at first sight of the navigators of the
ship had taken hold of my mind, was perhaps the
principle of my concealment. I was unwilling to
trust myself with a race of people who had offered,
to the cursory glance I had taken, so many points of
vague novelty, doubt, and apprehension. I therefore
thought proper to contrive a hiding-place in the hold.
This I did by removing a small portion of the
shifting-boards in such a manner as to afford me a
convenient retreat between the huge timbers of the
ship.
I had scarcely completed my work, when a foot-
step in the hold forced me to make use of it. A man
passed by my place of concealment with a feeble and
unsteady gait. I could not see his face, but had an
opportunity of observing his general appearance.
There was about it an evidence of great age and
infirmity. His knees tottered beneath a load of
years, and his entire frame quivered under the bur-
then. He muttered to himself, in a low broken tone,
some words of a language which I could not under-
stand, and groped in a corner among a pile of sin-
gular-looking instruments, and decayed charts of
navigation. His manner was a wild mixture of the
peevishness of second childhood, and the solemn
dignity of a god. He at length went on deck, and I
saw him no more.
* * * * * *
A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken
possession of my soul -- a sensation which will
admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of by-gone
time 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 satis-
fied 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
it to the world, but I will not fail to make the endea-
vor. 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 operations
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 DIS-
COVERY.
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 sin-
gular cast of spars, her huge size and overgrown
suits of canvass, her severely simple bow and anti-
quated 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 of 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 has every
characteristic of Spanish oak, if Spanish oak were
distended or swelled 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 stud-
ding-sail. From that period the ship, being thrown
dead off the wind, has held her terrific course due
south, with every rag of canvass 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 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 buried 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 ex-
treme, 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 him-
self, 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 elbow, yet 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 figures fall athwart
my path in the wild glare of the battle-latterns, 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 Tad-
mor, 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 pre-
dominates even over my despair, and will reconcile
me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evi-
dent that we are hurrying onwards to some excit-
ing knowledge -- some never-to-be-imparted secret,
whose attainment is destruction. Perhaps this cur-
rent 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 expres-
sion 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 canvass, 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 con-
centric 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 shrieking of ocean and
of tempest, the ship is quivering, oh God! and --
going down.
Page 127
BON-BON
That Pierre Bon-Bon was a restaurateur of un- common qualifications, no man who, during the reign of -- , frequented the little Câfe in the cul- de-sac Le Febvre at Rouen, will, I imagine, feel himself at liberty to dispute. That Pierre Bon-Bon was, in an equal degree, skilled in the philosophy of that period is, I presume, still more especially un- deniable. His patés à la fois were beyond doubt immaculate -- but what pen can do justice to his essays sur la Nature -- his thoughts sur l'Ame -- his observations sur l'Esprit? If his omelettes -- if his fricandeaux were inestimable, what littérateur of that day would not have given twice as much for an `Idée de Bon-Bon' as for all the trash of all the `Idées' of all the rest of the savants? Bon-Bon had ransacked libraries which no other man had ransacked -- had read more than any other would have entertained a notion of reading -- had under- stood more than any other would have conceived the possibility of understanding; and although, while he flourished, there were not wanting some authors
I have spoken of the philosopher in his capacity
of restaurateur. I would not, however, have any
friend of mine imagine that in fulfilling his hereditary
duties in that line, our hero wanted a proper estima-
tion of their dignity and importance. Far from it.
It was impossible to say in which branch of his
duplicate profession he took the greater pride. In
his opinion the powers of the mind held intimate
this I do not mean to insinuate a charge of gluttony,
or indeed any other serious charge to the prejudice
of the metaphysician. If Pierre Bon-Bon had his
failings -- and what great man has not a thousand?
-- if Pierre Bon-Bon, I say, had his failings, they
were failings of very little importance -- faults indeed
which in other tempers have often been looked upon
rather in the light of virtues. As regards one of
these foibles, I should not have mentioned it in this
history but for the remarkable prominency -- the
extreme alto relievo -- in which it jutted out from the
plane of his general disposition. He could never let
slip an opportunity of making a bargain.
Not that he was avaricious -- no. It was by
no means necessary to the satisfaction of the philo-
sopher, that the bargain should be to his own proper
advantage. Provided a trade could be effected -- a
trade of any kind, upon any terms, or under any
circumstances, a triumphant smile was seen for
many days thereafter to enlighten his countenance,
and a knowing wink of the eye to give evidence of
his sagacity.
At any epoch it would not be very wonderful if
a humor so peculiar as the one I have just mentioned,
should elicit attention and remark. At the epoch
of our narrative, had this peculiarity not attracted
observation, there would have been room for wonder
indeed. It was soon reported that upon all occasions
of the kind, the smile of Bon-Bon was wont to differ
widely from the downright grin with which that
restaurateur would laugh at his own jokes, or wel-
come an acquaintance. Hints were thrown out of
an exciting nature -- stories were told of perilous
bargains made in a hurry and repented of at leisure
-- and instances were adduced of unaccountable
capacities, vague longings, and unnatural inclina-
tions implanted by the author of all evil for wise
purposes of his own.
The philosopher had other weaknesses -- but they
are scarcely worthy of our serious examination.
For example, there are few men of extraordinary
profundity who are found wanting in an inclination
for the bottle. Whether this inclination be an excit-
ing cause, or rather a valid proof, of such profundity,
it is impossible to say. Bon-Bon, as far as I can learn,
did not think the subject adapted to minute investi-
gation -- nor do I. Yet in the indulgence of a
propensity so truly classical, it is not to be supposed
that the restaurateur would lose sight of that intui-
tive discrimination which was wont to characterize,
at one and the same time, his essais and his omelettes.
With him Sauterne was to Medoc what Catullus
was to Homer. He would sport with a syllogism in
sipping St. Peray, but unravel an argument over
Clos de Vougeot, and upset a theory in a torrent of
Chambertin. In his seclusions the Vin de Bourgogne
had its allotted hour, and there were appropriate
moments for the Côtes du Rhone. Well had it been
if the same quick sense of propriety had attended
him in the peddling propensity to which I have
formerly alluded -- but this was by no means the
case. Indeed, to say the truth, that trait of mind in
the philosophic Bon-Bon did begin at length to as-
sume a character of strange intensity and mysticism,
and, however singular it may seem, appeared deeply
tinctured with the grotesque diablerie of his favorite
German studies.
To enter the little Café in the Cul-de-Sac Le
Febvre was, at the period of our tale, to enter the
sanctum of a man of genius. Bon-Bon was a man
of genius. There was not a sous-cuisinier in Rouen,
who could not have told you that Bon-Bon was a
man of genius. His very cat knew it, and forbore
to whisk her tail in the presence of the man of
genius. His large water-dog was acquainted with
the fact, and upon the approach of his master, be-
trayed his sense of inferiority by a sanctity of
deportment, a debasement of the ears, and a drop-
ping of the lower jaw not altogether unworthy of a
dog. It is, however, true that much of this habitual
respect might have been attributed to the personal
appearance of the metaphysician. A distinguished
exterior will, I am constrained to say, have its weight
even with a beast; and I am willing to allow much
in the outward man of the restaurateur calculated
to impress the imagination of the quadruped. There
is a peculiar majesty about the atmosphere of the
little great -- if I may be permitted so equivocal an
expression -- which mere physical bulk alone will
be found at all times inefficient in creating. If, how-
ever, Bon-Bon was barely three feet in height, and
if his head was diminutively small, still it was im-
possible to behold the rotundity of his stomach
without a sense of magnificence nearly bordering
upon the sublime. In its size both dogs and men
must have seen a type of his acquirements -- in its
immensity a fitting habitation for his immortal soul.
I might here -- if it so pleased me -- dilate upon
the matter of habiliment, and other mere circum-
stances of the external metaphysician. I might hint
that the hair of our hero was worn short, combed
smoothly over his forehead, and surmounted by a
conical-shaped white flannel cap and tassels -- that
his pea-green jerkin was not after the fashion of
those worn by the common class of restaurateurs at
that day -- that the sleeves were something fuller
than the reigning costume permitted -- that the cuffs
were turned up, not as usual in that barbarous
period, with cloth of the same quality and color as
the garment, but faced in a more fanciful manner
with the particolored velvet of Genoa -- that his
slippers were of a bright purple, curiously filagreed,
and might have been manufactured in Japan, but for
the exquisite pointing of the toes, and the brilliant
tints of the binding and embroidery -- that his
breeches were of the yellow satin-like material
called aimable -- that his sky-blue cloak, resembling
in form a dressing-wrapper, and richly bestudded
all over with crimson devices, floated cavalierly
upon his shoulders like a mist of the morning -- and
that his tout ensemble gave rise to the remarkable
words of Benevenuta, the Improvisatrice of Florence,
"that it was difficult to say whether Pierre Bon-Bon
Paradise of perfection."
I have said that "to enter the Café in the Cul-de-
Sac Le Febvre was to enter the sanctum of a man
of genius" -- but then it was only the man of
genius who could duly estimate the merits of the
sanctum. A sign consisting of a vast folio swung
before the entrance. On one side of the volume was
painted a bottle -- on the reverse a paté. On the
back were visible in large letters the words Æuvres
de Bon-Bon. Thus was delicately shadowed forth
the two-fold occupation of the proprietor.
Upon stepping over the threshold the whole
interior of the building presented itself to view. A
long, low-pitched room, of antique construction, was
indeed all the accommodation afforded by the Café.
In a corner of the apartment stood the bed of the
metaphysician. An array of curtains, together with
a canopy
and comfortable. In the corner diagonally opposite,
appeared, in direct and friendly communion, the pro-
perties of the kitchen and the bibliothéque. A dish
of polemics stood peacefully upon the dresser. Here
lay an oven-full of the latest ethics -- there a kettle of
duodecimo melanges. Volumes of German morality
were hand and glove with the gridiron -- a toast-
ing fork might be discovered by the side of Eusebius
-- Plato reclined at his ease in the frying pan -- and
contemporary manuscripts were filed away upon the
spit.
In other respects the Café de Bon-Bon might be
said to differ little from the Cafés of the period. A
gigantic fire-place yawned opposite the door. On
the right of the fire-place an open cupboard displayed
a formidable array of labelled bottles. There Mous-
seux, Chambertin, St. George, Richbourg, Bordeaux,
Margaux, Haubrion, Leonville, Medoc, Sauterne,
Bârac, Preignac, Grave, Lafitte, and St. Peray, con-
tended with many other names of lesser celebrity
for the honor of being quaffed. From the ceiling,
suspended by a chain, swung a fantastic iron lamp,
throwing a hazy light over the room, and relieving
in some measure the placidity of the scene.
It was here, about twelve o'clock one night, dur-
ing the severe winter of -- , that Pierre Bon-Bon,
after having listened for some time to the comments
of his neighbors upon his singular propensity -- that
Pierre Bon-Bon, I say, having turned them all out
of his house, locked the door upon them with a
Dieu, and betook himself in no very pacific mood to
the comforts of a leather-bottomed arm-chair, and a
fire of blazing faggots.
It was one of those terrific nights which are only
met with once or twice during a century. The
snow drifted down bodily in enormous masses, and
the Café de Bon-Bon tottered to its very centre,
with the floods of wind that, rushing through the
crannies in the wall, and pouring impetuously down
the chimney, shook awfully the curtains of the
philosopher's bed, and disorganized the economy of
his paté-pans and papers. The huge folio sign that
swung without, exposed to the fury of the tempest,
creaked ominously, and gave out a moaning sound
from its stanchions of solid oak.
I have said that it was in no very placid temper
the metaphysician drew up his chair to its customary
station by the hearth. Many circumstances of a
perplexing nature had occurred during the day, to
disturb the serenity of his meditations. In attempt-
ing
perpetrated an
of a principle in ethics had been frustrated by the
overturning of a stew -- and last, not least, he had
been thwarted in one of those admirable bargains
which he at all times took such especial delight in
bringing to a successful termination. But in the
chafing of his mind at these unaccountable vicissi-
tudes, there did not fail to be mingled some degree
of that nervous anxiety which the fury of a boister-
ous night is so well calculated to produce. Whist-
ling to his more immediate vicinity the large black
water-dog we have spoken of before, and settling
himself uneasily in his chair, he could not help
casting a wary and unquiet eye towards those
distant recesses of the apartment whose inexorable
shadows not even the red fire-light itself could more
than partially succeed in overcoming. Having com-
pleted a scrutiny whose exact purpose was perhaps
unintelligible to himself, he drew closer to his seat a
small table covered with books and papers, and soon
became absorbed in the task of retouching a volumi-
nous manuscript, intended for publication on the
morrow.
"I am in no hurry, Monsieur Bon-Bon" -- whisper-
ed a whining voice in the apartment.
"The devil!" -- ejaculated our hero, starting to his
feet, overturning the table at his side, and staring
around him in astonishment.
"Very true" -- calmly replied the voice.
"Very true! -- what is very true? -- how came you
here?" -- vociferated the metaphysician, as his eye fell
upon something which lay stretched at full length
upon the bed.
"I was saying" -- said the intruder, without attend-
ing to the interrogatories -- "I was saying that I am
not at all pushed for time -- that the business upon
which I took the liberty of calling is of no pressing
importance -- in short that I can very well wait until
you have finished your Exposition."
"My Exposition! -- there now! -- how do you know
-- how came you to understand that I was writing
an Exposition? -- good God!"
"Hush!" -- replied the figure in a shrill under tone:
and, arising quickly from the bed, he made a single step
towards our hero, while the iron lamp overhead swung
convulsively back from his approach.
The philosopher's amazement did not prevent a
narrow scrutiny of the stranger's dress and appear-
ance. The outlines of a figure, exceedingly lean,
but much above the common height, were rendered
minutely distinct by means of a faded suit of black
cloth which fitted tight to the skin, but was otherwise
cut very much in the style of a century ago. These
garments had evidently been intended for a much
shorter person than their present owner. His ankles
and wrists were left naked for several inches. In
his shoes, however, a pair of very brilliant buckles
gave the lie to the extreme poverty implied by the
other portions of his dress. His head was bare, and
entirely bald, with the exception of the hinder part,
from which depended a queue of considerable length.
A pair of green spectacles, with side glasses, pro-
tected his eyes from the influence of the light, and at
the same time prevented our hero from ascertaining
either their colour or their conformation. About
the entire person there was no evidence of a shirt;
but a white cravat, of filthy appearance, was tied
with extreme precision around the throat, and the
ends, hanging down formally side by side, gave,
although I dare say unintentionally, the idea of an
ecclesiastic. Indeed, many other points both in his
appearance and demeanor might have very well
sustained a conception of that nature. Over his left
ear he carried, after the fashion of a modern clerk,
an instrument resembling the stylus of the ancients.
In a breast-pocket of his coat appeared conspicuously
a small black volume fastened with clasps of steel.
This book, whether accidentally or not, was so turned
outwardly from the person as to discover the words
"Rituel Catholique" in white letters upon the back.
His entire physiognomy was interestingly saturnine
-- even cadaverously pale. The forehead was lofty,
and deeply furrowed with the ridges of contemplation.
The corners of the mouth were drawn down into an
expression of the most submissive humility. There
was also a clasping of the hands, as he stepped
towards our hero -- a deep sigh -- and altogether a
look of such utter sanctity as could not have failed
to be unequivocally prepossessing. Every shadow
of anger faded from the countenance of the metaphy-
sician, as, having completed a satisfactory survey of
his visiter's person, he shook him cordially by the
hand, and conducted him to a seat.
There would however be a radical error in attri-
buting this instantaneous transition of feeling in the
philosopher to any one of those causes which might
naturally be supposed to have had an influence. In-
deed Pierre Bon-Bon, from what I have been able to
understand of his disposition, was of all men the least
likely to be imposed upon by any speciousness of
exterior deportment. It was impossible that so ac-
curate an observer of men and things should have
failed to discover, upon the moment, the real charac-
ter of the personage who had thus intruded upon his
hospitality. To say no more, the conformation of
his visiter's feet was sufficiently remarkable -- there
was a tremulous swelling in the hinder part of his
breeches -- and the vibration of his coat tail was a
palpable fact. Judge then with what feelings of satis-
faction our hero found himself thrown thus at once
into the society of a -- of a person for whom he had at
all times entertained such unqualified respect. He
was, however, too much of the diplomatist to let
escape him any intimation of his suspicions, or rather
-- I should say -- his certainty in regard to the true
state of affairs. It was not his cue to appear at all
conscious of the high honour he thus unexpectedly
enjoyed, but by leading his guest into conversation,
to elicit some important ethical ideas which might,
in obtaining a place in his contemplated publication,
enlighten the human race, and at the same time im-
mortalize himself -- ideas which, I should have added,
his visiter's great age, and well known proficiency in
the science of morals, might very well have enabled
him to afford.
