'I repeat that I am dying. But within me is a pledge of that affection--ah, how little! which you felt for me, Morella. And when my spirit departs shall the child live--thy child and mine, Morella's. But thy days shall be days of sorrow--that sorrow which is the most lasting of impressions, as the cypress is the most enduring of trees. For the hours of thy happiness are over, and Joy is not gathered twice in a life, as the roses of Pæstum twice in a year. Thou shalt not, then, play the Teian with Time, but, being ignorant of the myrtle and the vine, thou shalt bear about with thee thy shroud on earth, like the Moslemin at Mecca.' 'Morella!'--I cried--'Morella! how knowest thou this?'----but she turned away her face upon the pillow, and, a slight tremor coming over her limbs, she thus died, and I heard her voice no more. Yet, as she had foreseen, her child--to which in dying she had given birth, and which breathed not till the mother breathed no more--her child, a daughter, lived. And she grew strangely in size and intellect, and was the perfect resemblance of her who had departed, and I loved her with a love more fervent and more intense than I believed it possible to feel on earth. But ere long the Heaven of this pure affection became overcast; and Gloom, and Horror, and Grief came over it in clouds. I said the child grew strangely in stature and intelligence. Strange indeed was her rapid increase in bodily size--but terrible, oh! terrible were the tumultuous thoughts which crowded upon me while watching the development of her mental being. Could it be otherwise, when I daily discovered in the conceptions of the child the adult powers and faculties of the woman?--when the lessons of experience fell from the lips of infancy? and when the wisdom or the passions of maturity I found hourly gleaming from its full and speculative eye? When, I say, all this became evident to my appalled senses--when I could no longer hide it from my soul, nor throw it off from those perceptions which trembled to receive it, is it to be wondered at that suspicions of a nature fearful, and exciting, crept in upon my spirit, or that my thoughts fell back aghast upon the wild tales and thrilling theories of the entombed Morella? I snatched from the scrutiny of the world a being whom Destiny compelled me to adore, and in the rigid seclusion of my ancestral home, I watched with an agonizing anxiety over all which concerned my daughter.