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.
In 1874 I began drawing attention to the fact that unknown and unreprinted poetry by Edgar Poe was in existence.
Nothing further then he uttered – not a feather then he fluttered – Till I scarcely more than muttered, “Other friends have flown before – On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.” Then the bird said, “Nevermore.
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.
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore. “Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore – Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!” Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.
When reason returned with the morning – when I had slept off the fumes of the night’s debauch – I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched.
The memory of a past happiness is the anguish of today.
One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; – hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; – hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; – hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin.
To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable. There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.
My heart beat calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence.
Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells – From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
The winters in the latitude of Sullivan’s Island are seldom very severe, and in the fall of the year it is a rare event indeed.
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.
I believe, indeed, that what I could not refrain from saying to him on this head had the effect of inducing him to push on. While, therefore, I cannot but lament the most unfortunate and bloody events which immediately arose from my advice, I must still be allowed to feel some degree of gratification at having been instrumental, however remotely, in opening to the eye of science one of the most intensely exciting secrets which has ever engrossed its attention.
There may be a class of beings, human once, but now invisible to humanity, to whom, from afar, our disorder may seem order – our unpicturesqueness picturesque, in a word, the earth-angels, for whose scrutiny more especially than our own, and for whose death – refined appreciation of the beautiful, may have been set in array by God the wide landscape-gardens of the hemispheres.
Luchesi cannot tell amontillado from a sherry.
While the male is absent at sea in search of food, the female remains on duty, and it is only upon the return of her partner that she ventures abroad.
On this home by Horror haunted – tell me truly, I implore – Is there – is there balm in Gilead.
How often we forget all time, when lone Admiring Nature’s universal throne; Her woods – her wilds – her mountains – the intense Reply of HERS to OUR intelligence!
Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?