Actuated by these enlightened views our hero bade
the gentleman sit down, while he himself took occa-
sion to throw some faggots upon the fire, and place
upon the now re-established table some bottles of the
powerful Vin de Mousseux. Having quickly com-
pleted these operations, he drew his chair vis-a-vis
to his companion's, and waited until he should open
the conversation. But plans even the most skilfully
matured are often thwarted in the outset of their
application, and the restaurateur found himself
entirely nonplused by the very first words of his
visiter's speech.
"I see you know me, Bon-Bon," -- said he: -- "ha!
ha! ha! -- he! he! he! -- hi! hi! hi! -- ho! ho! ho! --
hu! hu! hu!" -- and the devil, dropping at once the
sanctity of his demeanor, opened to its fullest extent
a mouth from ear to ear, so as to display a set of
jagged and fang-like teeth, and throwing back his
head, laughed long, loud, wickedly, and uproarious-
ly, while the black dog, crouching down upon his
haunches, joined lustily in the chorus, and the tabby cat,
flying off at a tangent, stood up on end and shrieked
in the farthest corner of the apartment.
Not so the philosopher: he was too much a man
of the world either to laugh like the dog, or by shrieks
to betray the indecorous trepidation of the cat. It
must be confessed, however, that he felt a little
astonishment to see the white letters which formed
the words "Rituel Catholique" on the book in his
guest's pocket, momently changing both their color
and their import, and in a few seconds in place of
the original title, the words Regitre des Condamnés
blaze forth in characters of red. This startling cir-
cumstance, when Bon-Bon replied to his visiter's
remark, imparted to his manner an air of embarrass-
ment which might not probably have otherwise been
observable.
"Why, sir," -- said the philosopher -- "why, sir,
to speak sincerely -- I believe you are -- upon my
word -- the d -- dest -- that is to say I think -- I
imagine -- I have some faint -- some very faint idea
-- of the remarkable honor -- "
"Oh! -- ah! -- yes! -- very well!" -- interrupted
his majesty -- "say no more -- I see how it is."
And hereupon, taking off his green spectacles, he
wiped the glasses carefully with the sleeve of his coat,
and deposited them in his pocket.
If Bon-Bon had been astonished at the incident of
the book, his amazement was now much increased
by the spectacle which here presented itself to view.
In raising his eyes, with a strong feeling of curiosity
to ascertain the color of his guest's, he found them
as might have been imagined -- nor yet hazel nor
blue -- nor indeed yellow, nor red -- nor purple --
nor white -- nor green -- nor any other color in the
heavens above, or in the earth beneath, or in the
waters under the earth. In short, Pierre Bon-Bon
not only saw plainly that his majesty had no eyes
whatsoever, but could discover no indications of their
having existed at any previous period; for the space
where eyes should naturally have been, was, I am
constrained to say, simply a dead level of cadaverous
flesh.
It was not in the nature of the metaphysician to
forbear making some inquiry into the sources of so
strange a phenomenon, and to his surprise the reply
of his majesty was at once prompt, dignified, and
satisfactory.
"Eyes! -- my dear Bon-Bon, eyes! did you say?
-- oh! ah! I perceive. The ridiculous prints, eh?
which are in circulation, have given you a false idea
of my personal appearance. Eyes!! -- true. Eyes,
Pierre Bon-Bon, are very well in their proper place
-- that, you would say, is the head -- right -- the
head of a worm. To you likewise these optics are
indispensable -- yet I will convince you that my
vision is more penetrating than your own. There is
a cat, I see, in the corner -- a pretty cat! -- look at
her! -- observe her well. Now, Bon-Bon, do you
behold the thoughts -- the thoughts, I say -- the ideas
-- the reflections -- engendering in her pericranium?
There it is now! -- you do not. She is thinking
we admire the profundity of her mind. She has just
concluded that I am the most distinguished of eccle-
siastics, and that you are the most superfluous of
metaphysicians. Thus you see I am not altogether
blind: but to one of my profession the eyes you speak
of would be merely an incumbrance, liable at any
time to be put out by a toasting iron or a pitchfork.
To you, I allow, these optics are indispensable.
Endeavor, Bon-Bon, to use them well -- my vision
is the soul."
Hereupon the guest helped himself to the wine upon
the table, and pouring out a bumper for Bon-Bon,
requested him to drink it without scruple, and make
himself perfectly at home.
"A clever book that of yours, Pierre" -- resumed
his majesty, tapping our friend knowingly upon the
shoulder, as the latter put down his glass after a
thorough compliance with his visiter's injunction.
"A clever book that of yours, upon my honor. It's
a work after my own heart. Your arrangement of
matter, I think, however, might be improved, and
many of your notions remind me of Aristotle. That
philosopher was one of my most intimate acquaintances.
I liked him as much for his terrible ill temper, as for
his happy knack at making a blunder. There is only
one solid truth in all that he has written, and for that
I gave him the hint out of pure compassion for his
absurdity. I suppose, Pierre Bon-Bon, you very well
know to what divine moral truth I am alluding."
"Cannot say that I -- "
"Indeed! -- why I told Aristotle that by sneezing
men expelled superfluous ideas through the pro-
boscis."
"Which is -- hiccup! -- undoubtedly the case" --
said the metaphysician, while he poured out for him-
self another bumper of Mousseux, and offered his
snuff-box to the fingers of his visiter."
"There was Plato, too" -- continued his majesty,
modestly declining the snuff-box and the compliment
-- "there was Plato, too, for whom I, at one time,
felt all the affection of a friend. You knew, Plato,
Bon-Bon? -- ah! no, I beg a thousand pardons. He
met me at Athens, one day, in the Parthenon, and
told me he was distressed for an idea. I bade him
write down that ' 
.' He said that he
would do so, and went home, while I stepped over to
the Pyramids. But my conscience smote me for the
lie, and hastening back to Athens, I arrived behind
the philosopher's chair as he was inditing the `.'
Giving the gamma a fillip with my finger I turned it
upside down. So the sentence now reads ' ,' and is, you perceive, the fundamental doctrine
of his metaphysics."
"Were you ever at Rome?" -- asked the restaura-
teur as he finished his second bottle of Mousseux,
and drew from the closet a larger supply of Vin de
Chambertin.
"But once, Monsieur Bon-Bon -- but once. There
was a time" -- said the devil, as if reciting some pas-
sage from a book -- `there was a time when occur-
red an anarchy of five years during which the re-
public, bereft of all its officers, had no magistracy
besides the tribunes of the people, and these were not
legally vested with any degree of executive power'
-- at that time, Monsieur Bon-Bon -- at that time
only I was in Rome, and I have no earthly acquaint-
ance, consequently, with any of its philosophy."2
"What do you think of Epicurus? -- what do you
think of -- hiccup! -- Epicurus?"
"What do I think of whom?" -- said the devil in
astonishment -- "you cannot surely mean to find
any fault with Epicurus! What do I think of Epi-
curus! Do you mean me, sir? -- I am Epicurus.
I am the same philosopher who wrote each of the
three hundred treatises commemorated by Diogenes
Laertes."
"That's a lie!" -- said the metaphysician, for the
wine had gotten a little into his head.
"Very well! -- very well, sir! -- very well indeed,
sir" -- said his majesty.
"That's a lie!" -- repeated the restaurateur dog-
matically -- "that's a -- hiccup! -- lie!"
"Well, well! have it your own way" -- said the
devil pacifically: and Bon-Bon, having beaten his ma-
jesty at an argument, thought it his duty to conclude
a second bottle of Chambertin.
"As I was saying" -- resumed the visiter -- "as
I was observing a little while ago, there are some
very outŕe notions in that book of yours, Monsieur
Bon-Bon. What, for instance, do you mean by all
soul?"
"The -- hiccup! -- soul" -- replied the metaphy-
sician, referring to his MS. -- "is undoubtedly" --
"No, sir!"
"Indubitably" --
"No, sir!"
"Indisputably" --
"No, sir!"
"Evidently" --
"No, sir!"
"Incontrovertibly" --
"No, sir!"
"Hiccup!" --
"No, sir!"
"And beyond all question a" --
"No, sir! the soul is no such thing." (Here the
philosopher finished his third bottle of Chambertin.)
"Then -- hic-cup! -- pray -- sir -- what -- what
is it?"
"That is neither here nor there, Monsieur Bon-
Bon," replied his majesty, musingly. "I have tasted
-- that is to say I have known some very bad souls,
and some too -- pretty good ones." Here the devil
licked his lips, and, having unconsciously let fall his
hand upon the volume in his pocket, was seized with
a violent fit of sneezing.
His majesty continued.
"There was the soul of Cratinus -- passable: --
Aristophanes -- racy: -- Plato -- exquisite: -- not
your Plato, but Plato the comic poet: your Plato
would have turned the stomach of Cerberus --
faugh! Then let me see! there were Noevius, and
Andronicus, and Plautus, and Terentius. Then
there were Lucilius, and Catullus, and Naso, and
Quintius Flaccus -- dear Quinty! as I called him
when he sung a seculare for my amusement, while
I toasted him in pure good humor on a fork. But
they want flavor these Romans. One fat Greek is
worth a dozen of them, and besides will keep, which
cannot be said of a Quirite. Let us taste your
Sauterne."
Bon-Bon had by this time made up his mind to
the nil admirari, and endeavored to hand down the
bottles in question. He was, however, conscious of
a strange sound in the room like the wagging of a
tail. Of this, although extremely indecent in his
majesty, the philosopher took no notice -- simply
kicking the black water-dog and requesting him to
be quiet. The visiter continued.
"I found that Horace tasted very much like Aris-
totle -- you know I am fond of variety. Terentius
I could not have told from Menander. Naso, to my
astonishment, was Nicander in disguise. Virgilius
had a strong twang of Theocritus. Martial put me
much in mind of Archilochus -- and Titus Livy was
positively Polybius and none other."
"Hic -- cup!" -- here replied Bon-Bon, and his
majesty proceeded.
"But if I have a penchant, Monsieur Bon-Bon, --
if I have a penchant, it is for a philosopher. Yet,
let me tell you, sir, it is not every dev -- I mean it
is not every gentleman who knows how to choose a
philosopher. Long ones are not good; and the best,
if not carefully shelled, are apt to be a little rancid
on account of the gall."
"Shelled!!"
"I mean taken out of the carcass."
"What do you think of a -- hiccup! -- physician?"
"Don't mention them! -- ugh! ugh!" (Here his
majesty retched violently.) "I never tasted but one
-- that rascal Hippocrates! -- smelt of asafoetida
-- ugh! ugh! ugh! -- caught a wretched cold wash-
ing him in the Styx -- and after all he gave me the
cholera morbus."
"The -- hiccup! -- wretch!" -- ejaculated Bon-
Bon -- "the -- hic-cup! -- abortion of a pill-box!"
-- and the philosopher dropped a tear.
"After all" -- continued the visiter -- "after all,
if a dev -- if a gentleman wishes to live he must
have more talents than one or two; and with us a fat
face is an evidence of diplomacy."
"How so?"
"Why we are sometimes exceedingly pushed for
provisions. You must know that in a climate so
sultry as mine, it is frequently impossible to keep a
spirit alive for more than two or three hours; and
after death, unless pickled immediately, (and a
pickled spirit is not good,) they will -- smell -- you
understand, eh? Putrefaction is always to be ap-
prehended when the spirits are consigned to us in
the usual way."
"Hiccup! -- hiccup! -- good God! how do you
manage?"
Here the iron lamp commenced swinging with re-
doubled violence, and the devil half started from his
seat -- however, with a slight sigh, he recovered his
composure, merely saying to our hero in a low tone,
"I tell you what, Pierre Bon-Bon, we must have no
more swearing."
Bon-Bon swallowed another bumper, and his
visiter continued.
"Why there are several ways of managing. The
most of us starve: some put up with the pickle. For
my part I purchase my spirits vivente corpore, in
which case I find they keep very well."
"But the body! -- hiccup! -- the body!!!" --
vociferated the philosopher, as he finished a bottle of
Sauterne.
"The body, the body -- well, what of the body?
-- oh! ah! I perceive. Why, sir, the body is not at
all affected by the transaction. I have made in-
numerable purchases of the kind in my day, and the
parties never experienced any inconvenience. There
were Cain, and Nimrod, and Nero, and Caligula,
and Dionysius, and Pisistratus, and -- and a thou-
sand others, who never knew what it was to have a
soul during the latter part of their lives; yet, sir,
these men adorned society. Why is'nt there A -- ,
now, whom you know as well as I? Is he not in
possession of all his faculties, mental and corporeal?
Who writes a keener epigram? Who reasons more
wittily? Who -- but, stay! I have his agreement
in my pocket-book."
Thus saying, he produced a red leather wallet, and
took from it a number of papers. Upon some of
these Bon-Bon caught a glimpse of the letters
MACHI..., MAZA..., RICH..., and the
words CALIGULA and ELIZABETH. His ma-
jesty selected a narrow slip of parchment, and from
it read aloud the following words:
"In consideration of certain mental endowments
which it is unnecessary to specify, and in farther
consideration of one thousand louis d'or, I, being
aged one year and one month, do hereby make
over to the bearer of this agreement all my right,
title, and appurtenance in the shadow called my
soul." (Signed) A...3 (Here his majesty
repeated a name which I do not feel myself justifi-
able in indicating more unequivocally.)
"A clever fellow that A..." -- resumed he;
"but like you, Monsieur Bon-Bon, he was mistaken
about the soul. The soul a shadow truly! -- no
such nonsense, Monsieur Bon-Bon. The soul a
shadow!! ha! ha! ha! -- he! he! he! -- hu! hu! hu!
Only think of a fricasséed shadow!"
"Only think -- hiccup! -- of a fricasséed shadow!!"
echoed our hero, whose faculties were becoming
gloriously illuminated by the profundity of his ma-
jesty's discourse.
"Only think of a -- hiccup! -- fricasséed shadow!!!
Now, damme! -- hiccup! -- humph! -- if I would
have been such a -- hiccup! -- nincompoop. My
soul, Mr. -- humph!"
"Your soul, Monsieur Bon-Bon?"
"Yes, sir -- hiccup! -- my soul is" --
"What, sir?"
"No shadow, damme!"
"Did not mean to say" --
"Yes, sir, my soul is -- hiccup! -- humph! -- yes,
sir."
"Did not intend to assert" --
"My soul is -- hiccup! -- peculiarly qualified for
-- hiccup! -- a" --
"What, sir?"
"Stew."
"Ha!"
"Souflée."
"Eh?"
"Fricassée."
"Indeed!"
"Ragout or fricandeau -- and see here! -- I'll
let you have it -- hiccup! -- a bargain."
"Could'nt think of such a thing," said his majesty
calmly, at the same time arising from his seat. The
metaphysician stared.
"Am supplied at present," said his majesty.
"Hiccup! -- e-h?" -- said the philosopher.
"Have no funds on hand."
"What?"
"Besides, very ungentlemanly in me" --
"Sir!"
"To take advantage of" --
"Hiccup!"
"Your present situation."
Here his majesty bowed and withdrew -- in what
manner the philosopher could not precisely ascer-
tain -- but in a well-concerted effort to discharge a
bottle at "the villain," the slender chain was severed
that depended from the ceiling, and the metaphysician
prostrated by the downfall of the lamp.
2.
mais c'etait la Philosophie Grécque. -- Condorcet.
3. Quære -- Arouet?
Page 153
SHADOW.
A FABLE.
write shall have long since gone my way into the
region of shadows. For indeed strange things shall
happen, and secret things be known, and many cen-
turies shall pass away ere these memorials be seen
of men. And when seen there will be some to dis-
believe, and some to doubt, and yet a few who will
find much to ponder upon in the characters here
graven with a stylus of iron.
