Morella — A Tale
Auto kath’ auto meth’ auton, mono eides aei ou.Itself — alone by itself — eternally one and single.
-Plato, Sympos.
With a feeling of deep but 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 ...
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Ulalume
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Ulalume — A Ballad
The skies they were ashen and sober;The leaves they were crispéd and sere —The leaves they were withering and sere:It was night, in the lonesome OctoberOf my most immemorial year:It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,In the misty mid region of Weir: —It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. Here once, through an alley Titanic,Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul —Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.These were days when my heart was volcanicAs the scoriac rivers that roll —As the lavas that restlessly rollTheir ...
The Fall of the House of Usher
The Fall of the House of Usher
Son cœur est un luth suspendu; Sitôt qu’on le touche il rèsonne. De Béranger.
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 melancholy 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 insufferable; for the ...
The Masque of the Red Death
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The Masque of the Red Death
The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had been ever so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avator and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleedings at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest-ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease were ...