belt of foam, with the exception that she now lay more along. I took courage and looked once again upon the scene.

Never shall I forget the sensations of awe, horror, and admiration, with which I gazed about me. The boat appeared to be hanging, as if by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface of a funnel vast in circumference, prodigious in depth, and whose perfectly smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity with which they spun round, and for the gleaming and ghastly radiance which they shot forth, as the rays of the full moon, from the circular rift among the clouds which I have already described, streamed in a flood of golden glory along the black walls, and far away down into the innermost recesses of the abyss.

The rays of the moon seemed to search out the very bottom of the profound gulf; but still I could make out nothing distinctly, on account of a thick mist in which everything there was . enveloped. This mist or spray was no doubt occasioned by the clashing of the great walls of the funnel, as they all met together at the bottom; but the yell that went up to the heavens out of that abyss I dare not venture to describe.

Looking about me upon the wide waste of liquid ebony in which we were thus borne, I perceived that our boat was not the only object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below us were visible fragments of vessels, large masses of building timber and trunks of trees, with many smaller articles, such as pieces of house furniture, broken boxes, barrels and staves. I have already described the unnatural curiosity which had taken the place of my original terrors. I now began to watch with a strange interest the numerous things that floated in our company. I must have been delirious, for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents to the foam below. This fir-tree,' I found myself at one time saying, 'will certainly be the next thing to plunge and disappear; and then I was disappointed to find that the wreck of a Dutch merchant ship overtook it and went down before it. While in this position the old fisherman began to observe that the lighter objects in the whirl, such as

casks, were much longer in sliding down the slope of the funnel than heavy objects, such as the schooner. This afforded him some hope of escape. He therefore lashed himself to a cask and threw himself into the water, hoping that he might not be plunged into the abyss below before the turn of the tide :

The result was precisely what I had hoped it would be. It might have been an hour or thereabout, after my quitting the schooner, when, having descended to a vast distance below me, it made three or four wild gyrations in rapid succession, and, bearing my loved brother with it, plunged headlong, at once and for ever, into the chaos of foam below. The barrel to which I was attached sunk very little farther than half the distance between the bottom of the gulf and the place where I leaped overboard, when a great change took place in the character of the whirlpool. The slope of the sides of the vast funnel became momently less and less steep. The gyrations of the whirl grew, gradually, less and less violent. By degrees, the froth and the mist disappeared, and the bottom of the gulf seemed slowly to uprise. The sky was clear, the wind had gone down, and the full moon was setting radiantly in the west, when I found myself on the surface of the ocean, in full view of the shores of Lofoden, and above the spot where the pool of the Moskoeström had been.

Of all Poe's tales, the one which he himself esteemed most highly is that entitled Ligeia. It is one of several which stand distinguished from his other tales by a peculiar character. In it, as in all his more powerful writings, the effect left on the mind is a feeling of awe and horror; but this feeling is in Ligeia produced by metaphysical means. Instead of the physical terror of the story of M. Valdemar, or the circumstantial dread of such a tale as the Descent into the Maelström, we find in Ligeia and several other pieces strange and

daring plunges into regions of speculation which thrill us with a sense of the forbidden, as though prying into Nature's mysteries in a fashion not meet for man. The story is as follows: it is told, like most of the others, in the first person; the writer apparently having 'lost his own identity in the temporary conviction of the truth of what he tells.

Accordingly the constantly-recurring I had married the Lady Ligeia, having met her in some old decaying city on the Rhine. There was always something strange about her: her husband never knew what was her paternal name. Her eyes had an expression which suggested, in a fashion which bewildered, dim remembrances of some pre-existent state. Her beauty and learning were equally great: but her main characteristic was her tremendous strength of will.

She gradually faded, in early youth; but this wonderful volition appeared to struggle at every step with advancing death. She wrestled with the advancing shadow with a desperate fierceness of resistance.' She was resolved that she would not leave her husband; she was determined that she would not die. Death came, notwithstanding; but in the last moment of life she sprang upon her feet and shrieked aloud those strangely suggestive words of Joseph Glanvill, ‘Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor to death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.' She sank down, exhausted; and as she breathed her last sigh, her husband heard a low murmur come from her lips. He bent his ear to them, and heard the same words repeated.

The husband sank into a morbid state, described with great power; but after some time he again married. The dwelling where he and his wife lived, and the appearance of their chamber, are described with more than Poe's usual power of exciting a creeping sensation of awe. Mysterious sounds and footsteps were heard about that chamber. Strange shadows from invisible figures were cast upon its floor. After several mysterious fits of illness the second wife died, and her husband watched at night beside her shrouded form.

As he sat he heard a low sob come from the bed of death. He watched in an agony of superstitious terror. After some minutes a feeble tinge of colour began to flush the dead face. The husband thought that life was not gone, and used every means of restoring it. But in a very short time all signs of life had disappeared, and the body lay more dead in appearance than ever.

An hour passed, and a sigh was again heard from the bed. The lips trembled and parted. A partial glow came over the forehead and cheek; the heart feebly beat. The husband chafed and bathed temples and hands, and used every exertion which no little medical reading could suggest. But in vain. Suddenly the colour fled, and the pulsation ceased; and in an instant the body assumed the appearance of that which has for many days been buried.

Through that unspeakably horrible night, time after time, until near the period of the grey dawn, this hideous drama of revivification was repeated; each

terrific relapse was only into a sterner and apparently more irredeemable death; each agony wore the aspect of a struggle with some invisible foe; and each struggle was preceded by I know not what of wild change in the personal appearance of the corpse.'

Once more, as dawn approached, rising from a more appalling and hopeless dissolution than any before it, the dead stirred with a more vigorous life. The hues of life flushed up, the limbs relaxed; and, rising from the bed, tottering with feeble steps, with closed eyes, and with the manner of one bewildered in a dream, the thing that was enshrouded advanced boldly and palpably into the middle of the apartment.' We give the rest

in the writer's words :

I trembled not; I stirred not; for a crowd of unutterable fancies connected with the air, the stature, the demeanour, of the figure, rushing through my brain, had paralysed-had chilled me into stone. I stirred not, but gazed upon the apparition. There was a mad disorder in my thoughts-a tumult unappeasable. Could it indeed be the living Rowena who confronted me? Could it indeed be Rowena at all-the fair-haired, blue-eyed Lady Rowena? Then, why should I doubt it? The bandage lay heavily about the mouth; but then might it not be the mouth of the breathing Lady of Tremaine ? And the cheeks, there

were the roses as in her noon of life—yet these might be the fair cheeks of the living Lady of Tremaine. But had she then grown taller since her malady? What inexpressible madness seized me with that thought? One bound, and I had reached her feet! shrinking from my touch she let fall from her head, unloosened, the ghastly cerements which had confined it, and then streamed forth into the rushing atmosphere of the chamber huge masses of long and dishevelled hair; it was blacker than the raven wings of midnight. And now slowly opened the eyes of the figure that stood before me. Here, then, at least,' I shrieked