The year had been a year of terror, and of feel-
ings more intense than terror for which there is no
name upon the earth. For many prodigies and
signs had taken place, and far and wide, over sea
and land, the black wings of the Pestilence were
spread abroad. To those, nevertheless, cunning in
the stars, it was not unknown that the heavens
wore an aspect of ill; and to me, the Greek Oinos,
among others, it was evident that now had arrived
the alternation of that seven hundred and ninety-
fourth year when, at the entrance of Aries, the
planet Jupiter is conjoined with the red ring of the
terrible 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 Ptole-
mais, 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 artizan Corinnos, and, being of rare workman-
ship, 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 dis-
tinct account -- things material and spiritual. Heavi-
ness in the atmosphere -- a sense of suffocation --
anxiety -- and above all, that terrible state of ex-
istence 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 iron lamps which illumined our revel.
Uprearing themselves in tall slender lines of light,
they thus remained burning all pallid and motion-
less; 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 mad-
ness; 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 merri-
ment 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 indistinguishable, and
so fainted 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 indefinitive,
and was the shadow neither of man nor God --
neither God of Greece, nor God of Chaldæa, nor any
Egyptian God. And the shadow rested upon the
brazen doorway, and under the arch of the entabla-
ture 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 as-
sembled, 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 duskily
upon our ears in the well remembered and familiar
accents of many thousand departed friends.
Page 157
THE DEVIL IN THE BELFRY.
What o'clock is it?
Old Saying.
finest place in the world is -- or, alas! was -- the
Dutch borough of Vondervotteimittiss. Yet, as it lies
some distance from any of the main roads, being in
a somewhat out of the way situation, there are, per-
haps, very few of my readers who have ever paid it
a visit. For the benefit of those who have not, there-
fore, it will be only proper that I should enter into
some account of it. And this is, indeed, the more
evident, as with the hope of enlisting public sympathy
in behalf of the inhabitants, I design here to give a
history of the calamitous events which have so lately
occurred within the limits. No one who knows me
will doubt that the duty thus self-imposed will be
executed to the best of my ability, with all that rigid
impartiality, all that cautious examination into facts,
and diligent collation of authorities which should ever
distinguish him who aspires to the title of historian.
By the united aid of medals, manuscripts, and
inscriptions, I am enabled to say positively that the
borough of Vondervotteimittiss has existed, from its
origin, in precisely the same condition which it at
present preserves. Of the date of this origin, how-
ever, I grieve that I can only speak with that species
of indefinite definitiveness which mathematicians are,
at times, forced to put up with in certain algebraic
formulæ. The date, I may thus say, in regard to the
remoteness of its antiquity, cannot be less than any
assignable quantity whatsoever.
Touching the derivation of the name Vondervot-
teimittiss, I confess myself, with sorrow, equally at
fault. Among a multitude of opinions upon this deli-
cate point, some acute, some learned, some sufficiently
the reverse, I am able to select nothing which ought
to be considered satisfactory. Perhaps the idea of
Grogswigg, nearly coincident with that of Krouta-
plenttey, is to be cautiously preferred. It runs --
"Vondervotteimittiss: Vonder, lege Donder: Vottei-
mittiss, quasi und Bleitziz -- Bleitziz obsol: pro
Blitzen." This derivation, to say the truth, is still
countenanced by some traces of the electric fluid
evident on the summit of the steeple of the House of
the Town-Council. I do not choose, however, to
commit myself on a theme of such importance, and
must refer the reader desirous of further information
to the "Oratiunculae de Rebus Praeter-Veteris" of
Dundergutz. See, also, Blunderbuzzard "De Deri-
vationibus," pp. 27 to 5010, Folio Gothic edit., Red
and Black character, Catch-word and No Cypher --
wherein consult, also, marginal notes in the autograph
of Stuffundpuff, with the Sub-Commentaries of Grunt-
undguzzell.
Notwithstanding the obscurity which thus envelops
the date of the foundation of Vondervotteimittiss,
and the derivation of its name, there can be no
doubt, as I said before, that it has always existed as
we find it at this epoch. The oldest man in the
borough can remember not the slightest difference in
the appearance of any portion of it, and, indeed, the
very suggestion of such a possibility is considered an
insult. The site of the village is in a perfectly cir-
cular valley, of about a quarter of a mile in circum-
ference, and entirely surrounded by gentle hills, over
whose summit the people have never yet ventured
to pass. For this they assign the very good reason
that they do not believe there is anything at all on
the other side.
Round the skirts of the valley, (which is quite
level, and paved throughout with flat tiles,) extends a
continuous row of sixty little houses. These, having
their backs on the hills, must look, of course, to the
centre of the plain, which is just sixty yards from
the front door of each dwelling. Every house has a
small garden before it, with circular paths, a sun-
dial, and twenty-four cabbages. The buildings
themselves are all so precisely alike, that one can in
no manner be distinguished from the other. Owing
to their vast antiquity, the style of architecture is
somewhat odd -- but is not for that reason the less
strikingly picturesque. They are fashioned of hard-
burned little bricks, red, with black ends, so that the
walls look like chess-boards upon a great scale. The
gables are turned to the front, and there are cornices
as big as all the rest of the house over the eaves, and
over the main doors. The windows are narrow and
deep, with very tiny panes and a great deal of sash.
On the roof is a vast quantity of tiles with long curly
ears. The wood-work, throughout, is of a dark hue,
and there is much carving about it, with but a trifling
variety of pattern; for time out of mind the carvers
of Vondervotteimittiss have never been able to carve
more than two objects -- a time-piece and a cabbage.
But these they do excellently well, and intersperse
them with singular ingenuity wherever they find
room for the chisel.
The dwellings are as much alike inside as out,
and the furniture is all upon one plan. The floors
are of square tiles, the tables and chairs of black-
looking wood with thin crooked legs and puppy feet.
The mantel-pieces are wide and high, and have not
only time-pieces and cabbages sculptured over the
front, but a real time-piece, which makes a prodi-
gious tickling, on top in the middle, with a flower
pot containing a cabbage standing on each extremity
by way of outrider. Between each cabbage and the
time-piece again, is a little china man having a big
belly, with a great round hole in it, through which is
seen the dial-plate of a watch.
The fire-places are large and deep, with fierce
crooked-looking fire-dogs. There is constantly a
rousing fire, and a huge pot over it full of sauer-kraut
and pork, to which the good woman of the house is
always busy in attending. She is a little fat old
lady, with blue eyes and a red face, and wears a
huge cap like a sugar-loaf, ornamented with purple
and yellow ribbons. Her dress is of orange-colored
linsey-woolsey made very full behind and very short
in the waist; and indeed very short in other respects,
not reaching below the middle of the calf of her leg.
This is somewhat thick, and so are her ankles, but
she has a fine pair of green stockings to cover them.
Her shoes, of pink leather, are fastened each with a
bunch of yellow ribbons puckered up in the shape of
a cabbage. In her left hand she has a little heavy
Dutch watch -- in her right she wields a ladle for
the sauer-kraut and pork. By her side there stands a
fat tabby cat, with a gilt toy repeater tied to its tail,
which "the boys" have there fastened by way of a
quiz.
The boys themselves are, all three of them, in the
garden attending the pig. They are each two feet
in height. They have three-cornered cocked hats,
purple waistcoats reaching down to their thighs,
buckskin knee-breeches, red woollen stockings, heavy
shoes with big silver buckles, and long surtout coats
with large buttons of mother-of-pearl. Each, too,
has a pipe in his mouth, and a dumpy little watch in
his right hand. He takes a puff and a look, and
then a look and a puff. The pig, which is corpulent
and lazy, is occupied now in picking up the stray
leaves that fall from the cabbages, and now in giving
a kick behind at the gilt repeater which the urchins
have also tied to his tail, in order to make him look
as handsome as the cat.
Right at the front door, in a high-backed leather-
bottomed armed chair, with crooked legs and puppy
feet like the tables, is seated the old man of the house
himself. He is an exceedingly puffy little old gentle-
man, with big circular eyes and a huge double chin.
His dress resembles that of the boys, and I need say
nothing farther about it. All the difference is that
his pipe is somewhat bigger than theirs, and he can
make a greater smoke. Like them he has a watch,
but he carries that watch in his pocket. To say the
truth, he has something of more importance than a
watch to attend to, and what that is I shall presently
explain. He sits with his right leg upon his left
knee, wears a grave countenance, and always keeps
one of his eyes, at least, resolutely bent upon a cer-
tain remarkable object in the centre of the plain.
This object is situated in the steeple of the House
of the Town-Council. The Town-Council are all
very little round intelligent men with big saucer eyes
and fat double chins, and have their coats much
longer and their shoe-buckles much bigger than the
ordinary inhabitants of Vondervotteimittiss. Since
my sojourn in the borough they have had several
special meetings, and have adopted the three import-
ant resolutions --
"That it is wrong to alter the good old course of
things" --
"That there is nothing tolerable out of Vonder-
votteimittiss
And "That we will stick by our clocks and our
cabbages."
Above the session room of the Council is the
steeple, and in the steeple is the belfry, where exists,
and has existed time out of mind, the pride and won-
der of the village -- the great clock of the borough
of Vondervotteimittiss. And this is the object to
which the eyes of all the old gentlemen are turned
who sit in the leather-bottomed arm-chairs.
The great clock has seven faces, one in each of
the seven sides of the steeple, so that it can be readily
seen from all quarters. Its faces are large and white,
and its hands heavy and black. There is a belfry-
man whose sole duty is to attend it; but this duty is
the most perfect of sinecures, for the clock of Von-
dervotteimittiss was never yet known to have any-
thing the matter with it. Until lately the bare sup-
position of such a thing was considered heretical.
From the remotest period of antiquity to which the
archives have reference, the hours have been regu-
larly struck by the big bell. And indeed the case is
just the same with all the other clocks and watches in
the borough. Never was such a place for keeping
the true time. When the large clapper thought
proper to say "twelve o'clock!" all its obedient fol-
lowers opened their throats simultaneously, and
responded like a very echo. In short, the good
burghers were fond of their sauer-kraut, but then
they were proud of their clocks.
All people who hold sinecure offices are held in
more or less respect, and as the belfry-man of Von-
dervotteimittiss has the most perfect of sinecures, he
is the most perfectly respected of any man in the
world. He is the chief dignitary of the borough,
and the very pigs look up to him with a sentiment of
reverence. His coat-tail is very far longer -- his
pipe, his shoe-buckles, his eyes, and his belly, very
far bigger than those of any old gentleman in the
village -- and as to his chin, it is not only double but
triple.
I have thus painted the happy estate of Vonder-
votteimittiss -- alas! that so fair a picture should
ever experience a reverse!
There has been long a saying among the wisest
inhabitants that "no good can come from over the
hills," and it really seemed that the words had in
them something of the spirit of prophecy. It wanted
five minutes of noon, on the day before yesterday,
when there appeared a very odd-looking object on
the summit of the ridge to the eastward. Such an
occurrence, of course, attracted universal attention,
and every little old gentleman who sat in a leather-
bottomed arm-chair turned one of his eyes with a
stare of dismay upon the phenomenon, still keeping
the other upon the clock in the steeple.
By the time that it wanted only three minutes of
noon the droll object in question was clearly per-
ceived to be a very diminutive foreign-looking young
man. He descended the hills at a great rate, so that
every body had soon a good look at him. He was
really the most finnicky little personage that had ever
been seen in Vondervotteimittiss. His countenance
was of a dark snuff colour, and he had a long hooked
nose, pea eyes, a wide mouth, and an excellent set
of teeth, which latter he seemed anxious of display-
mustaches and whiskers there was none of the rest
of his face to be seen. His head was uncovered,
and his hair neatly done up in papillotes. His dress
was a tight-fitting swallow-tailed black coat (from
one of whose pockets dangled a vast length of white
handkerchief), black kerseymere knee-breeches, black
silk stockings, and stumpy-looking pumps, with huge
bunches of black satin ribbon for bows. Under one
arm he carried a huge
the other a fiddle nearly five times as big as himself.
In his left hand was a gold snuff-box, from which as
he capered down the hill, cutting all manner of fan-
tastical steps, he took snuff incessantly with an air of
the greatest possible self-satisfaction. God bless me!
here was a sight for the eyes of the sober burghers
of Vondervotteimittiss!
To speak plainly, the fellow had, in spite of his
grinning, an audacious and sinister kind of face;
and as he curvetted right into the village, the odd
stumpy appearance of his pumps excited no little
suspicion, and many a burgher who beheld him that
day would have given a trifle for a peep beneath the
white cambric handkerchief which hung so ob-
trusively from the pocket of his swallow-tailed coat.
But what mainly occasioned a righteous indignation
was that the scoundrelly popinjay, while he cut a
fandango here, and a whirligig there, did not seem to
have the remotest idea in the world of such a thing
as keeping time in his steps.
The good people of the borough had scarcely a
chance, however, to get their eyes thoroughly open,
when, just as it wanted half a minute of noon, the rascal
bounced, as I say, right into the midst of them, gave
a chazzez here and a balancez there, and then, after
a pirouette and a
self right up into the belfry of the house of the Town-
Council, where the wonder-stricken belfry-man sat
smoking in a state of stupified dignity and dismay.
But the little chap seized him at once by the nose, gave
it a swing and a pull, clapped the big
mouth, and then, lifting up the big fiddle, beat him
with it so long and so soundly, that what with the belfry-
man being so fat, and the fiddle being so hollow, you
would have sworn there was a regiment of double-
bass drummers all beating the devil's tattoo up in the
belfry of the steeple of Vondervotteimittiss.
There is no knowing to what desperate act of
vengeance this unprincipled attack might have
aroused the inhabitants, but for the important fact
that it now wanted only half a second of noon. The
bell was about to strike, and it was a matter of
absolute and pre-eminent necessity that every body
should look well at his watch. It was evident, how-
ever, that just at this moment, the fellow in the
steeple was doing something that he had no business
to do with the clock. But as it now began to strike,
nobody had any time to attend to his manoeuvres,
for they had all to count the strokes of the bell as it
sounded.
"One!" said the clock.
"Von!" echoed every little old gentleman in every
leather-bottomed arm-chair in Vondervotteimittiss.
"Von!" said his watch also; "von!" said the watch
of his vrow, and "von!" said the watches of the
boys, and the little gilt repeaters on the tails of the
cat and the pig.
"Two!" continued the big bell; and
"Doo!" repeated all the repeaters.
"Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven! Eight! Nine!
Ten!" said the bell.
"Dree! Vour! Fibe! Sax! Seben! Aight! Noin!
Den!" answered the others.
"Eleven!" said the big one.
"Eleben!" assented the little fellows.
"Twelve!" said the bell.
"Dvelf!" they replied, perfectly satisfied, and
dropping their voices.
"Und dvelf it iss!" said all the little old gentlemen,
putting up their watches. But the big bell had not
done with them yet.
"Thirteen!" said he.
"Der Teufel!" gasped the little old gentlemen,
turning pale, dropping their pipes, and putting down
all their right legs from over their left knees --
"Der Teufel!" groaned they -- "Dirteen! Dir-
teen!! -- Mein Gott, it is -- it is Dirteen o'clock!!"
What is the use of attempting to describe the
terrible scene which ensued? All Vondervotteim-
ittis flew at once into a lamentable state of uproar.
"Vot is cum'd to mein pelly?" roared all the boys
-- "I've been an ongry for dis hour!"
"Vot is cum'd to mein kraut?" screamed all the
vrows -- "It has been done to rags for dis hour!"
"Vot is cum'd to mein pipe?" swore all the little
old gentlemen -- "Donder und Blitzen! it has been
smoked out for dis hour!" -- and they filled them up
again in a great rage, and sinking back in their arm-
chairs, puffed away so fast and so fiercely that the
whole valley was immediately filled with an impene-
trable smoke.
