The man's dreary expectation of
incredulity seals our conviction of the truth of his story. In
_The Manuscript Found in a Bottle_, too, we may trace the first
suggestion of that idea which finds its most complete and
memorable expression in _Ligeia_ (1837). The antique ship, with
its preternaturally aged crew "doomed to hover continually upon
the brink of eternity, without taking a final plunge into the
abyss," is an early foreshadowing of the fulfilment of Joseph
Glanvill's declaration so strikingly illustrated in the return of
Ligeia: "Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death
utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will." In
_Ligeia_, Poe concentrates on this idea with singleness of
purpose. He had striven to embody it in his earlier sketches, in
_Morella_, where the beloved is reincarnated in the form of her
own child, in the musical, artificial _Eleonora_ and in the
gruesome _Berenice_. In _Ligeia_, at last, it finds its
appropriate setting in the ebony bridal-chamber, hung with gold
tapestries grotesquely embroidered with fearful shapes and
constantly wafted to and fro, like those in one of the _Episodes
of Vathek_. In _The Fall of the House of Usher_ he adapts the
theme which he had approached in the sketch entitled _Premature
Burial_, and unites with it a subtler conception, the sentience
of the vegetable world.
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