The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2: reference groups

On the next night, safe at last, the queen decides she has left a famous sailor's story unfinished and wakes her snoring husband to tell the rest.

The maimed cat flees him; his grief turns to irritation, and a spirit of perverseness, the urge to do wrong because it is wrong, drives him to hang it in cold blood, weeping.

He names the impulse perverseness: acting for the very reason that we should not, an impulse that in some minds becomes irresistible and runs against our own well-being.

He offers an example: a speaker who wants to please, and knows he displeases, is seized with a longing to tantalise his listener with roundabout talk, and gives in.

Another example: facing a vital task that must be done at once, we put it off for no reason; the craving for delay grows until the last hour passes, and then, too late, the energy returns.

Another: standing at the edge of a precipice, sickened, we are drawn by the very horror of the thought of falling, and unless someone holds us back we plunge.

The narrator insists he is nervous but not mad, his senses only sharpened; with no motive, loving the old man he lives with, he resolved to kill him to be rid of his pale, filmed vulture eye.

He boasts of his caution: kinder than ever by day, every midnight for a week he slowly puts his head and a shaded lantern into the old man's room, but the eye is always closed.

The eye is wide open, and he hears a low, quick sound like a muffled watch: the old man's heart, which drives him to fury.

He holds the light steady as the heartbeat grows louder; fearing a neighbour will hear, he leaps in with a yell, drags the old man down and smothers him under the bed until the heart stops.

Among her ailments is a trancelike epilepsy resembling death; meanwhile his own disease grows, a monomania of morbid, fixed attention on trivial objects.

He describes losing whole days and nights in staring at a shadow, a flame or a flower, or repeating a word until it means nothing.

He insists this is not daydreaming, which wanders pleasurably away from its object, but an unpleasant attention that keeps returning to a trivial object and magnifies it.

His books of the time fed the disorder; he spent weeks over a single paradoxical sentence about death and resurrection.

She leaves, but the image of her teeth does not; his monomania fixes on them utterly, and he comes to believe that possessing them alone could restore his reason.

He looks for the cat to kill it, but it has vanished; he sleeps soundly for the first time, answers the few inquiries easily, and believes his future secure.

On the fourth day the police search the house again; perfectly calm, he walks the cellar with them, and as they leave, from sheer bravado, he raps on the very wall that hides the body.

A shriek answers from inside the wall; the police tear it down and find the decayed body with the cat sitting on its head, walled up with her.

He inherited the estate and for years delighted in his safety, until the thought "I am safe" began to haunt him like a tune, and one day he added aloud: unless I am fool enough to confess.

An icy chill seizes him; knowing he has never resisted such fits, he runs through the streets, is chased and seized, and blurts out a full confession before collapsing.

In the embarrassed silence, the doors burst open, blowing out the candles; a cloaked stranger whispers that the winner is a cheat and tells them where to search him.

The marked cards are found on him; his host, handing him a fur cloak from the floor, tells him with cold contempt to leave the university.

On the eighth night, gloating at his own cleverness, he chuckles; the old man starts up crying "Who's there?" and sits listening in the dark for an hour while the narrator stands motionless.

He welcomes them, blames the shriek on a dream, shows them round, and in triumphant audacity sets his chair over the corpse; then a ringing begins in his ears that is not in his ears.

The beating grows louder; he talks, argues, raves and scrapes his chair, but the officers chat and smile; convinced they hear and are mocking him, he shrieks a confession and tells them to tear up the planks.

In a closet the police find a small furnace and crucibles; the man, caught, flings their contents on the floor, and a packet of unknown powder is found on him.

With cold deliberation he considers how to hide the body without being seen, and decides to wall it up in the cellar.

He opens a false chimney in the damp cellar wall, props the body inside, rebuilds and replasters it so perfectly that nothing shows, and congratulates himself.

He explains that he is in a condemned cell as a victim of this imp: after months of planning a murder with no chance of detection, he killed his victim with a poisoned candle, and the verdict was a natural death.

He dismembers the body, hides it under the floorboards with no trace of blood, and at four in the morning opens the door calmly to three police officers sent because a neighbour heard a shriek.

The chained man screams and the narrator, after a moment's trembling, screams back louder; near the end a laugh and a plea to call it a joke come from inside, then silence.

Lying unbound in darkness, he dares not open his eyes for fear there is nothing to see; opening them, he finds total blackness, and reasons that he is not in his old cell.

A fearful idea, that he is in a tomb, sends him into a swoon; recovering, he gropes forward, finds open space, and recalls the rumoured horrors of the dungeons, certain only that his death will be bitter.

Investigation showed she had revived, broken out of her coffin, beaten on the iron door with a piece of it, and died there standing, caught on the ironwork.

A robust officer, after a head injury, was buried hastily; a visitor felt the grave move, and when it was dug up he was found half-sitting, having forced the lid up.

The officer revived and described hearing the crowd above; he later died from a galvanic experiment; this recalls a young lawyer revived by galvanism after two days in the grave.

He recovered, and said he had been dimly aware throughout, from the doctors pronouncing him dead to the dissecting room, trying to say "I am alive"; many graves hold skeletons in suspicious postures.

He describes the horror of burial alive: suffocation, darkness, silence, and the knowledge that friends who would save you can never know; and he says what follows is his own experience.