Meantime the cabbages all turned very red in the
face, and it seemed as if the old Nick himself had
taken possession of everything in the shape of a
time-piece. The clocks carved upon the furniture
got to dancing as if bewitched, while those upon the
mantel-pieces could scarcely contain themselves for
fury, and kept such a continual striking of thirteen,
and such a frisking and wriggling of their pendulums
as it was really horrible to see. But, worse than
all, neither the cats nor the pigs could put up any
longer with the outrageous behavior of the little
repeaters tied to their tails, and resented it by scamp-
ering all over the place, scratching and poking, and
squeaking and screeching, and caterwauling and
squalling, and flying into the faces, and running
under the petticoats, of the people, and creating
altogether the most abominable din and confusion
which it is possible for a reasonable person to con-
ceive. And to make it if he could more abominable,
the rascally little scape-grace in the steeple was
evidently exerting himself to the utmost. Every
now and then one might catch a glimpse of the
belfry upon the belly of the belfry-man, who was
lying flat upon his back. In his teeth he held the
bell-rope which he kept jerking about with his head,
raising such a clatter that my ears ring again even to
think of it. On his lap lay the big fiddle at which he was
scraping out of all time and tune with both his hands,
making a great show, the nincompoop! of playing
Judy O'Flannagan and Paddy O'Rafferty.
Affairs being thus miserably situated, I left the
place in disgust, and now appeal for aid to all lovers
of good time and fine kraut. Let us proceed in a
body to the borough, and restore the ancient order
of things in Vondervotteimittiss by ejecting that
little chap from the steeple.
Page 171
LIGEIA.
And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth
the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a
great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man
doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save
only through the weakness of his feeble will.
Joseph Glanvill.
even precisely where, I first became acquainted with
the Lady Ligeia. Long years have since elapsed, and
my memory is feeble through much suffering. Or,
perhaps, I cannot now bring these points to mind,
because, in truth, the character of my beloved, her
rare learning, her singular yet placid cast of beauty,
and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low,
musical language, made their way into my heart by
paces so steadily and stealthily progressive, that they
have been unnoticed and unknown. Yet I believe
that I met her most frequently in some large, old,
decaying city near the Rhine. Of her family -- I have
surely heard her speak -- that they are of a remotely
ancient date cannot be doubted. Ligeia! Buried in
studies of a nature more than all else adapted to
deaden impressions of the outward world, it is by that
sweet word alone -- by Ligeia -- that I bring before
mine eyes in fancy the image of her who is no more.
And now, while I write, a recollection flashes upon
me that I have never known the paternal name of
her who was my friend and my betrothed, and who
became the partner of my studies, and eventually the
wife of my bosom. Was it a playful charge on the
part of my Ligeia? or was it a test of my strength
of affection that I should institute no inquiries upon
this point? or was it rather a caprice of my own --
a wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most
passionate devotion? I but indistinctly recall the fact
itself -- what wonder that I have utterly forgotten
the circumstances which originated or attended it?
And, indeed, if ever that spirit which is entitled Ro-
mance -- if ever she, the wan, and the misty-winged
Ashtophet of idolatrous Egypt, presided, as they tell,
over marriages ill-omened, then most surely she pre-
sided over mine.
There is one dear topic, however, on which my
memory faileth me not. It is the person of Ligeia.
In stature she was tall, somewhat slender, and in her
latter days even emaciated. I would in vain attempt
to portray the majesty, the quiet ease, of her de-
meanor, or the incomprehensible lightness and elas-
ticity of her footfall. She came and departed like a
shadow. I was never made aware of her entrance
into my closed study save by the dear music of her
low sweet voice, as she placed her delicate hand
upon my shoulder. In beauty of face no maiden ever
equalled her. It was the radiance of an opium dream
-- an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine
than the phantasies which hovered about the slumber-
ing souls of the daughters of Delos. Yet her features
were not of that regular mould which we have been
falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of
the heathen. "There is no exquisite beauty," says
Bacon, Lord Verülam, speaking truly of all the forms
and genera of beauty, "without some strangeness in
the proportions." Yet, although I saw that the fea-
tures of Ligeia were not of classic regularity, although
I perceived that her loveliness was indeed "exquisite,"
and felt that there was much of "strangeness" per-
vading it, yet I have tried in vain to detect the irre-
gularity, and to trace home my own perception of
"the strange." I examined the contour of the lofty
and pale forehead -- it was faultless -- how cold
indeed that word when applied to a majesty so divine!
-- the skin rivalling the purest ivory, the commanding
extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions
above the temples, and then the raven-black, the
glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses,
setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet,
"hyacinthine!" I looked at the delicate outlines of
the nose -- and nowhere but in the graceful medal-
lions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection.
There was the same luxurious smoothness of surface,
the same scarcely perceptible tendency to the aquiline,
the same harmoniously curved nostril speaking the
free spirit. I regarded the sweet mouth. Here was
indeed the triumph of all things heavenly -- the
magnificent turn of the short upper lip -- the soft,
voluptuous slumber of the under -- the dimples which
sported, and the color which spoke -- the teeth glanc-
ing back, with a brilliancy almost startling, every
ray of the holy light which fell upon them in her
serene, and placid, yet most exultingly radiant of all
smiles. I scrutinized the formation of the chin --
and here, too, I found the gentleness of breadth, the
softness and the majesty, the fulness and the spiri-
tuality, of the Greek, -- the contour which the god
Apollo revealed but in a dream, to Cleomenes, the son
of the Athenian. And then I peered into the large
eyes of Ligeia.
For eyes we have no models in the remotely
antique. It might have been, too, that in these eyes
of my beloved lay the secret to which Lord Verülam
alludes. They were, I must believe, far larger than
the ordinary eyes of our race. They were even far
fuller than the fullest of the Gazelle eyes of the tribe
of the valley of Nourjahad. Yet it was only at in-
tervals -- in moments of intense excitement -- that
this peculiarity became more than slightly noticeable
in Ligeia. And at such moments was her beauty --
in my heated fancy thus it appeared perhaps -- the
beauty of beings either above or apart from the earth
-- the beauty of the fabulous Houri of the Turk.
The color of the orbs was the most brilliant of black,
and far over them hung jetty lashes of great length.
The brows, slightly irregular in outline, had the same
hue. The "strangeness," however, which I found in
the eyes was of a nature distinct from the formation,
or the color, or the brilliancy of the features, and
must, after all, be referred to the expression. Ah,
word of no meaning! behind whose vast latitude of
mere sound we intrench our ignorance of so much
of the spiritual. The expression of the eyes of
Ligeia! How, for long hours have I pondered upon
it! How have I, through the whole of a midsummer
night, struggled to fathom it! What was it -- that
something more profound than the well of Democritus
-- which lay far within the pupils of my beloved?
What was it? I was possessed with a passion to
discover. Those eyes! those large, those shining,
those divine orbs! they became to me twin stars of
Leda, and I to them devoutest of astrologers. Not
for a moment was the unfathomable meaning of
their glance, by day or by night, absent from my
soul.
There is no point, among the many incomprehen-
sible anomalies of the science of mind, more thril-
lingly exciting than the fact -- never, I believe,
noticed in the schools -- that in our endeavors to
recall to memory something long forgotten we often
find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance
without being able, in the end, to remember. And
thus, how frequently, in my intense scrutiny of
Ligeia's eyes, have I felt approaching the full know-
ledge of the secret of their expression -- felt it
approaching -- yet not quite be mine -- and so at
length entirely depart. And (strange, oh strangest
mystery of all!) I found, in the commonest objects
of the universe, a circle of analogies to that expres-
sion. I mean to say that, subsequently to the period
when Ligeia's beauty passed into my spirit, there
dwelling as in a shrine, I derived, from many exist-
ences in the material world, a sentiment such as I
felt always aroused within me by her large and
luminous orbs. Yet not the more could I define that
sentiment, or analyze, or even steadily view it. I
recognized it, let me repeat, sometimes in the com-
monest objects of the universe. It has flashed upon
me in the survey of a rapidly-growing vine -- in the
contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a
stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean,
in the falling of a meteor. I have felt it in the
glances of unusually aged people. And there are
one or two stars in heaven -- (one especially, a star
of the sixth magnitude, double and changeable, to be
found near the large star in Lyra) in a telescopic
scrutiny of which I have been made aware of the
feeling. I have been filled with it by certain sounds
from stringed instruments, and not unfrequently by
passages from books. Among innumerable other
instances, I well remember something in a volume
of Joseph Glanvill, which (perhaps merely from its
quaintness -- who shall say?) never failed to inspire
me with the sentiment, -- "And the will therein
lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries
of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great
will pervading all things by nature of its intentness.
Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death
utterly, but only through the weakness of his feeble
will."
Length of years, and subsequent reflection, have
enabled me to trace, indeed, some remote connexion
between this passage in the old English moralist and
a portion of the character of Ligeia. An intensity
in thought, action, or speech, was possibly, in her, a
result, or at least an index, of that gigantic volition
which, during our long intercourse, failed to give
other and more immediate evidence of its existence.
Of all women whom I have ever known she, the
outwardly calm, the ever-placid Ligeia, was the
most violently a prey to the tumultuous vultures of
stern passion. And of such passion I could form no
estimate, save by the miraculous expansion of those
eyes which at once so delighted and appalled me,
by the almost magical melody, modulation, distinct-
ness and placidity of her very low voice, and by the
fierce energy (rendered doubly effective by contrast
with her manner of utterance) of the words which
she uttered.
I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia: it was
immense -- such as I have never known in woman.
In the classical tongues was she deeply proficient,
and as far as my own acquaintance extended in re-
gard to the modern dialects of Europe, I have never
known her at fault. Indeed upon any theme of the
most admired, because simply the most abstruse, of
the boasted erudition of the academy, have I ever
found Ligeia at fault? How singularly, how thril-
lingly, this one point in the nature of my wife has
forced itself, at this late period only, upon my atten-
tion! I said her knowledge was such as I had never
known in woman. Where breathes the man who,
like her, has traversed, and successfully, all the wide
areas of moral, natural, and mathematical science?
I saw not then what I now clearly perceive, that the
acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic, were astound-
ing -- yet I was sufficiently aware of her infinite
supremacy to resign myself, with a child-like con-
fidence, 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 for -- but less known --
that delicious vista by slow but perceptible degrees
expanding before me, down whose long, gorgeous,
and all untrodden path, I might at length pass on-
ward 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
flee 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 im-
mersed. Letters, lambent and golden, grew duller
than Saturnian lead, wanting the radiant lustre of
her eyes. And now those eyes shone less and less
frequently upon the pages over which I pored.
Ligeia grew ill. The wild eye 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 sunk
impetuously with the tides of the most gentle emo-
tion. 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 astonish-
ment, 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 im-
potent to convey any just idea of the fierceness of
resistance with which she wrestled with the dark
shadow. I groaned in anguish at the pitiable
spectacle. I 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
alike the uttermost of folly. Yet not for an instant,
amid the most convulsive writhings of her fierce
spirit, was shaken the external placidity of her de-
meanor. 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 over-
flowings 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 abandon-
ment to a love, alas! all unmerited, all unworthily
bestowed, I at length recognised 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. Me-
thinks I again behold the terrific struggles of her
lofty, her nearly idealized nature, with the might
and the terror, and the majesty, of the great Shadow.
But she perished. The giant will succumbed to a
power more stern. And I thought, as I gazed upon
the corpse, of the wild passage in Joseph Glanvill:
"The will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who
knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor?
For God is but a great will pervading all things by
nature of its intentness. 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 terms
more, than falls ordinarily 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 and 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 in-
cipient 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 I
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 not any individual portion of the archi-
tecture 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. Oc-
cupying 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
upon the objects within. Over the upper portion of
this huge window extended the open 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, de-
pended, 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 can-
delabra of Eastern figure were in various stations
about -- and there was the couch, too, the bridal
couch, of an Indian model, and low, and sculptured
of solid ebony, with a 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 unpropor-
tionably 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. This material was the richest
cloth of gold. It was spotted all over, at irregular
intervals, with arabesque figures, of 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 re-
garded from a single point of view. By a con-
trivance 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 sud-
denly departed; and, step by step, as the visiter
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 North-
man, 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 un-
hallowed 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 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 iron
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
Ligeia, I could restore the departed Ligeia to the
pathway she had abandoned upon 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 had no origin save
in the distemper of her fancy, or, perhaps, in the
phantastic 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 medical men. 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 fail to
observe a similar increase in the nervous irritation of
her temperament, and in her excitability by trivial
causes of fear. Indeed reason seemed fast tottering
from her throne. 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 a vague terror,
the workings of her emaciated countenance. I sat
by the side of her ebony bed, upon one of the otto-
mans 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 faint, almost inarticu-
late breathings, and the 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 some 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
object had passed lightly by my person; and I saw
that there lay a faint indefinite shadow upon the
golden carpet, in the very middle of the rich lustre
thrown from the censer. 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. Finding the wine, I recrossed the cham-
ber, and poured out a gobletful, which I held to the
lips of the fainting lady. She had now partially
recovered, however, and took, herself, the vessel,
while I sank upon the ottoman near me, with my
eyes rivetted upon her person. It was then that I
became distinctly aware of a gentle foot-fall upon the
carpet, and near the couch; and, in a second there-
after, as Rowena was in the act of raising the wine
to her lips, I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw,
fall within the goblet, as if from some invisible spring
in the atmosphere of the room, three or four large
drops of a brilliant and ruby-colored fluid. If this I
saw -- not so Rowena. She swallowed the wine
unhesitatingly, and I forbore to speak to her of a
circumstance which must, after all, I considered,
have been but the suggestion of a vivid imagination,
rendered morbidly active by the terror of the lady,
by the opium, and by the hour.
Yet -- I cannot conceal it from myself -- after
this period, a rapid change for the worse took place
in the disorder of my wife; so that, on the third
subsequent night, the hands of her menials prepared
her for the tomb, and on the fourth, I sat alone, with
her shrouded body, in that fantastic chamber which
had received her as my bride. Wild visions, opium
engendered, flitted, shadow-like, before me. I gazed
with unquiet eye upon the sarcophagi in the angles
of the room, upon the varying figures of the drapery,
and upon the writhing of the particolored fires in
the censer overhead. My eyes then fell, as I called
to mind the circumstances of a former night, to the
spot beneath the glare of the censer where I had
beheld the faint traces of the shadow. It was there,
however, no longer, and, breathing with greater
freedom, I turned my glances to the pallid and rigid
figure upon the bed. Then rushed upon me a thou-
sand memories of Ligeia -- and then came back upon
my heart, with the turbulent violence of a flood, the
whole of that unutterable wo with which I had
regarded her thus enshrouded. The night waned;
and still, with a bosom full of bitter thoughts of the
one only and supremely beloved, I remained with
mine eyes rivetted upon the body of Rowena.
It might have been midnight, or perhaps earlier,
or later, for I had taken no note of time, when a sob,
low, gentle, but very distinct, startled me from my
revery. I felt that it came from the bed of ebony --
the bed of death. I listened in an agony of supersti-
tious terror -- but there was no repetition of the
sound; I strained my vision to detect any motion in
the corpse, but there was not the slightest perceptible.
Yet I could not have been deceived. I had heard
the noise, however faint, and my whole soul was
awakened within me, as I resolutely and perseveringly
kept my attention rivetted upon the body. Many
minutes elapsed before any circumstance occurred
tending to throw light upon the mystery. At length
it became evident that a slight, a very faint, and
barely noticeable tinge of color had flushed up within
the cheeks, and along the sunken small veins of the
eyelids. Through a species of unutterable horror
and awe, for which the language of mortality has
reel, my heart cease to beat, my limbs grow rigid
where I sat. Yet a sense of duty finally operated to
restore my self-possession. I could no longer doubt
that we had been precipitate in our preparations for
interment -- that Rowena still lived. It was neces-
sary that some immediate exertion be made; yet the
turret was altogether apart from the portion of the
abbey tenanted by the servants -- there were none
within call, -- I had no means of summoning them
to my aid without leaving the room for many min-
utes -- and this I could not venture to do. I there-
fore struggled alone in my endeavors to call back
the spirit still hovering. In a short period it was
certain, however, that a relapse had taken place; the
color utterly disappeared from both eyelid and cheek,
leaving a wanness even more than that of marble;
the lips became doubly shrivelled and pinched up in
the ghastly expression of death; a repulsive clammi-
ness and coldness overspread rapidly the surface of the
body; and all the usual rigorous stiffness immediately
supervened. I fell back with a shudder upon the
couch from which I had been so startlingly aroused,
and again gave myself up to passionate waking
visions of Ligeia.
