Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore⁠— Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore Of “never⁠—never mor...

The situation of American literature is anomalous. It has no centre, or, if it have, it is like that of the sphere of Hermes. It is divided into many systems, each revolving round its several suns, an...

The ancient fable of two antagonistic spirits imprisoned in one body, equally powerful and having the complete mastery by turns-of one man, that is to say, inhabited by both a devil and an angel seems...

Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages. Why then give a date to this story I have to tell? Let it suffice to say, that at the period of which I speak, there existed, in the interior...

Keats fell by a criticism. Who was it died of The Andromache?3 Ignoble souls!⁠—De L’Omelette perished of an ortolan. L’histoire en est brève. Assist me, Spirit of Apicius! A golden cage bore the littl...

“Let us hurry to the walls,” said Abel-Phittim to Buzi-Ben-Levi and Simeon the Pharisee, on the tenth day of the month Thammuz, in the year of the world three thousand nine hundred and forty-one⁠—“let...

The most notorious ill-fortune must in the end yield to the untiring courage of philosophy⁠—as the most stubborn city to the ceaseless vigilance of an enemy. Shalmanezer, as we have it in holy writing...

That Pierre Bon-Bon was a restaurateur of uncommon qualifications, no man who, during the reign of ⸻, frequented the little café in the cul-de-sac Le Febre at Rouen, will, I imagine, feel himself at l...

Of my country and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other. Hereditary wealth afforded me an education of no common...

Ill-fated and mysterious man!⁠—bewildered in the brilliancy of thine own imagination, and fallen in the flames of thine own youth! Again in fancy I behold thee! Once more thy form hath risen before me...

Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch⁠—as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. ...

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 befo...

I am⁠—that is to say I was⁠—a great man; but I am neither the author of Junius nor the man in the mask; for my name, I believe, is Robert Jones, and I was born somewhere in the city of Fum-Fudge. The ...

By late accounts from Rotterdam, that city seems to be in a high state of philosophical excitement. Indeed, phenomena have there occurred of a nature so completely unexpected⁠—so entirely novel⁠—so ut...

About twelve o’clock, one night in the month of October, and during the chivalrous reign of the third Edward, two seamen belonging to the crew of the Free and Easy, a trading schooner plying between S...

Ye who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed strange things shall happen, and secret things be known, and many centu...

Antiochus Epiphanes is very generally looked upon as the Gog of the prophet Ezekiel. This honor is, however, more properly attributable to Cambyses, the son of Cyrus. And, indeed, the character of the...

The Baron Ritzner von Jung was a noble Hungarian family, every member of which (at least as far back into antiquity as any certain records extend) was more or less remarkable for talent of some descri...

“Listen to me,” said the Demon as he placed his hand upon my head. “The region of which I speak is a dreary region in Libya, by the borders of the river Zaire. And there is no quiet there, nor silence...

I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia. Long years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering. Or, p...

I presume everybody has heard of me. My name is the Signora Psyche Zenobia. This I know to be a fact. Nobody but my enemies ever calls me Suky Snobbs. I have been assured that Suky is but a vulgar cor...

It was a quiet and still afternoon when I strolled forth in the goodly city of Edina. The confusion and bustle in the streets were terrible. Men were talking. Women were screaming. Children were choki...

Everybody knows, in a general way, that the finest place in the world is⁠—or, alas, was⁠—the Dutch borough of Vondervotteimittiss. Yet as it lies some distance from any of the main roads, being in a s...

I cannot just now remember when or where I first made the acquaintance of that truly fine-looking fellow, Brevet Brigadier-General John A. B. C. Smith. Someone did introduce me to the gentleman, I am ...

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary...

Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. This has been already too much an object for the scorn⁠—for the hor...

Eiros: Why do you call me Eiros? Charmion: So henceforward will you always be called. You must forget too, my earthly name, and speak to me as Charmion. Eiros: This is indeed no dream! Charmion: Dream...

It’s on my visiting cards sure enough (and it’s them that’s all o’ pink satin paper) that inny gintleman that plases may behould the intheristhin’ words, “Sir Pathrick O’Grandison, Barronitt, 39 South...

I am a business man. I am a methodical man. Method is the thing, after all. But there are no people I more heartily despise than your eccentric fools who prate about method without understanding it; a...

It was well said of a certain German book that “er lasst sich nicht lesen”⁠—it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in t...

The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they ar...

We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag. For some minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak. “Not long ago,” said he at length, “and I could have guided you on this route as we...

“La musique,” says Marmontel, in those Contes Moraux19 which in all our translations, we have insisted upon calling Moral Tales, as if in mockery of their spirit⁠—“la musique est le seul des talents q...

Una: “Born again?” Monos: Yes, fairest and best beloved Una, “born again.” These were the words upon whose mystical meaning I had so long pondered, rejecting the explanations of the priesthood, until ...

“Con tal que las costumbres de un autor,” says Don Thomas de las Torres, in the preface to his Amatory Poems “sean puras y castas, importo muy poco que no sean igualmente severas sus obras”⁠—meaning, ...

