Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/274

254 But in death only was I fully impressed with the strength of her affection. For long hours, detaining my hand, would she pour out before me the over-flowing of a heart whose more than passionate devotion amounted to idolatry. How had I deserved to be so blessed by such confessions? how had I deserved to be so cursed with the removal of my beloved in the hour of her making them? But upon this subject I cannot bear to dilate. Let me say only, that in Ligeia's more than womanly abandonment to a love, alas all unmerited, all unworthily bestowed, I at length recognized the principle of her longing with so wildly earnest a desire for the life which was now fleeing so rapidly away. It is this wild longing, it is this eager vehemence of desire for life but for life, that I have no power to portray, no utterance capable of expressing.]

At high noon of the night in which she departed, beckoning me peremptorily to her side, she bade me repeat certain verses composed by herself not many days before. I obeyed her. They were these: [See The Conqueror Worm, pages 219-220.]

"O God !" half shrieked Ligeia, leaping to her feet and extending her arms aloft with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of these lines—"O God! ODivine Father! shall these things be undeviatingly so? shall this conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in Thee? Who—who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor? 'Mandoth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.'"

And now, as if exhausted with emotion, she suf-