An hour thus elapsed when, (could it be possible?)
I was a second time aware of some vague sound is-
suing from the region of the bed. I listened -- in
extremity of horror. The sound came again -- it
was a sigh. Rushing to the corpse, I saw -- distinctly
saw -- a tremor upon the lips. In a minute after,
they slightly relaxed, disclosing a bright line of the
pearly teeth. Amazement now struggled in my
bosom with the profound awe which had hitherto
reigned therein alone. I felt that my vision grew
dim, that my reason wandered, and it was only by a
convulsive effort that I at length succeeded in nerving
myself to the task which duty thus, once more, had
pointed out. There was now a partial glow upon
the forehead and upon the cheek and throat -- a
perceptible warmth pervaded the whole frame -- there
was even a slight pulsation at the heart. The lady
lived; and with redoubled ardor I betook myself to
the task of restoration. I chafed and bathed the
temples and the hands, and used every exertion which
experience, and no little medical reading, could sug-
gest. But in vain. Suddenly, the color fled, the
pulsation ceased, the lips resumed the expression of
the dead, and, in an instant afterwards, the whole
body took upon itself the icy chillness, the livid hue,
the intense rigidity, the sunken outline, and each and
all of the loathsome peculiarities of that which has
been, for many days, a tenant of the tomb.
And again I sunk into visions of Ligeia -- and
again, (what marvel that I shudder while I write?)
again there reached my ears a low sob from the re-
gion of the ebony bed. But why shall I minutely
detail the unspeakable horrors of that night? Why
shall I pause to relate how, time after time, until near
the period of the gray dawn, this hideous drama of
revivification was repeated, and how each terrific
relapse was only into a sterner and apparently more
irredeemable death? Let me hurry to a conclusion.
The greater part of the fearful night had worn
away, and the corpse of Rowena once again stirred
-- and now more vigorously than hitherto, although
arousing from a dissolution more appalling in its utter
hopelessness than any. I had long ceased to struggle
or to move, and remained sitting rigidly upon the
ottoman, a helpless prey to a whirl of violent emotions,
of which extreme awe was perhaps the least terrible,
the least consuming. The corpse, I repeat, stirred,
and now more vigorously than before. The hues
of life flushed up with unwonted energy into the
countenance -- the limbs relaxed -- and, save that
the eyelids were yet pressed heavily together, and
that the bandages and draperies of the grave still
imparted their charnel character to the figure, I
might have dreamed that Rowena had indeed shaken
off, utterly, the fetters of Death. But if this idea was
not, even then, altogether adopted, I could, at least,
doubt no longer, when, arising from the bed, totter-
ing, with feeble steps, with closed eyes, and with the
manner of one bewildered in a dream, the Lady of
Tremaine advanced bodily and palpably into the
middle of the apartment.
I trembled not -- I stirred not -- for a crowd of
unutterable fancies connected with the air, the de-
meanor of the figure, rushing hurriedly through my
brain, had paralyzed, had chilled me into stone. I
stirred not -- but gazed upon the apparition. There
was a mad disorder in my thoughts -- a tumult un-
appeasable. Could it, indeed, be the living Rowena
who confronted me? Why, why should I doubt it?
The bandage lay heavily about the mouth -- but then
it was the mouth of the breathing Lady of Tremaine.
And the cheeks -- there were the roses as in her
noon of life -- yes, these were indeed the fair cheeks
of the living Lady of Tremaine. And the chin, with
its dimples, as in health, was it not hers? -- but had
she then grown taller since her malady? What
inexpressible madness seized me with that thought?
One bound, and I had reached her feet! Shrinking
from my touch, she let fall from her head, unloosened,
the ghastly cerements which had confined it, and
there streamed forth, into the rushing atmosphere of
the chamber, huge masses of long and dishevelled
hair. It was blacker than the raven wings of the
midnight! And now the eyes opened of the figure
which stood before me. "Here then, at least," I
shrieked aloud, "can I never -- can I never be mis-
taken -- these are the full, and the black, and the
wild eyes -- of the lady -- of the Lady Ligeia!"
Page 193
KING PEST.
A TALE CONTAINING AN ALLEGORY.
The gods do bear and well allow in kings
The things which they abhor in rascal routes.
Buckhurst's Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex.
month of August, and during the chivalrous reign
of the third Edward, two seamen belonging to the
crew of the "Free and Easy," a trading schooner
plying between Sluys and the Thames, and then at
anchor in that river, were much astonished to find
themselves seated in the tap-room of an ale-house in
the parish of St. Andrews, London -- which ale-
house bore for sign the portraiture of a "Jolly Tar."
The room, it is needless to say, although ill-con-
trived, smoke-blackened, low-pitched, and in every
other respect agreeing with the general character of
such places at the period -- was, nevertheless, in the
opinion of the grotesque groups scattered here and
there within it, sufficiently well adapted for its pur-
pose.
Of these groups our two seamen formed, I think,
the most interesting, if not the most conspicuous.
The one who appeared to be the elder, and whom
his companion addressed by the characteristic ap-
pellation of "Legs," was also much the most ill-
favored, and, at the same time, much the taller of
the two. He might have measured six feet nine
inches, and an habitual stoop in the shoulders seemed
to have been the necessary consequence of an al-
titude so enormous. Superfluities in height were,
however, more than accounted for by deficiencies
in other respects. He was exceedingly, wofully,
awfully thin; and might, as his associates asserted,
have answered, when sober, for a pennant at the
mast-head, or, when stiff with liquor, have served
for a jib-boom. But these jests, and others of a
similar nature, had evidently produced, at no time,
any effect upon the leaden muscles of the tar. With
high cheek-bones, a large hawk-nose, retreating chin,
fallen under-jaw, and huge protruding white eyes,
the expression of his countenance, although tinged
with a species of dogged indifference to matters and
things in general, was not the less utterly solemn
and serious beyond all attempts at imitation or
description.
The younger seaman was, in all outward ap-
pearance, the antipodes of his companion. His
stature could not have exceeded four feet. A pair of
stumpy bow-legs supported his squat, unwieldy
figure, while his unusually short and thick arms,
with no ordinary fists at their extremities, swung off
dangling from his sides like the fins of a sea-turtle.
Small eyes, of no particular color, twinkled far back
in his head. His nose remained buried in the mass
of flesh which enveloped his round, full, and purple
face; and his thick upper-lip rested upon the still
thicker one beneath with an air of complacent self-
satisfaction, much heightened by the owner's habit
of licking them at intervals. He evidently regarded
his tall ship-mate with a feeling half-wondrous, half-
quizzical; and stared up occasionally in his face as
the red setting sun stares up at the crags of Ben
Nevis.
Various and eventful, however, had been the
peregrinations of the worthy couple in and about
the different tap-houses of the neighborhood during
the earlier hours of the night. Funds even the most
ample, are not always everlasting: and it was with
empty pockets our friends had ventured upon the
present hostelrie.
At the precise period, then, when this history pro-
perly commences, Legs, and his fellow Hugh Tar-
paulin, sat, each with both elbows resting upon the
large oaken table in the middle of the floor, and
with a hand upon either cheek. They were eyeing,
from behind a huge flagon of unpaid-for. " humming-
stuff," the portentous words "No Chalk," which to
their indignation and astonishment were scored over
the doorway by means of that very mineral whose
presence they purported to deny. Not that the gift
of decyphering written characters -- a gift among
the commonalty of that day considered little less
cabalistical than the art of inditing -- could, in strict
justice, have been laid to the charge of either disciple
of the sea; but there was, to say the truth, a certain
twist in the formation of the letters -- an indescrib-
able lee-lurch about the whole -- which foreboded,
in the opinion of both seamen, a long run of dirty
weather; and determined them at once, in the pithy
words of Legs himself, to "pump ship, clew up all
sail, and scud before the wind."
Having accordingly drank up what remained of
the ale, and looped up the points of their short
doublets, they finally made a bolt for the street.
Although Tarpaulin rolled twice into the fire-place,
mistaking it for the door, yet their escape was at
length happily effected -- and half after twelve o'clock
found our heroes ripe for mischief, and running
for life down a dark alley in the direction of St.
Andrew's Stair, hotly pursued by the landlord and
landlady of the "Jolly Tar."
At the epoch of this eventful tale, and periodi-
cally, for many years before and after, all England,
but more especially the metropolis, resounded with
the fearful cry of "Pest!" The city was in a great
measure depopulated -- and in those horrible regions,
in the vicinity of the Thames, where amid the dark,
narrow, and filthy lanes and alleys, the Demon of
Disease was supposed to have had his nativity, awe,
terror, and superstition were alone to be found stalk-
ing abroad.
By authority of the king such districts were placed
under ban, and all persons forbidden, under pain of
death, to intrude upon their dismal solitude. Yet
neither the mandate of the monarch, nor the huge
barriers erected at the entrances of the streets, nor
the prospect of that loathsome death which, with
almost absolute certainty, overwhelmed the wretch
whom no peril could deter from the adventure, pre-
vented the unfurnished and untenanted dwellings
from being stripped, by the hand of nightly rapine,
of every article, such as iron, brass, or lead-work,
which could in any manner be turned to a profitable
account.
Above all, it was usually found, upon the annual
winter opening of the barriers, that locks, bolts, and
secret cellars, had proved but slender protection to
those rich stores of wines and liquors which, in con-
sideration of the risk and trouble of removal, many of
the numerous dealers having shops in the neighbor-
hood had consented to trust, during the period of
exile, to so insufficient a security.
But there were very few of the terror-stricken
people who attributed these doings to the agency
of human hands. Pest-spirits, Plague-goblins, and
Fever-demons, were the popular imps of mischief;
and tales so blood-chilling were hourly told, that the
whole mass of forbidden buildings was, at length,
enveloped in terror as in a shroud, and the plunderer
himself was often scared away by the horrors his
own depredations had created; leaving the entire
vast circuit of prohibited district to gloom, silence,
pestilence, and death.
It was by one of these terrific barriers already
mentioned, and which indicated the region beyond to
be under the Pest-ban, that, in scrambling down an
alley, Legs and the worthy Hugh Tarpaulin found
their progress suddenly impeded. To return was out
of the question, and no time was to be lost, as their
pursuers were close upon their heels. With thorough-
bred seamen to clamber up the roughly fashioned
plank-work was a trifle; and, maddened with the
twofold excitement of exercise and liquor, they leaped
unhesitatingly down within the enclosure, and holding
on their drunken course with shouts and yellings,
were soon bewildered in its noisome and intricate
recesses.
Had they not, indeed, been intoxicated beyond all
sense of human feelings, their reeling footsteps must
have been palsied by the horrors of their situation.
The air was damp, cold and misty. The paving-stones,
loosened from their beds, lay in wild disorder amid
the tall, rank grass, which sprang up hideously around
the feet and ankles. Rubbish of fallen houses choked
up the streets. The most fetid and poisonous smells
every where prevailed -- and by the occasional aid
of that ghastly and uncertain light which, even at
midnight, never fails to emanate from a vapory and
pestilential atmosphere, might be discerned lying in
the by-paths and alleys, or rotting in the windowless
habitations, the carcass of many a nocturnal plunderer
arrested by the hand of the plague in the very per-
petration of his robbery.
But it lay not in the power of images, or sensations,
or impediments like these, to stay the course of men
who, naturally brave, and at that time especially,
brimful of courage and of "humming-stuff," would
have reeled, as straight as their condition might have
permitted, undauntedly into the very jaws of the
arch-angel Death. Onward -- still onward stalked
the gigantic Legs, making the desolate solemnity
echo and re-echo with yells like the terrific war-whoop
of the Indian: and onward -- still onward rolled the
dumpy Tarpaulin, hanging on to the doublet of his
more active companion, and far surpassing the latter's
most strenuous exertions in the way of vocal music,
by bull-roarings in basso, from the profundity of his
stentorian lungs.
They had now evidently reached the strong hold
of the pestilence. Their way at every step or plunge
grew more noisome and more horrible -- the paths
more narrow and more intricate. Huge stones and
beams falling momently from the decaying roofs
above them, gave evidence, by their sullen and heavy
descent, of the vast height of the surrounding buildings,
while actual exertion became necessary to force a
passage through frequent heaps of putrid human
corpses.4
Suddenly, as the seamen stumbled against the en-
trance of a gigantic and ghastly-looking building, a
yell more than usually shrill from the throat of the
excited Legs, was replied to from within in a rapid
succession of wild, laughter-like, and fiendish shrieks.
Nothing daunted at sounds which, of such a nature,
at such a time, and in such a place, might have
curdled the very blood in hearts less irrecoverably
on fire, the drunken couple burst open the pannels of
the door, and staggered into the midst of things with
a volley of curses. It is not to be supposed, however,
that the scene which here presented itself to the eyes
of the gallant Legs and worthy Tarpaulin, produced
at first sight any other effect upon their illuminated
faculties than an overwhelming sensation of stupid
astonishment.
The room within which they found themselves
proved to be the shop of an undertaker -- but an open
trap-door, in a corner of the floor near the entrance,
looked down upon a long range of wine-cellars,
whose depths the occasional sounds of bursting bottles
proclaimed to be well stored with their appropriate
contents. In the middle of the room stood a table --
in the centre of which again arose a huge tub of
what appeared to be punch. Bottles of various wines
and cordials, together with grotesque jugs, pitchers,
and flagons of every shape and quality, were scattered
profusely upon the board. Around it, upon coffin-
tressels, was seated a company of six -- this company
I will endeavor to delineate one by one.
Fronting the entrance, and elevated a little above
his companions, sat a personage who appeared to be
the president of the table. His stature was gaunt
and tall, and Legs was confounded to behold in him
a figure more emaciated than himself. His face was
yellower than the yellowest saffron -- but no feature
marked to merit a particular description. This one
consisted in a forehead so unusually and hideously
lofty, as to have the appearance of a bonnet or crown
of flesh superseded upon the natural head. His mouth
was puckered and dimpled into a singular expression
of ghastly affability, and his eyes, as indeed the eyes
of all at table, were glazed over with the fumes of
intoxication. This gentleman was clothed from head
to foot in a richly embroidered black silk-velvet pall
wrapped negligently around his form after the fashion
of a Spanish cloak. His head was stuck all full of
tall sable hearse-plumes, which he nodded to and fro
with a jaunty and knowing air, and, in his right hand,
he held a huge human thigh-bone, with which he ap-
peared to have been just knocking down some member
of the company for a song.
Opposite him, and with her back to the door, was
a lady of no whit the less extraordinary character.
Although quite as tall as the person who has just
been described, she had no right to complain of his
unnatural emaciation. She was evidently in the last
stage of a dropsy; and her figure resembled nearly
in outline the shapeless proportions of the huge
puncheon of October beer which stood, with the head
driven in, close by her side, in a corner of the
chamber. Her face was exceedingly round, red, and
full -- and the same peculiarity, or rather want of
peculiarity, attached itself to her countenance, which
I before mentioned in the case of the president -- that
is to say, only one feature of her face was sufficiently
distinguished to need a separate characterization:
indeed, the acute Tarpaulin immediately observed
that the same remark might have applied to each
individual person of the party; every one of whom
seemed to possess a monopoly of some particular por-
tion of physiognomy. With the lady in question
this portion proved to be the mouth. Commencing
at the right ear, it swept with a terrific chasm to the
left -- the short pendants which she wore in either
auricle continually bobbing into the aperture. She
made, however, every exertion to keep her jaws
closed and looked dignified, in a dress consisting of
a newly starched and ironed shroud coming up close
under her chin, with a crimped ruffle of cambric
muslin.
At her right hand sat a diminutive young lady
whom she appeared to patronise. This delicate little
creature, in the trembling of her wasted fingers, in
the livid hue of her lips, and in the slight hectic spot
which tinged her otherwise leaden complexion, gave
evident indications of a galloping consumption. An
air of extreme haut ton, however, pervaded her whole
appearance -- she wore, in a graceful and degagé
manner, a large and beautiful winding-sheet of the
finest India lawn -- her hair hung in ringlets over
her neck -- a soft smile played about her mouth --
but her nose, extremely long, thin, sinuous, flexible,
and pimpled, hung down far below her under lip, and
in spite of the delicate manner in which she now and
then moved it to one side or the other with her
tongue, gave an expression rather doubtful to her
countenance.
