"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. For long hours, detaining my hand, would she pour out before me the overflowing of a heart whose more than passionate devotion amounted to idolatry." (Oh, the indecency of all this endless intimate talk!) "How had I deserved to be blessed by such confessions?" (Another man would have felt himself cursed.) "How had I deserved to be 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! unmerited, all unworthily bestowed, I at length recognized the principle of her longing with so wildly earnest a desire for the life which was fleeing so rapidly away. It is this wild longing--it is this vehement desire for life--_but_ for life--that I have no power to portray--no utterance capable of expressing." Well, that is ghastly enough, in all conscience. "And from them that have not shall be taken away even that which they have." "To him that hath life shall be given life, and from him that hath not life shall be taken away even that life which he hath." Or her either. These terribly conscious birds like Poe and his Ligeia deny the very life that is in them, they want to turn it all into talk, into _knowing._ And so life, which will not be known, leaves them. But poor Ligeia, how could she help it. It was her doom. All the centuries of the SPIRIT, all the years of American rebellion against the Holy Ghost, had done it to her. She dies, when she would rather do anything than die. And when she dies the clue, which he only lived to grasp, dies with her. Foiled! Foiled! No wonder she shrieks with her last breath. On the last day Ligeia dictates to her husband a poem. As poems go, it is rather false, meretricious. But put yourself in Ligeia's place, and it is real enough, and ghastly beyond bearing. "Out, out are all the lights--but all! And over each quivering form The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, And the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy 'Man,' And its hero the Conqueror Worm." Which is the American equivalent for a William Blake poem. For Blake, too, was one of these ghastly, obscene "Knowers." "'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! O Divine 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 the angels, _nor unto death utterly_, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.'" So Ligeia dies. And yields to death at least partly. _Anche troppo._