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.

I cannot, for my soul, remember how,
when, or 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 first and most frequently
in some large, old, decaying city near
the Rhine. Of her family--I have surely
heard her speak. That it is of a
remotely ancient date cannot be doubted.
Ligeia! Ligeia! 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 finally
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 she,
the wan and the misty-winged Ashtophet
of idolatrous Egypt, presided, as they
tell, over marriages ill-omened, then
most surely she presided over mine.

There is one dear topic, however, on
which my memory falls 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 demeanor, or the
incomprehensible lightness and
elasticity of her footfall. She came and
departed as 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 marble
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 vision
about the slumbering 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 Verulam, speaking truly of
all the forms and genera of beauty,
"without some strangeness in the
proportion." Yet, although I saw that
the features of Ligeia were not of a
classic regularity--although I perceived
that her loveliness was indeed
"exquisite," and felt that there was
much of "strangeness" pervading it, yet
I have tried in vain to detect the
irregularity 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 medallions
of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar
perfection. There were the same
luxurious smoothness of surface, the
same scarcely perceptible tendency to
the aquiline, the same harmoniously
curved nostrils 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 glancing 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 fullness
and the spirituality, 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 Verulam
alludes. They were, I must believe, far
larger than the ordinary eyes of our own
race. They were even fuller than the
fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe
of the valley of Nourjahad. Yet it was
only at intervals--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 hue 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 tint. 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.

There is no point, among the many
incomprehensible anomalies of the
science of mind, more thrillingly
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 knowledge 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 expression.
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 existences
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 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,
save only through the weakness of his
feeble will."

Length of years, and subsequent
reflection, have enabled me to trace,
indeed, some remote connection between
this passage in the 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 the 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, distinctness and
placidity of her very low voice--and by
the fierce energy (rendered doubly
effective by contrast with her manner of
utterance) of the wild words which she
habitually 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 regard
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 thrillingly, this one
point in the nature of my wife has
forced itself, at this late period only,
upon my attention! I said her knowledge
was such as I have never known in
woman--but where breathes the man who
has traversed, and successfully, all the
wide areas of moral, physical, and
mathematical science? I saw not then
what I now clearly perceive, that the
acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic,
were astounding; yet I was sufficiently
aware of her infinite supremacy to
resign myself, with a child-like
confidence, to her guidance through the
chaotic world of metaphysical
investigation at which I was most busily
occupied during the earlier years of our
marriage. With how vast a triumph--with
how vivid a delight--with how much of
all that is ethereal in hope--did I
feel, as she bent over me in studies but
little sought--but less known--that
delicious vista by slow degrees
expanding before me, down whose long,
gorgeous, and all untrodden path, I
might at length pass onward to the goal
of a wisdom too divinely precious not to
be forbidden!

How poignant, then, must have been the
grief with which, after some years, I
beheld my well-grounded expectations
take wings to themselves and fly away!
Without Ligeia I was but as a child
groping benighted. Her presence, her
readings alone, rendered vividly
luminous the many mysteries of the
transcendentalism in which we were
immersed. Wanting the radiant lustre of
her eyes, letters, lambent and golden,
grew duller than Saturnian lead. And now
those eyes shone less and less
frequently upon the pages over which I
pored. Ligeia grew ill. The wild eyes
blazed with a too--too glorious
effulgence; the pale fingers became of
the transparent waxen hue of the grave,
and the blue veins upon the lofty
forehead swelled and sank impetuously
with the tides of the gentle emotion. I
saw that she must die--and I struggled
desperately in spirit with the grim
Azrael. And the struggles of the
passionate wife were, to my
astonishment, even more energetic than
my own. There had been much in her stern
nature to impress me with the belief
that, to her, death would have come
without its terrors;--but not so. Words
are impotent to convey any just idea of
the fierceness of resistance with which
she wrestled with the Shadow. I groaned
in anguish at the pitiable spectacle. 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 the
uttermost folly. Yet not until the last
instance, amid the most convulsive
writhings of her fierce spirit, was
shaken the external placidity of her
demeanor. Her voice grew more
gentle--grew more low--yet I would not
wish to dwell upon the wild meaning of
the quietly uttered words. My brain
reeled as I hearkened entranced, to a
melody more than mortal--to assumptions
and aspirations which mortality had
never before known.