Over against her, and upon the left of the dropsical
lady, was seated a little puffy, wheezing, and gouty
old man, whose cheeks hung down upon the shoulders
of their owner, like two huge bladders of Oporto
wine. With his arms folded, and with one bandaged
leg cocked up against the table, he seemed to think
himself entitled to some consideration. He evidently
prided himself much upon every inch of his personal
appearance, but took more especial delight in calling
attention to his gaudy-colored surcoat. This, to say
the truth, must have cost no little money, and was
made to fit him exceedingly well -- being fashioned
from one of the curiously embroidered silken covers
appertaining to those glorious escutcheons which,
in England and elsewhere, are customarily hung up
in some conspicuous place upon the dwellings of
departed aristocracy.
Next to him, and at the right hand of the president,
was a gentleman in long white hose and cotton
drawers. His frame shook, in a ludicrous manner,
with a fit of what Tarpaulin called "the horrors."
His jaws, which had been newly shaved, were tightly
tied up by a bandage of muslin; and his arms being
fastened in a similar way at the wrists, prevented
him from helping himself too freely to the liquors
upon the table; a precaution rendered necessary, in the
opinion of Legs, by the peculiarly sottish and wine-
bibbing cast of his visage. A pair of prodigious
ears, nevertheless, which it was no doubt found im-
possible to confine, towered away into the atmo-
sphere of the apartment, and were occasionally pricked
up, or depressed, as the sounds of bursting bottles
increased, or died away, in the cellars underneath.
Fronting him, sixthly and lastly, was situated a
singularly stiff-looking personage, who, being afflicted
with paralysis, must, to speak seriously, have felt very
ill at ease in his unaccommodating habiliments. He
was habited, somewhat uniquely, in a new and hand-
some mahogany coffin. The top or head-piece of
the coffin pressed upon the skull of the wearer, and
extended over it in the fashion of a hood, giving to
the entire face an air of indescribable interest. Arm-
holes had been cut in the sides, for the sake not
more of elegance than of convenience -- but the dress,
nevertheless, prevented its proprietor from sitting as
erect as his associates; and as he lay reclining
against his tressel, at an angle of forty-five degrees,
a pair of huge goggle eyes rolled up their awful
whites towards the ceiling in absolute amazement at
their own enormity.
Before each of the party lay a portion of a skull,
which was used as a drinking cup. Overhead was
suspended an enormous human skeleton, by means
of a rope tied round one of the legs and fastened to
a ring in the ceiling. The other limb, confined by
no such fetter, stuck off from the body at right
angles, causing the whole loose and rattling frame
to dangle and twirl about in a singular manner, at
the caprice of every occasional puff of wind which
of this hideous thing lay a quantity of ignited and
glowing charcoal, which threw a fitful but vivid
light over the entire scene; while coffins, and other
wares appertaining to the shop of an undertaker,
were piled high up around the room, and against the
windows, preventing any straggling ray from escap-
ing into the street.
It has been before hinted that at sight of this ex-
traordinary assembly, and of their still more extra-
ordinary paraphernalia, our two seamen did not
conduct themselves with that proper degree of
decorum which might have been expected. Legs,
having leant himself back against the wall, near
which he happened to be standing, dropped his lower
jaw still lower than usual, and spread open his eyes
to their fullest extent: while Hugh Tarpaulin, stoop-
ing down so as to bring his nose upon a level with
the table, and spreading out a palm upon either knee,
burst into a long, loud, and obstreperous roar of
very ill-timed and immoderate laughter.
Without, however, taking offence at behavior so
excessively rude, the tall president smiled very
graciously upon the intruders -- nodded to them
in a dignified manner with his head of sable plumes
-- and, arising, took each by an arm, and led him
to a seat which some others of the company had
placed in the meantime for his accommodation.
Legs to all this offered not the slightest resistance,
but sat down as he was directed -- while the gallant
Hugh, removing his coffin-tressel from its station
near the head of the table, to the vicinity of the little
consumptive lady in the winding-sheet, plumped
down by her side in high glee, and, pouring out a
skull of red wine, drank it off to their better ac-
quaintance. But at this presumption the stiff gentle-
man in the coffin seemed exceedingly nettled; and
serious consequences might have ensued, had not the
president, rapping upon the table with his truncheon,
diverted the attention of all present to the following
speech:
"It becomes our duty upon the present happy
occasion" --
"Avast there!" -- interrupted Legs, looking very
serious -- "avast there a bit, I say, and tell us who
the devil ye all are, and what business ye have here,
rigged off like the foul fiends, and swilling the snug
`blue ruin' stowed away for the winter by my
honest shipmate Will Wimble the undertaker!"
At this unpardonable piece of ill-breeding, all the
original company half started to their feet, and uttered
the same rapid succession of wild fiendish shrieks
which had before caught the attention of the seamen.
The president, however, was the first to recover his
composure, and at length, turning to Legs with great
dignity, recommenced:
"Most willingly will we gratify any reasonable
curiosity on the part of guests so illustrious, unbidden
though they be. Know then that in these dominions
I am monarch, and here rule with undivided empire
under the title of `King Pest the First.'
"This apartment which you no doubt profanely
suppose to be the shop of Will Wimble the under-
taker -- a man whom we know not, and whose
plebeian appellation has never before this night
thwarted our royal ears -- this apartment, I say, is
the Dais-Chamber of our Palace, devoted to the
councils of our kingdom, and to other sacred and
lofty purposes.
"The noble lady who sits opposite is Queen Pest,
and our Serene Consort. The other exalted person-
ages whom you behold are all of our family, and
wear the insignia of the blood royal under the re-
spective titles of `His Grace the Arch Duke Pest-
Iferous' -- `His Grace the Duke Pest-Ilential' --
`His Grace the Duke Tem-Pest' -- and `Her Serene
Highness the Arch Duchess Ana-Pest.'
"As regards" -- continued he -- "your demand
of the business upon which we sit here in council,
we might be pardoned for replying that it concerns,
and concerns alone, our own private and regal in-
terest, and is in no manner important to any other
than ourself. But in consideration of those rights to
which as guests and strangers you may feel your-
selves entitled, we will furthermore explain that we
are here this night, prepared by deep research and
accurate investigation, to examine, analyze, and
thoroughly determine the indefinable spirit -- the in-
comprehensible qualities and nare -- of those ines-
timable treasures of the palate, the wines, ales, and
liqueurs of this goodly metropolis: by so doing to
advance not more our own designs than the true
welfare of that unearthly sovereign whose reign is
over us all -- whose dominions are unlimited -- and
whose name is `Death.' "
"Whose name is Davy Jones!" -- ejaculated Tar-
paulin, helping the lady by his side to a skull of
liqueur, and pouring out a second for himself.
"Profane varlet!" -- said the president, now turn-
ing his attention to the worthy Hugh -- "profane
and execrable wretch! -- we have said, that in con-
sideration of those rights which, even in thy filthy
person, we feel no inclination to violate, we have
condescended to make reply to your rude and un-
seasonable inquiries. We, nevertheless, for your
unhallowed intrusion upon our councils, believe it
our duty to mulct you and your companion in each
a gallon of Black Strap -- having imbibed which to
the prosperity of our kingdom -- at a single draught
-- and upon your bended knees -- you shall be forth-
with free either to proceed upon your way, or
remain and be admitted to the privileges of our
table, according to your respective and individual
pleasures."
"It would be a matter of utter unpossibility" --
replied Legs, whom the assumptions and dignity of
King Pest the First had evidently inspired with some
feelings of respect, and who arose and steadied him-
self by the table as he spoke -- "it would, please
your majesty, be a matter of utter unpossibility to
stow away in my hold even one-fourth of that same
liquor which your majesty has just mentioned. To
say nothing of the stuffs placed on board in the
forenoon by way of ballast, and not to mention the
various ales and liqueurs shipped this evening at
different sea-ports, I am, at present, full up to the
throat of `humming-stuff' taken in and duly paid for
at the sign of the `Jolly Tar.' You will, therefore,
please your majesty, be so good as take the will for
the deed -- for by no manner of means either can I
or will I swallow another drop -- least of all a drop
of that villanous bilge-water that answers to the hail
of `Black Strap.' "
"Belay that!" -- interrupted Tarpaulin, astonished
not more at the length of his companion's speech
than at the nature of his refusal -- "Belay that you
lubber! -- and I say, Legs, none of your palaver!
My hull is still light, although I confess you yourself
seem to be a little top-heavy; and as for the matter
of your share of the cargo, why rather than raise a
squall I would find stowage-room for it myself,
but" --
"This proceeding" -- interposed the president --
"is by no means in accordance with the terms of
the mulct or sentence, which is in its nature Median,
and not to be altered or recalled. The conditions
we have imposed must be fulfilled to the letter, and
that without a moment's hesitation -- in failure of
which fulfilment we decree that you do here be tied
neck and heels together, and duly drowned as rebels
in yon hogshead of October beer!"
"A sentence! -- a sentence! -- a righteous and
just sentence! -- a glorious decree! -- a most worthy
and upright, and holy condemnation!" -- shouted the
Pest family altogether. The king elevated his forehead
into innumerable wrinkles -- the gouty little old man
puffed like a pair of bellows -- the lady of the wind-
ing sheet waved her nose to and fro -- the gentle-
man in the cotton drawers pricked up his ears -- she
of the shroud gasped like a dying fish -- and he of
the coffin looked stiff and rolled up his eyes.
"Ugh! ugh! ugh!" -- chuckled Tarpaulin with-
out heeding the general excitation -- "ugh! ugh!
ugh! -- ugh! ugh! ugh! ugh! -- ugh! ugh! ugh!
I was saying," -- said he, "I was saying when
Mr. King Pest poked in his marling-spike, that
as for the matter of two or three gallons more or
less Black Strap, it was a trifle to a tight sea-boat
like myself not overstowed -- but when it comes
to drinking the health of the Devil -- whom God
assoilzie -- and going down upon my marrow bones
to his ill-favored majesty there, whom I know, as
well as I know myself to be a sinner, to be nobody
in the whole world but Tim Hurlygurly, the stage-
player -- why! its quite another guess sort of a
thing, and utterly and altogether past my compre-
hension."
He was not allowed to finish this speech in tran-
quillity. At the name of Tim Hurlygurly the whole
assembly leaped from their seats.
"Treason!" shouted his Majesty King Pest the
First.
"Treason!" said the little man with the gout.
"Treason!" screamed the Arch Duchess Ana-
Pest.
"Treason!" muttered the gentleman with his jaws
tied up.
"Treason!" growled he of the coffin.
"Treason!" treason!" shrieked her majesty of
the mouth; and, seizing by the hinder part of his
breeches the unfortunate Tarpaulin, who had just
commenced pouring out for himself a skull of liqueur,
she lifted him high up into the air, and dropped him
without ceremony into the huge open puncheon of
his beloved ale. Bobbing up and down, for a few
seconds, like an apple in a bowl of toddy, he, at
length, finally disappeared amid the whirlpool of
foam which, in the already effervescent liquor, his
struggles easily succeeded in creating.
Not tamely however did the tall seaman behold the
discomfiture of his companion. Jostling King Pest
through the open trap, the valiant Legs slammed the
door down upon him with an oath, and strode to-
wards the centre of the room. Here tearing down
the huge skeleton which swung over the table, he
laid it about him with so much energy and good will,
that, as the last glimpses of light died away within
the apartment, he succeeded in knocking out the
brains of the little gentleman with the gout. Rushing
then with all his force against the fatal hogshead
full of October ale and Hugh Tarpaulin, he rolled it
over and over in an instant. Out burst a deluge of
liquor so fierce -- so impetuous -- so overwhelming
-- that the room was flooded from wall to wall --
the loaded table was overturned -- the tressels were
thrown upon their backs -- the tub of punch into the
fire-place -- and the ladies into hysterics. Jugs,
pitchers, and carboys mingled promiscuously in the
melée, and wicker flagons encountered desperately
with bottles of junk. Piles of death-furniture flound-
ered about. Skulls floated en masse -- hearse-plumes
nodded to escutcheons -- the man with the horrors
was drowned upon the spot -- the little stiff gentleman
sailed off in his coffin -- and the victorious Legs,
seizing by the waist the fat lady in the shroud,
scudded out into the street, followed under easy sail
by the redoubtable Hugh Tarpaulin, who, having
sneezed three or four times, panted and puffed after
him with the Arch Duchess Ana-Pest.
4. The description here given, of the condition of the banned
districts, at the period spoken of, is positively not exaggerated.
Page 213
THE SIGNORA ZENOBIA.
is the Signora Psyche Zenobia. This I know to be
a fact. Nobody but my enemies ever calls me Suky
Snobbs. I have been assured that Suky is but a
vulgar corruption of Psyche, which is good Greek,
and means "the soul" -- (that's me, I'm all soul) --
and sometimes "a butterfly," which latter meaning
alludes to my appearance in my new crimson satin
dress, with the sky-blue Arabian mantelet, and the
trimmings of green agraffas, and the seven flounces
of orange-colored auriculas. As for Snobbs -- any
person who should look at me would be instantly
aware that my name was'nt Snobbs. Miss Tabitha
Turnip propagated that report through sheer envy.
Tabitha Turnip indeed! Oh the little wretch! But
what can we expect from a turnip? Wonder if she
remembers the old adage about "blood out of a
turnip, &c." [Mem: put her in mind of it the first
opportunity.] [Mem again -- pull her nose.] Where
was I? Ah! I have been assured that Snobbs is a
mere corruption of Zenobia, and that Zenobia was a
queen (So am I. Dr. Moneypenny, always calls me
the Queen of Hearts) and that Zenobia, as well as
Psyche, is good Greek, and that my father was "a
Greek," and that consequently I have a right to our
original patronymic, which is Zenobia, and not by
any means Snobbs. Nobody but Tabitha Turnip
calls me Suky Snobbs. I am the Signora Psyche
Zenobia.
As I said before, every body has heard of me. I
am that very Signora Psyche Zenobia, so justly cele-
brated as corresponding secretary to the " Phila-
delphia, Regular-Exchange, Tea-Total, Young,
Belles-Lettres, Universal, Experimental, Biblio-
graphical Association to Civilize Humanity." Dr.
Moneypenny made the title for us, and says he chose
it because it sounded big like an empty rum-puncheon.
(A vulgar man that sometimes -- but he's deep.) We
all sign the initials of the society after our names, in
the fashion of the R.S.A., Royal Society of Arts --
the S.D.U.K., Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge, &c., &c. Dr. Moneypenny says that S
stands for stale, and that D. U. K. spells duck, (but
it don't,) and that S.D.U.K. stands for Stale Duck,
and not for Lord Brougham's society -- but then Dr.
Moneypenny is such a queer man that I am never
sure when he is telling me the truth. At any rate
we always add to our names the initials P.R.E.T.T.Y
B.L.U.E.B.A.T.C.H. -- that is to say, Philadelphia
Regular-Exchange, Tea-Total, Young, Belles-Lettres,
Universal, Experimental, Bibliographical, Associa-
tion, To, Civilize, Humanity -- one letter for each
word, which is a decided improvement upon Lord
Brougham. Dr. Moneypenny will have it that our
initials give our true character -- but for my life I
can't see what he means.
Notwithstanding the good offices of Dr. Money-
penny, and the strenuous exertions of the association
to get itself into notice, it met with no very great
success until I joined it. The truth is, members in-
dulged in too flippant a tone of discussion. The
papers read every Saturday evening were character-
ized less by depth than buffoonery. They were all
whipped syllabub. There was no investigation of
first causes, first principles. There was no investi-
gation of anything at all. There was no attention
paid to that great point the "fitness of things." In
short, there was no fine writing like this. It was all
low -- very! No profundity, no reading, no meta-
physics -- nothing which the learned call spirituality,
and which the unlearned choose to stigmatise as cant.
[Dr. M. says I ought to spell "cant" with a capital
K -- but I know better.]
When I joined the society it was my endeavor to
introduce a better style of thinking and writing, and
all the world knows how well I have succeeded. We
get up as good papers now in the P.R.E.T.T.Y.
