e
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 will with its
vigor? Man doth 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 suffered her white arms to
fall, and returned solemnly to her bed of death. And as she breathed her
last sighs, there came mingled with them a low murmur from her lips. I
bent to them my ear and distinguished, again, the concluding words of
the passage in Glanvill--"Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto
death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will."

She died;--and I, crushed into the very dust with sorrow, could no
longer endure the lonely desolation of my dwelling in the dim and
decaying city by the Rhine. I had no lack of what the world calls
wealth. Ligeia had brought me far more, very far more than ordinarily
falls to the lot of mortals. After a few months, therefore, of weary and
aimless wandering, I purchased, and put in some repair, an abbey, which
I shall not name, in one of the wildest and least frequented portions of
fair England. The gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the
almost savage aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and time-honored
memories connected with both, had much in unison with the feelings of
utter abandonment which had driven me into that remote and unsocial
region of the country. Yet although the external abbey, with its verdant
decay hanging about it, suffered but little alteration, I gave way, with
a child-like perversity, and perchance with a faint hope of alleviating
my sorrows, to a display of more than regal magnificence within.--For
such follies, even in childhood, I had imbibed a taste and now they came
back to me as if in the dotage of grief. Alas, I feel how much even
of incipient madness might have been discovered in the gorgeous and
fantastic draperies, in the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wild
cornices and furniture, in the Bedlam patterns of the carpets of tufted
gold! I had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my
labors and my orders had taken a coloring from my dreams. But these
absurdities must not pause to detail. Let me speak only of that one
chamber, ever accursed, whither in a moment of mental alienation, I
led from the altar as my bride--as t