l pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero, the conqueror Worm.

"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 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