B.L.U.E.B.A.T.C.H. as any to be found even in
Blackwood. I say, Blackwood, because I have been
assured that the finest writing upon every subject, is to
be discovered in the pages of that justly celebrated
Magazine. We now take it for our model upon all
themes, and are getting into rapid notice accordingly.
And, after all, it's not so very difficult a matter to com-
pose an article of the genuine Blackwood stamp, if one
only goes properly about it. Of course I don't speak
of the political articles. Every body knows how
they are managed, since Dr. Moneypenny explained
it. Mr. Blackwood has a pair of tailor's shears, and
three apprentices who stand by him for orders. One
hands him the "Times," another the "Examiner,"
and a third a "Gulley's New Compendium of Slang-
Whang." Mr. B. merely cuts out and intersperses.
It is soon done -- nothing but Examiner, Slang-
Whang, and Times -- then Times, Slang-Whang, and
Examiner -- and then Times, Examiner, and Slang-
Whang.
But the chief merit of the Magazine lies in its
miscellaneous articles; and the best of these come
under the head of what Dr. Moneypenny calls the
bizarreries (whatever that may mean) and what every
body else calls the intensities. This is a species of
writing which I have long known how to appreciate,
although it is only since my late visit to Mr. Black-
wood (deputed by the society) that I have been made
aware of the exact method of composition. This
method is very simple, but not so much so as the
politics. Upon my calling at Mr. B.'s, and making
known to him the wishes of the society, he received
me with great civility, took me into his study, and
gave me a clear explanation of the whole process.
"My dear madam," said he, evidently struck with
my majestic appearance, for I had on the crimson
satin, with the green agraffas, and orange-colored
auriculas -- "My dear madam," said he, "sit
your writer of intensities must have very black ink,
and a very big pen, with a very blunt nib. And,
mark me, Miss Psyche Zenobia!" he continued, after
a pause, with the most impressive energy and solemnity
of manner, "mark me! -- that pen -- must -- never
be mended! Herein, madam, lies the secret, the soul,
of intensity. I assume it upon myself to say, that no
individual, of however great genius, ever wrote with
a good pen, understand me, a good article. You may
take it for granted, madam, that when a manuscript
can be read it is never worth reading. This is a
leading principle in our faith, to which if you cannot
readily assent, our conference is at an end."
He paused. But, of course, as I had no wish to
put an end to the conference, I assented to a propo-
sition so very obvious, and one, too, of whose truth
I had all along been sufficiently aware. He seemed
pleased, and went on with his instructions.
"It may appear invidious in me, Miss Psyche
Zenobia, to refer you to any article, or set of articles,
in the way of model or study; yet perhaps I may as
well call your attention to a few cases. Let me see.
There was `The Dead Alive,' a capital thing! -- the
record of a gentleman's sensations when entombed
before the breath was out of his body -- full of tact,
taste, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition.
You would have sworn that the writer had been
born and brought up in a coffin. Then we had the
`Confessions of an Opium-eater' -- fine, very fine!
-- glorious imagination -- deep philosophy -- acute
speculation -- plenty of fire and fury, and a good
spicing of the decidedly unitelligible. That was a
nice bit of flummery, and went down the throats of
the people delightfully. They would have it that
Coleridge wrote the paper -- but not so. It was
composed by my pet baboon, Juniper, over a rummer
of Hollands and water, hot, without sugar. [This I
could scarcely have believed had it been any body
but Mr. Blackwood, who assured me of it.] Then
there was `The Involuntary Experimentalist,' all
about a gentleman who got baked in an oven, and
came out alive and well, although certainly done to
a turn. And then there was `The Diary of a Late
Physician,' where the merit lay in good rant, and
indifferent Greek -- both of them taking things, with
the public. And then there was `The Man in the
Bell,' a paper by-the-bye, Miss Zenobia, which I
cannot sufficiently recommend to your attention. It
is the history of a young person who goes to sleep
under the clapper of a church bell, and is awakened
by its tolling for a funeral. The sound drives him
mad, and, accordingly, pulling out his tablets, he
gives a record of his sensations. Sensations are the
great things after all. Should you ever be drowned
or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations
-- they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet. If
you wish to write forcibly, Miss Zenobia, pay minute
attention to the sensations."
"That I certainly will, Mr. Blackwood," said I.
"Good!" he replied. "I see you are a pupil after
my own heart. But I must put you au fait to the
details necessary in composing what may be deno-
minated a genuine Blackwood article of the sensation
stamp -- the kind which you will understand me to
say I consider the best for all purposes.
"The first thing requisite is to get yourself into
such a scrape as no one ever got into before. The
oven, for instance -- that was a good hit. But if
you have no oven, or big bell, at hand, and if you
cannot conveniently tumble out of a balloon, or be
swallowed up in an earthquake, or get stuck fast in
a chimney, you will have to be contented with simply
imagining some similar misadventure. I should
prefer, however, that you have the actual fact to bear
you out. Nothing so well assists the fancy, as an
experimental knowledge of the matter in hand.
`Truth is strange,' you know, `stranger than fiction'
-- besides being more to the purpose."
Here I assured him I had an excellent pair of
garters, and would go and hang myself forthwith.
"Good!" he replied, "do so -- although hanging
is somewhat hacknied. Perhaps you might do better.
Take a dose of Morrison's pills, and then give us
your sensations. However, my instructions will ap-
ply equally well to any variety of misadventure, and
in your way home you may easily get knocked in
the head, or run over by an omnibus, or bitten by a
mad dog, or drowned in a gutter. But, to proceed.
"Having determined upon your subject, you must
next consider the tone, or manner, of your narration.
There is the tone didactic, the tone enthusiastic, the
tone sentimental, and the tone natural -- all common-
place enough. But then there is the tone laconic, or
curt, which has lately come much into use. It con-
sists in short sentences. Somehow thus: Can't be
too brief. Can't be too snappish. Always a full
stop. And never a paragraph.
"Then there is the tone elevated, diffusive, and
interjectional. Some of our best novelists patronize
this tone. The words must be all in a whirl, like a
humming-top, and make a noise very similar, which
answeres remarkably well instead of meaning. This
is the best of all possible styles where the writer is in
too great a hurry to think.
"The tone mystic is also a good one -- but requires
some skill in the handling. The beauty of this lies in
a knowledge of innuendo. Hint all, and assert no-
thing. If you desire to say `bread and butter,' do not
by any means say it outright. You may say any-
thing and everything approaching to `bread and
butter.' You may hint at `buckwheat cake,' or you
may even go as far as to insinuate `oatmeal por-
ridge,' but, if `bread and butter' is your real meaning,
be cautious, my dear Miss Psyche, not on any ac-
count to say `bread and butter.'
I assured him that I would never say it again as
long as I lived. He continued:
"There are various other tones of equal celebrity,
but I shall only mention two more, the tone meta-
physical, and the tone heterogeneous. In the former,
the merit consists in seeing into the nature of affairs
a very great deal farther than any body else. This
second sight is very efficient when properly managed.
A little reading of Coleridge's Table-Talk will
carry you a great way. If you know any big words
this is your chance for them. Talk of the Academy
and the Lyceum, and say something about the Ionic
and Italic schools, or about Bossarion, and Kant, and
Schelling, and Fitche, and be sure you abuse a man
called Locke, and bring in the words a priori and a
posteriori. As for the tone heterogeneous, it is
merely a judicious mixture, in equal proportions, of
all the other tones in the world, and is consequently
made up of everything deep, great, odd, piquant,
perinent, and pretty.
"Let us suppose now you have determined upon
your incidents and tone. The most important por-
tion, in fact the soul of the whole business, is yet to
be attended to -- I allude to the filling up. It is not
to be supposed that a lady or gentleman either has
been leading the life of a bookworm. And yet above
all things is it necessary that your article have an
air of erudition, or at least afford evidence of exten-
sive general reading. Now I'll put you in the way
of accomplishing this point. See here! (pulling down
some three or four ordinary looking volumes, and
opening them at random.) By casting your eye
down almost any page of any book in the world,
you will be able to perceive at once a host of little
scraps of either learning or bel-esprit-ism which are
the very thing for the spicing of a Blackwood article.
You might as well note down a few while I read
them to you. I shall make two divisions: first, Pi-
quant Facts for the Manufacture of Similes; and
second, Piquant Expressions to be introduced as
occasion may require. Write now! -- " and I wrote
as he dictated.
"Piquant Facts for Similes. `There were origi- nally but three muses -- Melete, Mneme, and Aoede -- meditation, memory, and singing.' You may make a great deal of that little fact if properly worked. You see it is not generally known, and looks recherché. You must be careful and give the thing with a down- right improviso air.
"Again. `The river Alpheus passed beneath the
sea, and emerged without injury to the purity of its
waters.' Rather stale that, to be sure, but, if pro-
perly dressed and dished up, will look quite as fresh
as ever.
"Here is something better. `The Persian Iris
appears to some persons to possess a sweet and very
powerful perfume, while to others it is perfectly
scentless.' Fine that, and very delicate! Turn it
about a little, and it will do wonders. We'll have
something else in the botanical line. There's nothing
goes down so well, especially with the help of a little
Latin. Write!
" `The Epidendrum Flos Aeris, of Java, bears a
very beautiful flower, and will live when pulled up by
the roots. The natives suspend it by a cord from
the ceiling, and enjoy its fragrance for years.' That's
capital! That will do for the similes. Now for the
Piquant expressions.
Piquant Expressions. `The venerable Chinese novel Ju-Kiao-Li.' Good! By introducing these few -223- words with dexterity you will evince your intimate acquaintance with the language and literature of the Chinese. With the aid of this you may possibly get along without either Arabic, or Sanscrit, or Chickasaw. There is no passing muster, however, without French, Spanish, Italian, German, Latin, and Greek. I must look you out a little specimen of each. Any scrap will answer, because you must depend upon your own ingenuity to make it fit into your article. Now write!
" `
-- French. Alludes to the frequent repetition of the
phrase,
that name. Properly introduced, will show not only
your knowledge of the language, but your general
reading and wit. You can say, for instance, that the
chicken you were eating (write an article about being
choked to death by a chicken-bone) was not altogether
That's Spanish -- from Miguel de Cervantes. `Come
quickly O death! but be sure and don't let me see
you coming, lest the pleasure I shall feel at your ap-
pearance should unfortunately bring me back again
to life.' This you may slip in quite à propos when
you are struggling in the last agonies with the
chicken-bone. Write!
That's Italian, you perceive -- from Ariosto. It
means that a great hero, in the heat of combat, not
perceiving that he had been fairly killed, continued
to fight valiantly, dead as he was. The application
of this to your own case is obvious -- for I trust,
Miss Psyche, that you will not neglect to kick for at
least an hour and a half after you have been choked
to death by that chicken-bone. Please to write!
That's German -- from Schiller. `And if I die, at
least I die -- for thee -- for thee!' Here it is clear
that you are apostrophising the cause of your disaster,
the chicken. Indeed what gentleman (or lady either)
of sense, would'nt die, I should like to know, for a
well fattened capon of the right Molucca breed,
stuffed with capers and mushrooms, and served up in
a salad-bowl, with orange-jellies en mosaiques. Write!
(You can get them that way at Tortoni's,) write, if
you please!
"Here is a nice little Latin phrase, and rare too,
(one can't be too recherché or brief in one's Latin,
committed an
has understood the words of your proposition, but
not the ideas. The man was a fool, you see. Some
poor fellow whom you addressed while choking with
that chicken-bone, and who therefore did'nt precisely
understand what you were talking about. Throw
the
have him annihilated. If he dares to reply, you can
tell him from Lucan (here it is) that his speeches are
mere
anemone, with great brillancy, has no smell. Or, if
he begins to bluster, you may be down upon him with
insomnia Jovis, reveries of Jupiter -- a phrase which
Silius Italicus (see here!) applies to thoughts pompous
and inflated. This will be sure and cut him to the
heart. He can do nothing but roll over and die.
Will you be kind enough to write.
"In Greek we must have something pretty from
Demosthenes -- for example. 
. [Aner o pheogon kai palin makesetai.]
There is a tolerably good translation of it in Hudi-
bras --
In a Blackwood article nothing makes so fine a show
For he that flies may fight again,
Which he can never do that's slain.
as your Greek. The very letters have an air of
profundity about them. Only observe, madam, the
acute look of that Epsilon! That Phi ought cer-
tainly to be a bishop! Was ever there a smarter
fellow than that Omicron? Just twig that Tau! In
short, there's nothing like Greek for a genuine sensa-
tion-paper. In the present case your application is
the most obvious thing in the world. Rap out the
sentence, with a huge oath, and by way of ultimatum,
at the good-for-nothing dunder-headed villain who
couldn't understand your plain English in relation to
the chicken-bone. He'll take the hint and be off, you
may depend upon it."
These were all the instructions Mr.B. could afford
me upon the topic in question, but I felt they would
be entirely sufficient. I was, at length, able to write
a genuine Blackwood article, and determined to do
it forthwith. In taking leave of me, Mr. B. made a
proposition for the purchase of the paper when
written; but, as he could only offer me fifty guineas
a sheet, I thought it better to let our society have it,
than sacrifice it for so trivial a sum. Notwithstand-
ing this niggardly spirit, however, the gentleman
showed his consideration for me in all other respects,
and indeed treated me with the greatest civility. His
parting words made a deep impression upon my
heart, and I hope I shall always remember them with
gratitude.
"My dear Miss Zenobia," he said, while tears
stood in his eyes, "is there anything else I can do
to promote the success of your laudable undertaking?
Let me reflect! It is just possible that you may not
be able, as soon as convenient, to -- to -- get your-
self drowned, or -- choked with a chicken-bone, or
-- or hung, -- or -- bitten by a -- but stay! Now I
think me of it, there are a couple of very excellent
bull-dogs in the yard -- fine fellows, I assure you --
savage, and all that -- indeed just the thing for your
money -- they'll have you eaten up, auriculas and
all, in less than five minutes (here's my watch!) --
and then only think of the sensations! Here! I say
-- Tom! -- Peter! -- Dick, you villain! -- let out
those" -- but as I was really in a great hurry, and
had not another moment to spare, I was reluctantly
forced to expedite my departure, and accordingly
took my leave at once -- somewhat more abruptly, I
admit, than strict courtesy would have, otherwise,
allowed.
It was my primary object, upon quitting Mr.
Blackwood, to get into some immediate difficulty,
pursuant to his advice, and with this view I spent a
greater part of the day in wandering about Edinburgh,
seeking for desperate adventures -- adventures ade-
quate to the intensity of my feelings, and adapted to
the vast character of the article I intended to write.
In this excursion I was attended by my negro-servant
Pompey, and my little lap-dog Diana, whom I had
brought with me from Philadelphia. It was not,
however, until late in the afternoon that I fully suc-
ceeded in my arduous undertaking. An important
event then happened, of which the following Black-
wood article, in the tone heterogeneous, is the sub-
stance and result.
Page 229
THE SCYTHE OF TIME.
forth in the goodly city of Edina. The confusion
and bustle in the streets were terrible. Men were
talking. Women were screaming. Children were
choking. Pigs were whistling. Carts they rattled.
Bulls they bellowed. Cows they lowed. Horses
they neighed. Cats they caterwauled. Dogs they
danced. Danced! Could it then be possible? Danced!
Alas! thought I, my dancing days are over! Thus
it is ever. What a host of gloomy recollections will
ever and anon be awakened in the mind of genius
and imaginative contemplation, especially of a genius
doomed to the everlasting, and eternal, and continual,
and, as one might say, the continued -- yes, the
continued and continuous, bitter, harassing, disturb-
ing, and, if I may be allowed the expression, the very
disturbing influence of the serene, and godlike, and
heavenly, and exalting, and elevated, and purifying
effect of what may be rightly termed the most envia-
ble, the most truly enviable -- nay! the most benignly
beautiful, the most deliciously ethereal, and, as it
were, the most pretty (if I may use so bold an ex-
pression) thing (pardon me, gentle reader!) in the
world -- but I am led away by my feelings. In such
a mind, I repeat, what a host of recollections are
stirred up by a trifle! The dogs danced! I -- I
could not! They frisked. I wept. They capered.
I sobbed aloud. Touching circumstances! which
cannot fail to bring to the recollection of the classical
reader that exquisite passage in relation to the fitness
of things which is to be found in the commencement
of the third volume of that admirable and venerable
Chinese novel, the Jo-Go-Slow.
