MORELLA

Itself, by itself, solely, one
everlasting, 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 conviction 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 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 reason I
could not imagine, were her favourite
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 example.

In all this, if I err not, my reason had
little to do. My convictions, or I
forget myself, were in no manner 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. Persuaded of this, I abandoned
myself implicitly to the guidance of my
wife, and entered with an unflinching
heart into the intricacies of her
studies. And then--then, when poring
over forbidden pages, I felt a forbidden
spirit enkindling 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 there fell a shadow upon my
soul, and I grew pale, and shuddered
inwardly 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 Paliggenedia 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 saneness of 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, thereby distinguishing
us from other beings that think, and
giving us our personal identity. But the
principium indivduationis, the notion of
that identity which at death is or is
not lost for ever, was to me, at all
times, a consideration of intense
interest; not more from the perplexing
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
unknown, 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, 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 decease? I did; but
the fragile spirit clung to its tenement
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 bedside. 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.

"It is a day of days," she said, as I
approached; "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 daughters of heaven and
death!"

I kissed her forehead, and she
continued:

"I am dying, yet shall I live."

"Morella!"

"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 I am dying. But within me is a
pledge of that affection--ah, how
little!--which thou didst feel 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 Paestum 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 the 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,
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
than I had believed it possible to feel
for any denizen of earth.

But, ere long the heaven of this pure
affection became darkened, 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 entombed
Morella? I snatched from the scrutiny of
the world a being whom destiny compelled
me to adore, and in the rigorous
seclusion of my 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 poured 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 shuddered 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 lustra of her life,
and as yet 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 existence, the latter had
received no impressions from the outward
world, save 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, with
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 whispered within the ears
of the holy man the syllables--Morella?
What more than fiend convulsed the
features of my child, and overspread
them with hues of death, as starting at
that scarcely audible 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, fell
those few simple sounds within my ear,
and thence like molten lead rolled
hissingly into my brain. Years--years
may pass away, but the memory of that
epoch never. Nor 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
ripples 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 channel where I laid the
second.--Morella.

THE END 