That she loved me I should not have
doubted; and I might have been easily
aware that, in a bosom such as hers,
love would have reigned no ordinary
passion. But in death only, was I fully
impressed with the strength of her
affection. For long hours, detaining my
hand, would she pour out before me the
overflowing of a heart whose more than
passionate devotion amounted to
idolatry. How had I deserved to be so
blessed by such confessions?--how had I
deserved to be so cursed with the
removal of my beloved in the hour of her
making them, But upon this subject I
cannot bear to dilate. Let me say only,
that in Ligeia's more than womanly
abandonment to a love, alas! all
unmerited, all unworthily bestowed, I at
length recognized the principle of her
longing with so wildly earnest a desire
for the life which was now fleeing so
rapidly away. It is this wild
longing--it is this eager vehemence of
desire for life--but for life--that I
have no power to portray--no utterance
capable of expressing.

At high noon of the night in which she
departed, beckoning me, peremptorily, to
her side, she bade me repeat certain
verses composed by herself not many days
before. I obeyed her.--They were
these:

 Lo! 'tis a gala night Within the
lonesome latter years! An angel throng,
bewinged, bedight In veils, and drowned
in tears, Sit in a theatre, to see A
play of hopes and fears, While the
orchestra breathes fitfully The music of
the spheres.

 Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low, And hither and
thither fly; Mere puppets they, who come
and go At bidding of vast formless
things That shift the scenery to and
fro, Flapping from out their Condor
wings Invisible Wo!

 That motley drama!--oh, be sure It
shall not be forgot! With its Phantom
chased forever more, By a crowd that
seize it not, Through a circle that ever
returneth in To the self-same spot, And
much of Madness and more of Sin And
Horror the soul of the plot.

 But see, amid the mimic rout, A
crawling shape intrude! A blood-red
thing that writhes from out The scenic
solitude! It writhes!--it writhes!--with
mortal pangs The mimes become its food,
And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs In
human gore imbued.

 Out--out are the lights--out all! And
over each quivering form, The curtain, a
funeral pall, Comes down with the rush
of a storm, And the angels, all pallid
and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man," And
its hero the Conqueror Worm.

"O God!" half shrieked Ligeia, leaping
to her feet and extending her arms aloft
with a spasmodic movement, as I made an
end of these lines--"O God! O Divine
Father!--shall these things be
undeviatingly so?--shall this Conqueror
be not once conquered? Are we not part
and parcel in Thee? Who--who knoweth the
mysteries of the will with its vigor?
Man doth not yield him to the angels,
nor unto death utterly, save only
through the weakness of his feeble
will."

And now, as if exhausted with emotion,
she suffered her white arms to fall, and
returned solemnly to her bed of death.
And as she breathed her last sighs,
there came mingled with them a low
murmur from her lips. I bent to them my
ear and distinguished, again, the
concluding words of the passage in
Glanvill--"Man doth not yield him to the
angels, nor unto death utterly, save
only through the weakness of his feeble
will."

She died;--and I, crushed into the very
dust with sorrow, could no longer endure
the lonely desolation of my dwelling in
the dim and decaying city by the Rhine.
I had no lack of what the world calls
wealth. Ligeia had brought me far more,
very far more than ordinarily falls to
the lot of mortals. After a few months,
therefore, of weary and aimless
wandering, I purchased, and put in some
repair, an abbey, which I shall not
name, in one of the wildest and least
frequented portions of fair England. The
gloomy and dreary grandeur of the
building, the almost savage aspect of
the domain, the many melancholy 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 incipient madness might
have been discovered in the gorgeous and
fantastic draperies, in the solemn
carvings of Egypt, in the wild cornices
and furniture, in the Bedlam patterns of
the carpets of tufted gold! I had become
a bounden slave in the trammels of
opium, and my labors and my orders had
taken a coloring from my dreams. But
these absurdities must not pause to
detail. Let me speak only of that one
chamber, ever accursed, whither in a
moment of mental alienation, I led from
the altar as my bride--as the successor
of the unforgotten Ligeia--the
fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena
Trevanion, of Tremaine.

