and modern times, of
my own and foreign lands, came thronging to my lips, with many, many
fair titles of the gentle, and the happy, and the good. What prompted
me then to disturb the memory of the buried dead? What demon urged me to
breathe that sound, which in its very recollection was wont to make ebb
the purple blood in torrents from the temples to the heart? What fiend
spoke from the recesses of my soul, when amid those dim aisles, and in
the silence of the night, I whispered within the ears of the holy man
the syllables--Morella? What more than fiend convulsed the features of
my child, and overspread them with hues of death, as starting at that
scarcely audible sound, she turned her glassy eyes from the earth to
heaven, and falling prostrate on the black slabs of our ancestral vault,
responded--"I am here!"

Distinct, coldly, calmly distinct, fell those few simple sounds within
my ear, and thence like molten lead rolled hissingly into my brain.
Years--years may pass away, but the memory of that epoch never. Nor was
I indeed ignorant of the flowers and the vine--but the hemlock and the
cypress overshadowed me night and day. And I kept no reckoning of time
or place, and the stars of my fate faded from heaven, and therefore the
earth grew dark, and its figures passed by me like flitting shadows,
and among them all I beheld only--Morella. The winds of the firmament
breathed but one sound within my ears, and the ripples upon the sea
murmured evermore--Morella. But she died; and with my own hands I bore
her to the tomb; and I laughed with a long and bitter laugh as I found
no traces of the first in the channel where I laid the second.--Morella.

A TALE OF THE RAGGED MOUNTAINS

DURING the fall of the year 1827, while residing near Charlottesville,
Virginia, I casually made the acquaintance of Mr. Augustus Bedloe. This
young gentleman was remarkable in every respect, and excited in me a
profound interest and curiosity. I found it impossible to comprehend
him either in his moral or his physical relations. Of his family I could
obtain no satisfactory account. Whence he came, I never ascertained.
Even about his age--although I call him a young gentleman--there was
something which perplexed me in no little degree. He certainly seemed
young--and he made a point of speaking about his youth--yet there were
moments when I should have had little trouble in imagining him a hundred
years of age. But in no regard was he more