The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 3Poe, Edgar Allan
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The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 3
Poe, Edgar Allan
American fiction -- 19th century; Fantasy fiction; Horror tales, American
And again I sunk into visions of Ligeia—and again, (what marvel
that I shudder while I write?), again there reached my ears a low
sob from the region of the ebony bed. But why shall I minutely
detail the unspeakable horrors of that night? Why shall I pause
to relate how, time after time, until near the period of the gray
dawn, this hideous drama of revivification was repeated; how each
terrific relapse was only into a sterner and apparently more
irredeemable death; how each agony wore the aspect of a struggle
with some invisible foe; and how each struggle was succeeded by I
know not what of wild change in the personal appearance of the
corpse? Let me hurry to a conclusion.
The greater part of the fearful night had worn away, and she who
had been dead, once again stirred—and now more vigorously than
hitherto, although arousing from a dissolution more appalling in
its utter hopelessness than any. I had long ceased to struggle or
to move, and remained sitting rigidly upon the ottoman, a
helpless prey to a whirl of violent emotions, of which extreme
awe was perhaps the least terrible, the least consuming. The
corpse, I repeat, stirred, and now more vigorously than before.
The hues of life flushed up with unwonted energy into the
countenance—the limbs relaxed—and, save that the eyelids were yet
pressed heavily together, and that the bandages and draperies of
the grave still imparted their charnel character to the figure, I
might have dreamed that Rowena had indeed shaken off, utterly,
the fetters of Death. But if this idea was not, even then,
altogether adopted, I could at least doubt no longer, when,
arising 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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