The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 3 Read online

  MORELLA

  Itself, by itself, solely, one everlasting, and single.

  PLATO: SYMPOS.

  WITH a feeling of deep yet most singular affection I regarded my friendMorella. Thrown by accident into her society many years ago, my soulfrom our first meeting, burned with fires it had never before known; butthe fires were not of Eros, and bitter and tormenting to my spirit wasthe gradual conviction that I could in no manner define their unusualmeaning or regulate their vague intensity. Yet we met; and fate bound ustogether at the altar, and I never spoke of passion nor thought oflove. She, however, shunned society, and, attaching herself to me alonerendered me happy. It is a happiness to wonder; it is a happiness todream.

  Morella’s erudition was profound. As I hope to live, her talents were ofno common order--her powers of mind were gigantic. I felt this, and, inmany matters, became her pupil. I soon, however, found that, perhapson account of her Presburg education, she placed before me a number ofthose mystical writings which are usually considered the mere dross ofthe early German literature. These, for what reason I could not imagine,were her favourite and constant study--and that in process of timethey became my own, should be attributed to the simple but effectualinfluence 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 wasany tincture of the mysticism which I read to be discovered, unless Iam greatly mistaken, either in my deeds or in my thoughts. Persuadedof this, I abandoned myself implicitly to the guidance of my wife, andentered with an unflinching heart into the intricacies of her studies.And then--then, when poring over forbidden pages, I felt a forbiddenspirit enkindling within me--would Morella place her cold hand upon myown, and rake up from the ashes of a dead philosophy some low, singularwords, whose strange meaning burned themselves in upon my memory. Andthen, hour after hour, would I linger by her side, and dwell upon themusic 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 shudderedinwardly at those too unearthly tones. And thus, joy suddenly faded intohorror, and the most beautiful became the most hideous, as Hinnon becameGe-Henna.

  It is unnecessary to state the exact character of those disquisitionswhich, growing out of the volumes I have mentioned, formed, for solong a time, almost the sole conversation of Morella and myself. Bythe learned in what might be termed theological morality they will bereadily conceived, and by the unlearned they would, at all events,be little understood. The wild Pantheism of Fichte; the modifiedPaliggenedia of the Pythagoreans; and, above all, the doctrines ofIdentity as urged by Schelling, were generally the points of discussionpresenting the most of beauty to the imaginative Morella. That identitywhich is termed personal, Mr. Locke, I think, truly defines to consistin the saneness of rational being. And since by person we understand anintelligent essence having reason, and since there is a consciousnesswhich always accompanies thinking, it is this which makes us all tobe that which we call ourselves, thereby distinguishing us fromother beings that think, and giving us our personal identity. But theprincipium indivduationis, the notion of that identity which at deathis or is not lost for ever, was to me, at all times, a consideration ofintense interest; not more from the perplexing and exciting nature ofits consequences, than from the marked and agitated manner in whichMorella mentioned them.

  But, indeed, the time had now arrived when the mystery of my wife’smanner oppressed me as a spell. I could no longer bear the touch of herwan fingers, nor the low tone of her musical language, nor the lustreof her melancholy eyes. And she knew all this, but did not upbraid; sheseemed conscious of my weakness or my folly, and, smiling, called itfate. She seemed also conscious of a cause, to me unknown, for thegradual alienation of my regard; but she gave me no hint or token ofits nature. Yet was she woman, and pined away daily. In time the crimsonspot settled steadily upon the cheek, and the blue veins upon the paleforehead became prominent; and one instant my nature melted into pity,but in, next I met the glance of her meaning eyes, and then my soulsickened and became giddy with the giddiness of one who gazes downwardinto some dreary and unfathomable abyss.

  Shall I then say that I longed with an earnest and consuming desire forthe moment of Morella’s decease? I did; but the fragile spirit clung toits tenement of clay for many days, for many weeks and irksome months,until my tortured nerves obtained the mastery over my mind, and I grewfurious through delay, and, with the heart of a fiend, cursed the daysand the hours and the bitter moments, which seemed to lengthen andlengthen as her gentle life declined, like shadows in the dying of theday.

  But one autumnal evening, when the winds lay still in heaven, Morellacalled me to her bedside. There was a dim mist over all the earth, anda warm glow upon the waters, and amid the rich October leaves of theforest, a rainbow from the firmament had surely fallen.

