University of Virginia Library

TALES
OF
THE GROTESQUE AND ARABESQUE.

MORELLA.

With a feeling of deep yet most singular affection
I regarded my friend Morella. Thrown by accident
into her society many years ago, my soul, from our
first meeting, burned with fires it had never before
known; but the fires were not of Eros; and bitter
and tormenting to my spirit was the gradual conviction
that I could in no manner define their unusual
meaning, or regulate their vague intensity. Yet we
met; and fate bound us together at the altar; and I

never spoke of passion, nor thought of love. She,
however, shunned society, and, attaching herself to
me alone, rendered me happy. It is a happiness to
wonder;—it is a happiness to dream.

Morella's erudition was profound. As I hope to
live, her talents were of no common order—her
powers of mind were gigantic. I felt this, and, in
many matters, became her pupil. I soon, however,
found that, perhaps on account of her Presburg
education, she placed before me a number of those
mystical writings which are usually considered the
mere dross of the early German literature. These,
for what reasons I could not imagine, were her
favorite and constant study—and that in process of
time they became my own should be attributed to
the simple but effectual influence of habit and example.

In all this, if I err not, my reason had little to do.
My convictions, or I forget myself, were in no manner
acted upon by the ideal, nor was any tincture of
the mysticism which I read to be discovered, unless
I am greatly mistaken, either in my deeds or in my
thoughts. Feeling deeply persuaded of this, I abandoned
myself implicitly to the guidance of my wife,
and entered with an unflinching heart into the intricacies
of her studies. And then—then, when, poring
over forbidden pages, I felt a forbidden spirit enkindling
within me—would Morella place her cold hand
upon my own, and rake up from the ashes of a dead
philosophy some low, singular words, whose strange
meaning burned themselves in upon my memory—and

then hour after hour would I linger by her side and
dwell upon the music of her voice—until, at length, its
melody was tainted with terror—and fell like a shadow
upon my soul—and I grew pale, and shuddered inwardly
at those too unearthly tones. And thus joy
suddenly faded into horror, and the most beautiful
became the most hideous, as Hinnon became Ge-Henna.

It is unnecessary to state the exact character of
those disquisitions which, growing out of the volumes
I have mentioned, formed, for so long a time, almost
the sole conversation of Morella and myself. By the
learned in what might be termed theological morality
they will be readily conceived, and by the unlearned
they would, at all events, be little understood. The
wild Pantheism of Fichte; the modified Παλιγγενεσια
of the Pythagoreans; and, above all, the doctrines of
Identity as urged by Schelling, were generally the
points of discussion presenting the most of beauty to
the imaginative Morella. That identity which is
termed personal, Mr. Locke, I think, truly defines to
consist in the sameness of a rational being. And
since by person we understand an intelligent essence
having reason, and since there is a consciousness
which always accompanies thinking, it is this which
makes us all to be that which we call ourselves—thereby
distinguishing us from other beings that think, and
giving us our personal identity. But the principium
individuationis—the notion of that identity which at
death is or is not lost forever, was to me, at all times,
a consideration of intense interest, not more from the

mystical and exciting nature of its consequences, than
from the marked and agitated manner in which
Morella mentioned them.

But, indeed, the time had now arrived when the
mystery of my wife's manner oppressed me as a spell.
I could no longer bear the touch of her wan fingers,
nor the low tone of her musical language, nor the
lustre of her melancholy eyes. And she knew all
this but did not upbraid—she seemed conscious of my
weakness or my folly, and, smiling, called it Fate.
She seemed, also, conscious of a cause, to me unknown,
for the gradual alienation of my regard; but
she gave me no hint or token of its nature. Yet was
she woman, and pined away daily. In time, the
crimson spot settled steadily upon the cheek, and the
blue veins upon the pale forehead became prominent;
and, one instant, my nature melted into pity, but, in
the next, I met the glance of her meaning eyes, and
then my soul sickened and became giddy with the
giddiness of one who gazes downward into some
dreary and unfathomable abyss.

Shall I then say that I longed with an earnest and
consuming desire for the moment of Morella's decease?
I did; but the fragile spirit clung to its tenement
of clay for many days—for many weeks and
irksome months—until my tortured nerves obtained
the mastery over my mind, and I grew furious through
delay, and, with the heart of a fiend, cursed the days,
and the hours, and the bitter moments, which seemed
to lengthen and lengthen as her gentle life declined—
like shadows in the dying of the day.

But one autumnal evening, when the winds lay
still in heaven, Morella called me to her side. There
was a dim mist over all the earth, and a warm glow
upon the waters, and, amid the rich October leaves
of the forest, a rainbow from the firmament had surely
fallen. As I came she was murmuring, in a low
under tone, which trembled with fervor, the words of
a Catholic hymn:

“It is a day of days,” said Morella; “a day of
all days either to live or die. It is a fair day for the

sons of earth and life—ah! more fair for the daughter's
of heaven and death.”

I turned towards her, and she continued.

“I am dying—yet shall I live. Therefore for me,
Morella, thy wife, hath the charnel-house no terrors—
mark me!—not even the terrors of the worm. The
days have never been when thou couldst love me;
but her whom in life thou didst abhor, in death thou
shalt adore.”

“Morella!”

“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 no longer, 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, as do 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 foretold, her child—to which in
dying she had given birth, and which breathed not
until the mother breathed no more—her child, a
daughter, lived. And she grew strangely in stature

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 had believed it possible
to feel for any denizen of earth.

But, ere long, the heaven of this pure affection
became overcast, and gloom, and horror, and grief,
swept 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 rigorous seclusion of my old ancestral
home, watched with an agonizing anxiety over all
which concerned the beloved.

And, as years rolled away, and I gazed, day after
day, upon her holy, and mild, and eloquent face, and

pored over her maturing form, day after day did I
discover new points of resemblance in the child to her
mother, the melancholy and the dead. And, hourly,
grew darker these shadows of similitude, and more
full, and more definite, and more perplexing, and more
hideously terrible in their aspect. For that her smile
was like her mother's I could bear; but then I shuddered
at its too perfect identity—that her eyes were
like Morella's I could endure; but then they too often
looked down into the depths of my soul with Morella's
own intense and bewildering meaning. And in the
contour of the high forehead, and in the ringlets of
the silken hair, and in the wan fingers which buried
themselves therein, and in the sad musical tones of
her speech, and above all—oh, above all—in the
phrases and expressions of the dead on the lips of
the loved and the living, I found food for consuming
thought and horror—for a worm that would not die.

Thus passed away two lustrums of her life, but my
daughter remained nameless upon the earth. “My
child” and “my love” were the designations usually
prompted by a father's affection, and the rigid seclusion
of her days precluded all other intercourse. Morella's
name died with her at her death. Of the mother I
had never spoken to the daughter—it was impossible
to speak. Indeed, during the brief period of her existtence
the latter had received no impressions from the
outward world but such as might have been afforded
by the narrow limits of her privacy. But at length
the ceremony of baptism presented to my mind, in its
unnerved and agitated condition, a present deliverance

from the terrors of my destiny. And at the baptismal
font I hesitated for a name. And many titles of the
wise and beautiful, of old and modern times, of my
own and foreign lands, came thronging to my lips—
and 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 shrieked within the ears of the holy man the syllables
—Morella? What more than fiend convulsed the
features of my child, and overspread them with the
hues of death, as, starting at that 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—like a knell of
death—horrible, horrible death—sank the eternal
sounds within my soul. Years—years may roll away,
but the memory of that epoch—never! Now 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 charnel where
I laid the second—Morella.