There is no individual portion of the
architecture and decoration of that
bridal chamber which is not now visibly
before me. Where were the souls of the
haughty family of the bride, when,
through thirst of gold, they permitted
to pass the threshold of an apartment so
bedecked, a maiden and a daughter so
beloved? I have said that I minutely
remember the details of the chamber--yet
I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep
moment--and here there was no system, no
keeping, in the fantastic display, to
take hold upon the memory. The room lay
in a high turret of the castellated
abbey, was pentagonal in shape, and of
capacious size. Occupying the whole
southern face of the pentagon was the
sole window--an immense sheet of
unbroken glass from Venice--a single
pane, and tinted of a leaden hue, so
that the rays of either the sun or moon,
passing through it, fell with a ghastly
lustre on the objects within. Over the
upper portion of this huge window,
extended the trellice-work of an aged
vine, which clambered up the massy walls
of the turret. The ceiling, of
gloomy-looking oak, was excessively
lofty, vaulted, and elaborately fretted
with the wildest and most grotesque
specimens of a semi-Gothic,
semi-Druidical device. From out the most
central recess of this melancholy
vaulting, depended, by a single chain of
gold with long links, a huge censer of
the same metal, Saracenic in pattern,
and with many perforations so contrived
that there writhed in and out of them,
as if endued with a serpent vitality, a
continual succession of parti-colored
fires.

Some few ottomans and golden candelabra,
of Eastern figure, were in various
stations about--and there was the couch,
too--bridal couch--of an Indian model,
and low, and sculptured of solid ebony,
with a pall-like canopy above. In each
of the angles of the chamber stood on
end a gigantic sarcophagus of black
granite, from the tombs of the kings
over against Luxor, with their aged lids
full of immemorial sculpture. But in the
draping of the apartment lay, alas! the
chief phantasy of all. The lofty walls,
gigantic in height--even
unproportionably so--were hung from
summit to foot, in vast folds, with a
heavy and massive-looking
tapestry--tapestry of a material which
was found alike as a carpet on the
floor, as a covering for the ottomans
and the ebony bed, as a canopy for the
bed, and as the gorgeous volutes of the
curtains which partially shaded the
window. The material was the richest
cloth of gold. It was spotted all over,
at irregular intervals, with arabesque
figures, about a foot in diameter, and
wrought upon the cloth in patterns of
the most jetty black. But these figures
partook of the true character of the
arabesque only when regarded from a
single point of view. By a contrivance
now common, and indeed traceable to a
very remote period of antiquity, they
were made changeable in aspect. To one
entering the room, they bore the
appearance of simple monstrosities; but
upon a farther advance, this appearance
gradually departed; and step by step, as
the visitor moved his station in the
chamber, he saw himself surrounded by an
endless succession of the ghastly forms
which belong to the superstition of the
Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers
of the monk. The phantasmagoric effect
was vastly heightened by the artificial
introduction of a strong continual
current of wind behind the
draperies--giving a hideous and uneasy
animation to the whole.

In halls such as these--in a bridal
chamber such as this--I passed, with the
Lady of Tremaine, the unhallowed hours
of the first month of our
marriage--passed them with but little
disquietude. That my wife dreaded the
fierce moodiness of my temper--that she
shunned me and loved me but little--I
could not help perceiving; but it gave
me rather pleasure than otherwise. I
loathed her with a hatred belonging more
to demon than to man. My memory flew
back, (oh, with what intensity of
regret!) to Ligeia, the beloved, the
august, the beautiful, the entombed. I
revelled in recollections of her purity,
of her wisdom, of her lofty, her
ethereal nature, of her passionate, her
idolatrous love. Now, then, did my
spirit fully and freely burn with more
than all the fires of her own. In the
excitement of my opium dreams (for I was
habitually fettered in the shackles of
the drug) I would call aloud upon her
name, during the silence of the night,
or among the sheltered recesses of the
glens by day, as if, through the wild
eagerness, the solemn passion, the
consuming ardor of my longing for the
departed, I could restore her to the
pathway she had abandoned--ah, could it
be forever?--upon the earth.

About the commencement of the second
month of the marriage, the Lady Rowena
was attacked with sudden illness, from
which her recovery was slow. The fever
which consumed her rendered her nights
uneasy; and in her perturbed state of
half-slumber, she spoke of sounds, and
of motions, in and about the chamber of
the turret, which I concluded had no
origin save in the distemper of her
fancy, or perhaps in the phantasmagoric
influences of the chamber itself. She
became at length convalescent--finally
well. Yet but a brief period elapsed,
ere a second more violent disorder again
threw her upon a bed of suffering; and
from this attack her frame, at all times
feeble, never altogether recovered. Her
illnesses were, after this epoch, of
alarming character, and of more alarming
recurrence, defying alike the knowledge
and the great exertions of her
physicians. With the increase of the
chronic disease which had thus,
apparently, taken too sure hold upon her
constitution to be eradicated by human
means, I could not fall to observe a
similar increase in the nervous
irritation of her temperament, and in
her excitability by trivial causes of
fear. She spoke again, and now more
frequently and pertinaciously, of the
sounds--of the slight sounds--and of the
unusual motions among the tapestries, to
which she had formerly alluded.

