| 1 |
And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. |
| 2 |
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. |
| 3 |
Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will. |
| 4 |
I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia. |
| 5 |
Long years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering. |
| 6 |
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. |
| 7 |
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? |
| 8 |
And, indeed, if ever that spirit which is entitled Romance - 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. |
| 9 |
There is one dear topic, however, on which my memory falls me not. It is the person of Ligeia. |
| 10 |
I would in vain attempt to portray the majesty, the quiet ease, of her demeanor, or the incomprehensible lightness and elasticity of her footfall. |
| 11 |
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. |
| 12 |
Yet her features were not of that regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the heathen. |
| 13 |
"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." |
| 14 |
And then I peered into the large eves of Ligeia. For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique. It might have been, too, that in these eves of my beloved lay the secret to which Lord Verulam alludes. |
| 15 |
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. |
| 16 |
Those eyes! those large, those shining, those divine orbs! they became to me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of astrologers. |
| 17 |
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. |
| 18 |
And (strange, oh strangest mystery of all!) I found, in the commonest objects of the universe, a circle of analogies to that expression. |
| 19 |
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. |
| 20 |
I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia: it was immense - such as I have never known in woman. |
| 21 |
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. |
| 22 |
And the struggles of the passionate wife were, to my astonishment, even more energetic than my own. |
| 23 |
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. |
| 24 |
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. |
| 25 |
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. |
| 26 |
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. |
| 27 |
Let me hurry to a conclusion. |
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