  “It is a day of days,” she said, as I approached; “a day of all dayseither to live or die. It is a fair day for the sons of earth andlife--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 inlife 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 spiritdeparts shall the child live--thy child and mine, Morella’s. But thydays shall be days of sorrow--that sorrow which is the most lasting ofimpressions, as the cypress is the most enduring of trees. For the hoursof thy happiness are over and joy is not gathered twice in a life, asthe roses of Paestum twice in a year. Thou shalt no longer, then, playthe 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 theMoslemin at Mecca.”

  “Morella!” I cried, “Morella! how knowest thou this?” but she turnedaway 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 givenbirth, which breathed not until the mother breathed no more, her child,a daughter, lived. And she grew strangely in stature and intellect, andwas the perfect resemblance of her who had departed, and I loved herwith a love more fervent than I had believed it possible to feel for anydenizen of earth.

  But, ere long the heaven of this pure affection became darkened, andgloom, and horror, and grief swept over it in clouds. I said the childgrew strangely in stature and intelligence. Strange, indeed, was herrapid increase in bodily size, but terrible, oh! terrible were thetumultuous thoughts which crowded upon me while watching the developmentof her mental being. Could it be otherwise, when I daily discoveredin the conceptions of the child the adult powers and faculties of thewoman? when the lessons of experience fell from the lips of infancy? andwhen the wisdom or the passions of maturity I found hourly gleaming fromits full and speculative eye? When, I say, all this became evident to myappalled senses, when I could no longer hide it from my soul, nor throwit off from those perceptions which trembled to receive it, is it to bewondered at that suspicions, of a nature fearful and exciting, crept inupon my spirit, or that my thoughts fell back aghast upon the wild talesand thrilling theories of the entombed Morella? I snatched from thescrutiny of the world a being whom destiny compelled me to adore, andin the rigorous seclusion of my home, watched with an agonizing anxietyover all which concerned the beloved.

  And as years rolled away, and I gazed day after day upon her holy, andmild, and eloquent face, and poured over her maturing form, day afterday did I discover new points of resemblance in the child to her mother,the melancholy and the dead. And hourly grew darker these shadows ofsimilitude, and more full, and more definite, and more perplexing, andmore hideously terrible in their aspect. For that her smile was
like hermother’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 intenseand bewildering meaning. And in the contour of the high forehead, andin the ringlets of the silken hair, and in the wan fingers which buriedthemselves therein, and in the sad musical tones of her speech, andabove all--oh, above all, in the phrases and expressions of the dead onthe lips of the loved and the living, I found food for consuming thoughtand horror, for a worm that would not die.

  Thus passed away two lustra of her life, and as yet my daughterremained nameless upon the earth. “My child,” and “my love,” were thedesignations usually prompted by a father’s affection, and the rigidseclusion of her days precluded all other intercourse. Morella’s namedied with her at her death. Of the mother I had never spoken to thedaughter, it was impossible to speak. Indeed, during the brief period ofher existence, the latter had received no impressions from the outwardworld, save such as might have been afforded by the narrow limits of herprivacy. But at length the ceremony of baptism presented to my mind,in its unnerved and agitated condition, a present deliverance from theterrors 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, ofmy own and foreign lands, came thronging to my lips, with many, manyfair titles of the gentle, and the happy, and the good. What promptedme then to disturb the memory of the buried dead? What demon urged me tobreathe that sound, which in its very recollection was wont to make ebbthe purple blood in torrents from the temples to the heart? What fiendspoke from the recesses of my soul, when amid those dim aisles, and inthe silence of the night, I whispered within the ears of the holy manthe syllables--Morella? What more than fiend convulsed the features ofmy child, and overspread them with hues of death, as starting at thatscarcely audible sound, she turned her glassy eyes from the earth toheaven, and falling prostrate on the black slabs of our ancestral vault,responded--“I am here!”

  Distinct, coldly, calmly distinct, fell those few simple sounds withinmy ear, and thence like molten lead rolled hissingly into my brain.Years--years may pass away, but the memory of that epoch never. Nor wasI indeed ignorant of the flowers and the vine--but the hemlock and thecypress overshadowed me night and day. And I kept no reckoning of timeor place, and the stars of my fate faded from heaven, and therefore theearth grew dark, and its figures passed by me like flitting shadows,and among them all I beheld only--Morella. The winds of the firmamentbreathed but one sound within my ears, and the ripples upon the seamurmured evermore--Morella. But she died; and with my own hands I boreher to the tomb; and I laughed with a long and bitter laugh as I foundno traces of the first in the channel where I laid the second.--Morella.