One night, near the closing in of
September, she pressed this distressing
subject with more than usual emphasis
upon my attention. She had just awakened
from an unquiet slumber, and I had been
watching, with feelings half of anxiety,
half of vague terror, the workings of
her emaciated countenance. I sat by the
side of her ebony bed, upon one of the
ottomans of India. She partly arose, and
spoke, in an earnest low whisper, of
sounds which she then heard, but which I
could not hear--of motions which she
then saw, but which I could not
perceive. The wind was rushing hurriedly
behind the tapestries, and I wished to
show her (what, let me confess it, I
could not all believe) that those almost
inarticulate breathings, and those very
gentle variations of the figures upon
the wall, were but the natural effects
of that customary rushing of the wind.
But a deadly pallor, overspreading her
face, had proved to me that my exertions
to reassure her would be fruitless. She
appeared to be fainting, and no
attendants were within call. I
remembered where was deposited a
decanter of light wine which had been
ordered by her physicians, and hastened
across the chamber to procure it. But,
as I stepped beneath the light of the
censer, two circumstances of a startling
nature attracted my attention. I had
felt that some palpable although
invisible object had passed lightly by
my person; and I saw that there lay upon
the golden carpet, in the very middle of
the rich lustre thrown from the censer,
a shadow--a faint, indefinite shadow of
angelic aspect--such as might be fancied
for the shadow of a shade. But I was
wild with the excitement of an
immoderate dose of opium, and heeded
these things but little, nor spoke of
them to Rowena. Having found the wine, I
recrossed the chamber, and poured out a
gobletful, which I held to the lips of
the fainting lady. She had now partially
recovered, however, and took the vessel
herself, while I sank upon an ottoman
near me, with my eyes fastened upon her
person. It was then that I became
distinctly aware of a gentle footfall
upon the carpet, and near the couch; and
in a second thereafter, 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 my own
perception that, immediately subsequent
to the fall of the ruby-drops, 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 parti-colored 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 seen 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
thousand 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 gazing
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 superstitious
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 soul was awakened within me. I
resolutely and perseveringly kept my
attention riveted 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 feeble, 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
no sufficiently energetic expression, I
felt 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--that Rowena still lived.
It was necessary that some immediate
exertion be made; yet 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 minutes--and this I
could not venture to do. I therefore
struggled alone in my endeavors to call
back the spirit ill hovering. In a short
period it was certain, however, that a
relapse had taken place; the color
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
clamminess and coldness overspread
rapidly the surface of the body; and all
the usual rigorous illness 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 issuing 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 afterward they
relaxed, disclosing a bright line of the
pearly teeth. Amazement now struggled in
my bosom with the profound awe which had
hitherto reigned there alone. I felt
that my vision grew dim, that my reason
wandered; and it was only by a violent
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 suggest.
But in vain. Suddenly, the color fled,
the pulsation ceased, the lips resumed
the expression of the dead, and, in an
instant afterward, the whole body took
upon itself the icy chilliness, the
livid hue, the intense rigidity, the
sunken outline, and all 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
region 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; how each terrific relapse was
only into a sterner and apparently more
irredeemable death; how each agony wore
the aspect of a struggle with some
invisible foe; and how each struggle was
succeeded by I know not what of wild
change in the personal appearance of the
corpse? Let me hurry to a conclusion.

The greater part of the fearful night
had worn away, and she who had been
dead, 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, tottering, with
feeble steps, with closed eyes, and with
the manner of one bewildered in a dream,
the thing that was enshrouded advanced
boldly 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 stature, the demeanor
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
unappeasable. Could it, indeed, be the
living Rowena who confronted me? Could
it indeed be Rowena at all--the
fair-haired, the blue-eyed Lady Rowena
Trevanion of Tremaine? Why, why should I
doubt it? The bandage lay heavily about
the mouth--but then might it not be the
mouth of the breathing Lady of Tremaine?
And the cheeks-there were the roses as
in her noon of life--yes, these might
indeed be the fair cheeks of the living
Lady of Tremaine. And the chin, with its
dimples, as in health, might it not be
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 slowly opened the eyes
of the figure which stood before me.
"Here then, at least," I shrieked aloud,
"can I never--can I never be
mistaken--these are the full, and the
black, and the wild eyes--of my lost
love--of the lady--of the LADY LIGEIA."




THE END

 