I am come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence⁠—whether much tha...

“You hardheaded, dunder-headed, obstinate, rusty, crusty, musty, fusty, old savage!” said I, in fancy, one afternoon, to my grand uncle Rumgudgeon⁠—shaking my fist at him in imagination. Only in imagi...

The château into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the open air, was one of those piles of commingle...

The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal⁠—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, an...

No more remarkable man ever lived than my friend, the young Ellison. He was remarkable in the entire and continuous profusion of good gifts ever lavished upon him by fortune. From his cradle to his gr...

There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous...

I was sick⁠—sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence⁠—the dread sentence of death⁠—was ...

True!⁠—nervous⁠—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses⁠—not destroyed⁠—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hea...

Many years ago, I contracted an intimacy with a Mr. William Legrand. He was of an ancient Huguenot family, and had once been wealthy; but a series of misfortunes had reduced him to want. To avoid the ...

For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence....

Since the world began there have been two Jeremys. The one wrote a Jeremiad about usury, and was called Jeremy Bentham. He has been much admired by Mr. John Neal, and was a great man in a small way. T...

Many years ago, it was the fashion to ridicule the idea of “love at first sight;” but those who think, not less than those who feel deeply, have always advocated its existence. Modern discoveries, ind...

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 exci...

There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. These the mere romanticist must eschew, if he do not wish t...

Whatever doubt may still envelop the rationale of mesmerism, its startling facts are now almost universally admitted. Of these latter, those who doubt, are your mere doubters by profession⁠—an unprofi...

Some years ago, I engaged passage from Charleston, SC, to the city of New York, in the fine packet-ship Independence, Captain Hardy. We were to sail on the fifteenth of the month (June), weather permi...

It was a chilly November afternoon. I had just consummated an unusually hearty dinner, of which the dyspeptic truffe formed not the least important item, and was sitting alone in the dining-room, with...

I will now play the Oedipus to the Rattleborough enigma. I will expound to you⁠—as I alone can⁠—the secret of the enginery that effected the Rattleborough miracle⁠—the one, the true, the admitted, the...

I am now growing in years, and⁠—since I understand that Shakespeare and Mr. Emmons are deceased⁠—it is not impossible that I may even die. It has occurred to me, therefore, that I may as well retire f...

At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18⁠—, I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in company with my friend C. Auguste Dupin, in his little back libr...

Having had occasion, lately, in the course of some Oriental investigations, to consult the Tellmenow Isitsöornot, a work which (like the Zohar of Simeon Jochaides) is scarcely known at all, even in Eu...

The symposium of the preceding evening had been a little too much for my nerves. I had a wretched headache, and was desperately drowsy. Instead of going out therefore to spend the evening as I had pro...

Oinos: Pardon, Agathos, the weakness of a spirit new-fledged with immortality! Agathos: You have spoken nothing, my Oinos, for which pardon is to be demanded. Not even here is knowledge a thing of int...

In the consideration of the faculties and impulses⁠—of the prima mobilia of the human soul, the phrenologists have failed to make room for a propensity which, although obviously existing as a radical,...

During the autumn of 18⁠—, while on a tour through the extreme southern provinces of France, my route led me within a few miles of a certain Maison de Santé or private madhouse, about which I had hear...

Of course I shall not pretend to consider it any matter for wonder, that the extraordinary case of M. Valdemar has excited discussion. It would have been a miracle had it not⁠—especially under the cir...

During the dread reign of cholera in New York, I had accepted the invitation of a relative to spend a fortnight with him in the retirement of his cottage ornée on the banks of the Hudson. We had here ...

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave u...

From his cradle to his grave a gale of prosperity bore my friend Ellison along. Nor do I use the word prosperity in its mere worldly sense. I mean it as synonymous with happiness. The person of whom I...

Now, my dear friend⁠—now, for your sins, you are to suffer the infliction of a long gossiping letter. I tell you distinctly that I am going to punish you for all your impertinences by being as tedious...

I never knew anyone so keenly alive to a joke as the king was. He seemed to live only for joking. To tell a good story of the joke kind, and to tell it well, was the surest road to his favor. Thus it ...

After the very minute and elaborate paper by Arago, to say nothing of the summary in Silliman’s Journal, with the detailed statement just published by Lieutenant Maury, it will not be supposed, of cou...

As it is well known that the “wise men” came “from the East,” and as Mr. Touch-and-go Bullet-head came from the East, it follows that Mr. Bullet-head was a wise man; and if collateral proof of the mat...

During a pedestrian trip last summer, through one or two of the river counties of New York, I found myself, as the day declined, somewhat embarrassed about the road I was pursuing. The land undulated ...

These remarks were published by Mr. Willis in the Home Journal, on the Saturday following Mr. Poe’s death. ↩ Mercier, in “L’an deux mille quatre cents quarante”, seriously maintains the doctrines of t...