In my solitary walk through the city I had two
humble but faithful companions. Diana, my poodle!
sweetest of creatures! She had a quantity of hair
over her one eye, and a blue ribband tied fashionably
around her neck. Diana was not more than five
inches in height, but her head was somewhat bigger
than her body, and her tail, being cut off exceedingly
close, gave an air of injured innocence to the inter-
esting animal which rendered her a favorite with
all.
And Pompey, my negro! -- sweet Pompey! how
shall I ever forget thee? I had taken Pompey's arm.
He was three feet in height (I like to be particular)
and about seventy, or perhaps eighty, years of age.
He had bow-legs and was corpulent. His mouth
should not be called small, nor his ears short. His
teeth, however, were like pearl, and his large full
eyes were deliciously white. Nature had endowed
him with no neck, and had placed his ankles (as
usual with that race) in the middle of the upper por-
tion of the feet. He was clad with a striking
simplicity. His sole garments were a stock of nine
inches in height, and a nearly-new drab overcoat
which had formerly been in the service of the tall,
stately, and illustrious Dr. Moneypenny. It was a
good overcoat. It was well cut. It was well made.
The coat was nearly new. Pompey held it up out
of the dirt with both hands.
There were three persons in our party, and two
of them have already been the subject of remark.
There was a third -- that third person was myself.
I am the Signora Psyche Zenobia. I am not Suky
Snobbs. My appearance is commanding. On the
memorable occasion of which I speak I was habited
in a crimson satin dress, with a sky-blue Arabian
mantelet. And the dress had trimmings of green
agraffas, and seven graceful flounces of the orange-
colored auricula. I thus formed the third of the party.
There was the poodle. There was Pompey. There
was myself. We were three. Thus it is said there
were originally but three Furies -- Melty, Nimmy
and Hetty -- Meditation, Memory, and Singing.
Leaning upon the arm of the gallant Pompey, and
attended at a respectful distance by Diana, I pro-
ceeded down one of the populous and very pleasant
streets of the now deserted Edina. On a sudden,
there presented itself to view a church -- a Gothic
cathedral -- vast, venerable, and with a tall steeple,
which towered into the sky. What madness now
possessed me? Why did I rush upon my fate? I
was seized with an uncontrollable desire to ascend
the giddy pinnacle and thence survey the immense
extent of the city. The door of the cathedral stood
invitingly open. My destiny prevailed. I entered
the ominous archway. Where then was my guardian
angel? -- if indeed such angels there be. If! Dis-
tressing monosyllable! what a world of mystery, and
meaning, and doubt, and uncertainty is there involved
in thy two letters! I entered the ominous archway!
I entered; and, without injury to my orange-colored
auriculas, I passed beneath the portal, and emerged
within the vestibule! Thus it is said the immense
river Alceus passed unscathed, and unwetted, beneath
the sea.
I thought the staircases would never have an end.
Round! Yes they went round and up, and round
and up, and round and up, until I could not help
surmising with the sagacious Pompey, upon whose
supporting arm I leaned in all the confidence of early
affection -- I could not help surmising that the upper
end of the continuous spiral ladder had been acci-
dentally, or perhaps designedly, removed. I paused
for breath; and, in the meantime, an incident occur-
red of too momentous a nature in a moral, and also
in a metaphysical point of view, to be passed over
without notice. It appeared to me -- indeed I was
quite confident of the fact -- I could not be mistaken
-- no! I had, for some moments, carefully and anx-
iously observed the motions of my Diana -- I say
that I could not be mistaken -- Diana smelt a rat!
I called Pompey's attention to the subject, and he --
he agreed with me. There was then no longer
any reasonable room for doubt. The rat had been
smelled -- and by Diana. Heavens! shall I ever
forget the intense excitement of that moment? Alas!
what is the boasted intellect of man? The rat! --
it was there -- that is to say, it was somewhere.
Diana smelled the rat. I -- I could not! Thus it
is said the Prussian Isis has, for some persons, a
sweet and very powerful perfume, while to others it
is perfectly scentless.
The staircase had been surmounted, and there
were now only three or four more upward steps in-
tervening between us and the summit. We still
ascended, and now only one step remained. One
step! One little, little step! Upon one such little
step in the great staircase of human life how vast a
sum of human happiness or misery often depends! I
thought of myself, and then of Pompey, and then of
the mysterious and inexplicable destiny which sur-
rounded us. I thought of Pompey! -- alas, I thought
of love! I thought of the many false steps which
have been taken, and may be taken again. I resolved
to be more cautious, more reserved. I abandoned
the arm of Pompey, and, without his assistance, sur-
mounted the one remaining step, and gained the
chamber of the belfry. I was followed immediately
afterwards by my poodle. Pompey alone remained
behind. I stood at the head of the staircase, and
encouraged him to ascend. He stretched forth to
me his hand, and unfortunately in so doing was forced
to abandon his firm hold upon the overcoat. Will
the gods never cease their persecution? The over-
coat it dropped, and, with one of his feet, Pompey
stepped upon the long and trailing skirt of the over-
coat. He stumbled and fell -- this consequence was
inevitable. He fell forwards, and, with his accursed
head, striking me full in the -- in the breast, pre-
cipitated me headlong, together with himself, upon
the hard, the filthy, the detestable floor of the belfry.
But my revenge was sure, sudden, and complete.
Seizing him furiously by the wool with both hands, I
tore out a vast quantity of the black, and crisp, and
curling material, and tossed it from me with every
manifestation of disdain. It fell among the ropes of
the belfry and remained. Pompey arose, and said
no word. But he regarded me piteously with his
large eyes and -- sighed. Ye gods -- that sigh! It
sunk into my heart. And the hair -- the wool! Could
I have reached that wool I would have bathed it with
my tears, in testimony of regret. But alas! it was
now far beyond my grasp. As it dangled among
the cordage of the bell, I fancied it still alive. I
fancied that it stood on end with indignation. Thus
the happy dandy Flos Aeris of Java, bears, it is said,
a beautiful flower, which will live when pulled up by
the roots. The natives suspend it by a cord from
the ceiling and enjoy its fragrance for years.
Our quarrel was now made up, and we looked
about the room for an aperture through which to sur-
vey the city of Edina. Windows there were none.
The sole light admitted into the gloomy chamber
proceeded from a square opening, about a foot in
diameter, at a height of about seven feet from the
floor. Yet what will the energy of true genius not
effect? I resolved to clamber up to this hole. A
vast quantity of wheels, pinions, and other cabalistic-
looking machinery stood opposite the hole, close to
it; and through the hole there passed an iron rod
from the machinery. Between the wheels and the
wall where the hole lay, there was barely room for
my body -- yet I was desperate, and determined to
persevere. I called Pompey to my side.
"You perceive that aperture, Pompey. I wish to
look through it. You will stand here just beneath
the hole -- so. Now, hold out one of your hands,
Pompey, and let me step upon it -- thus. Now, the
other hand, Pompey, and with its aid I will get upon
your shoulders."
He did everything I wished, and I found, upon
getting up, that I could easily pass my head and neck
through the aperture. The prospect was sublime.
Nothing could be more magnificent. I merely paused
a moment to bid Diana behave herself, and assure
Pompey that I would be considerate and bear as
lightly as possible upon his shoulders. I told him I
would be tender of his feelings -- ossi tender que
Zaire. Having done this justice to my faithful friend,
I gave myself up with great zest and enthusiasm to
the enjoyment of the scene which so obligingly spread
itself out before my eyes.
Upon this subject, however, I shall forbear to dilate.
I will not describe the city of Edinburgh. Every one
has been to Edinburgh -- the classic Edina. I will
confine myself to the momentous details of my own
lamentable adventure. Having, in some measure,
satisfied my curiosity in regard to the extent, situation,
and general appearance of the city, I had leisure to
survey the church in which I was, and the delicate
architecture of the steeple. I observed that the aper-
ture through which I had thrust my head was an
opening in the dial-plate of a gigantic clock, and
must have appeared, from the street, as a large key-
hole, such as we see in the face of French watches.
No doubt the true object was to admit the arm of an
attendant, to adjust, when necessary, the hands of
the clock from within. I observed also, with sur-
prise, the immense size of these hands, the longest of
which could not have been less than ten feet in
length, and, where broadest, eight or nine inches in
breadth. They were of solid steel apparently, and
their edges appeared to be sharp. Having noticed
these particulars, and some others, I again turned my
eyes upon the glorious prospect below, and soon be-
came absorbed in contemplation.
From this, after some minutes, I was aroused by
the voice of Pompey, who declared he could stand it
no longer, and requested that I would be so kind as
to come down. This was unreasonable, and I told
him so in a speech of some length. He replied, but
with an evident misunderstanding of my ideas upon
the subject. I accordingly grew angry, and told
him in plain words that he was a fool, that he had
committed an ignoramus e-clench-eye, that his notions
were mere insommary Bovis, and his words little
better than an enemy-werrybor'em. With this he
tions.
It might have been half an hour after this alterca-
tion, when, as I was deeply absorbed in the heavenly
scenery beneath me, I was startled by something
very cold which pressed with a gentle pressure upon
the back of my neck. It is needless to say that I felt
inexpressibly alarmed. I knew that Pompey was
beneath my feet, and that Diana was sitting, accord-
ing to my explicit directions, upon her hind-legs in
the farthest corner of the room. What could it be?
Alas! I but too soon discovered. Turning my head
gently to one side, I perceived, to my extreme hor-
ror, that the huge, glittering, scimetar-like minute-
hand of the clock, had, in the course of its hourly
revolution, descended upon my neck. There was, I
knew, not a second to be lost. I pulled back at
once -- but it was too late. There was no chance of
forcing my head through the mouth of that terrible
trap in which it was so fairly caught, and which
grew narrower and narrower with a rapidity too
horrible to be conceived. The agony of that moment
is not to be imagined. I threw up my hands and
endeavored with all my strength to force upwards
the ponderous iron bar. I might as well have tried
to lift the cathedral itself. Down, down, down it
came, closer, and yet closer. I screamed to Pompey
for aid; but he said that I had hurt his feelings by
calling him "an ignorant old squint eye." I yelled
to Diana; but she only said "bow-wow-wow," and
that "I had told her on no account to stir from the
corner." Thus I had no relief to expect from my
associates.
Meantime the ponderous and terrific Scythe of
Time (for I now discovered the literal import of that
classical phrase) had not stopped, nor was likely to
stop, in its career. Down and still down, it came.
It had already buried its sharp edge a full inch in my
flesh, and my sensations grew indistinct and confused.
At one time I fancied myself in Philadelphia with the
stately Dr. Moneypenny, at another in the back parlor
of Mr. Blackwood receiving his invaluable instructions.
And then again the sweet recollection of better and
earlier times came over me, and I thought of that
happy period when the world was not all a desert, and
Pompey not altogether cruel.
The ticking of the machinery amused me. Amused
me, I say, for my sensations now bordered upon
perfect happiness, and the most trifling circumstances
afforded me pleasure. The eternal click-clack, click-
clack, click-clack, of the clock was the most melo-
dious of music in my ears -- and occasionally even
put me in mind of the grateful sermonic harangues
of Dr. Morphine. Then there were the great figures
upon the dial-plate -- how intelligent, how intellectual,
they all looked! And presently they took to dancing
the Mazurka, and I think it was the figure V who
performed the most to my satisfaction. She was
evidently a lady of breeding. None of your swag-
gerers, and nothing at all indelicate in her motions.
She did the pirouette to admiration -- whirling round
upon her apex. I made an endeavor to hand her a
chair, for I saw that she appeared fatigued with her
exertions -- and it was not until then that I fully per-
ceived my lamentable situation. Lamentable indeed!
The bar had buried itself two inches in my neck.
I was aroused to a sense of exquisite pain. I prayed
for death, and, in the agony of the moment, could not
help repeating those exquisite verses of the poet
Miguel De Cervantes:
Vanny Buren, tan escondida
Query no to senty venny
Pork and pleasure, delly morry
Nommy, torny, darry, widdy!
But now a new horror presented itself, and one
indeed sufficient to startle the strongest nerves. My
eyes, from the cruel pressure of the machine, were
absolutely starting from their sockets. While I was
thinking how I should possibly manage without them,
one actually tumbled out of my head, and, rolling
down the steep side of the steeple, lodged in the rain
gutter which ran along the eaves of the main building.
The loss of the eye was not so much as the insolent
air of independence and contempt with which it re-
garded me after it was out. There it lay in the gutter
just under my nose, and the airs it gave itself would
have been ridiculous had they not been disgusting.
Such a winking and blinking were never before seen.
This behavior on the part of my eye in the gutter
was not only irritating on account of its manifest
insolence and shameful ingratitude, but was also ex-
ceedingly inconvenient on account of the sympathy
which always exists between two eyes of the same
head, however far apart. I was forced, in a manner,
to wink and blink, whether I would or not, in exact
concert with the scoundrelly thing that lay just under
my nose. I was presently relieved, however, by the
dropping out of the other eye. In falling it took the
same direction (possibly a concerted plot) as its fellow.
Both rolled out of the gutter together, and in truth I
was very glad to get rid of them.
The bar was now three inches and a half deep in
my neck, and there was only a little bit of skin to
cut through. My sensations were those of entire
happiness, for I felt that in a few minutes, at farthest,
I should be relieved from my disagreeable situation.
And in this expectation I was not at all deceived.
At twenty-five minutes past five in the afternoon pre-
cisely, the huge minute-hand had proceeded suffi-
ciently far on its terrible revolution to sever the small
remainder of my neck. I was not sorry to see the
head which had occasioned me so much embarrass-
ment at length make a final separation from my body.
It first rolled down the side of the steeple, then
lodged for a few seconds in the gutter, and then
made its way, with a plunge, into the middle of the
street.
I will candidly confess that my feelings were now
of the most singular, nay of the most mysterious, the
most perplexing and incomprehensible character.
My senses were here and there at one and the same
moment. With my head I imagined, at one time,
that I, the head, was the real Signora Psyche Zenobia
-- at another I felt convinced that myself, the body,
was the proper identity. To clear my ideas upon
this topic I felt in my pocket for my snuff-box, but,
upon getting it, and endeavoring to apply a pinch of
its grateful contents in the ordinary manner, I be-
came immediately aware of my peculiar deficiency,
and threw the box at once down to my head. It
took a pinch with great satisfaction, and smiled me
an acknowledgment in return. Shortly afterwards
it made me a speech, which I could hear but indis-
tinctly without my ears. I gathered enough, how-
ever, to know that it was astonished at my wishing
to remain alive under such circumstances. In the
concluding sentences it compared me to the hero in
Ariosto, who, in the heat of combat, not perceiving
that he was dead, continued to fight valiantly dead
as he was. I remember that it used the precise words
of the poet:
There was nothing now to prevent my getting down
Il pover hommy che non sera corty
And have a combat tenty erry morty.
from my elevation, and I did so. What it was that
Pompey saw so very peculiar in my appearance I
have never yet been able to find out. The fellow
opened his mouth from ear to ear, and shut his two
eyes as if he was endeavoring to crack nuts be-
tween the lids. Finally, throwing off his overcoat,
he made one spring for the staircase and -- I never
saw him again. I hurled after the scoundrel those
vehement words of Demosthenes --
and then turned to the darling of my heart, to the
Andrew O'Phlegethon, you really make haste to fly,
curtailed, the one-eyed, the shaggy-haired Diana.
Alas! what horrible vision affronted my eyes? Was
that a rat I saw skulking into his hole? Are these
the picked bones of the little angel who has been
cruelly devoured by the monster? Ye Gods! and
what do I behold? Is -- is that the departed spirit,
the shade, the ghost of my beloved puppy, which I
perceive sitting with a grace and face so melancholy,
in the corner? Hearken! for she speaks, and, hea-
vens! it is in the German of Schiller --
Alas! -- and are not her words too true?
"Unt stubby duk, so stubby dun Duk she! duk she!"`
And if I died at least I died
For thee -- for thee.
Sweet creature! she too has sacrificed herself in my
behalf! Dogless, niggerless, headless, what now re-
mains for the unhappy Signora Psyche Zenobia?
Alas -- nothing. I have done.
END OF VOL. I.