He describes slowly coming to consciousness from a trance, until memory returns and he is overwhelmed by the thought of his one great danger.

Afraid to move, he opens his eyes to utter darkness, cannot cry out, feels his jaw bound as for the dead, and his arms strike a wooden lid inches above his face.

Taken for dead, the man's tongue vibrates and an unearthly distant voice says: "I have been sleeping, and now I am dead."

The friend announces his sister is dead and says he will keep her body in a vault in the house for a fortnight, for fear of her doctors' curiosity; the narrator does not object.

The two of them carry the coffin down to a deep, airless, copper-lined vault beneath the narrator's room, behind a heavy iron door.

Before closing the coffin they see the twins' likeness; the body keeps a faint blush and a lingering smile; they screw down the lid and bolt the door.

The friend confesses he has heard his sister stirring in her coffin for days but dared not speak: they buried her alive, and now she stands outside the door.

The door swings open on the bloodied sister, who falls on her brother and kills him in her death-agony; the narrator flees as the house splits and sinks into the pool.

He cites a case: a respected man's wife seemed to die, was entombed in the family vault, and when the vault was opened three years later her skeleton fell into his arms.

A French heiress rejected a poor suitor for a rich, cruel husband, seemed to die, and was buried; the suitor dug her up for a lock of her hair, she woke, and she fled abroad with him, later winning in court against her husband's claim.

The lawyer's body was stolen by doctors for private dissection; after an incision, a student's electric experiment made him rise from the table, speak, and fall.

A terrified servant reports a violated grave and a disfigured body still alive; the narrator's clothes are bloody, his hand scratched, a spade stands by the wall, and the box spills dental tools and thirty-two teeth.

His elder brother appears alive, to his joy, then screams the name of the whirlpool: the wind is driving them straight into it.

He clutches at the hope of arriving at slack water, then despairs; the moon breaks through and his brother, too deafened to speak, signals him to listen.

His watch has stopped at seven: they are past the slack and the whirl is at full fury; from the crest of a wave he sees it just ahead.

Caught in the belt of surf around the whirl, the boat races round the edge; having given up hope, he finds himself calmer than before.

He finds himself admiring the grandeur of his death and even curious to see the depths, and the stillness out of the wind helps restore his wits.

Expecting death, he opens his eyes to find the boat hanging on the inside of an immense black funnel lit by the moon.

He sees the boat riding steadily on the steep wall, and a mist and a rainbow over the bottom from which an indescribable yell rises.

Swinging slowly downward, he watches the wreckage around him and idly bets on which will sink first, and his repeated wrong guesses start a new train of thought.

He realises that some objects are drawn down slowly enough to be thrown up again, and that barrel shapes sink slowest of all.

He sleeps, drinks drugged water, and wakes to a sulphurous light showing the cell far smaller than he thought; he busies himself working out his mistake.

He finds himself strapped to a low frame with only one arm half free, given salty meat and no water; overhead a painted figure of Time holds a pendulum that is slowly swinging.

Rats swarm up from the pit for his meat; when he looks up again, the pendulum's sweep has widened and it has come lower, and he sees its end is a razor-sharp crescent.

He understands this is the alternative death; for days he watches it descend inch by inch, praying for it to hurry, struggling madly, then lying calm and smiling at it.

After another swoon, weak with hunger, he eats a scrap the rats left, and a half-formed thought of hope comes and vanishes before he can grasp it.

He sees the blade will cross his heart, forces himself to dwell on the trivial fraying of his robe, laughs and howls in turn, and struggles in vain to free his arm.

As it comes within a dozen sweeps, despair brings calm, and he realises the single strap binding him will be cut at the first stroke, but it does not cross the blade's path.

The whole thought returns: he smears the strap with the greasy meat and lies utterly still for the rats.

The rats swarm over him, half-stifling him, and gnaw the strap; with superhuman resolve he lies still as the blade cuts his skin, then slides free.

The walls begin to close into a narrowing lozenge, forcing him toward the pit; he screams in despair and totters on the brink.

The leader offers him free passage round the world; the king begins to interrupt, doubting that the sea is round like a fruit.

The queen goes on, ignoring her husband's grunts, telling of an island built by tiny creatures, stone forests, and a vast cave of palaces and blind fish.

She tells of rivers of molten metal, a sky blotted out by ash, a forest under a lake, and a lovely land where entry means death, while the king scoffs.

She tells of creatures that trap prey in funnel pits, plants that live on air or on animals, and flowers that imprison insects; the king says "Pshaw!".

She tells of bees and birds that solved geometry problems at once which men took years to solve, and of a flock of birds taking hours to pass.

She tells of a headless bird carrying a house full of people in its claws and of a continent resting on a many-horned cow; the king believes only the one he has read in a book.

In the man-creatures' land she describes iron horses that eat black stones and a feathered hen of iron and brick; the king calls it nonsense.

She describes a chess-playing automaton, a calculating engine, and a printing press that raises and topples empires; the king calls it ridiculous.

She describes a man who sits in ovens, one who makes gold, one who draws invisible wire and one who counts vibrations; the king calls it absurd.

On a mountain summit an exhausted guide tells the narrator that a single day of terror three years ago turned his hair white and broke his nerve.

The boat plunges to the bottom with his brother; the whirl subsides before the cask sinks, and he is picked up by his fellow fishermen, who do not recognise him and do not believe his story.

The narrator declares the facts of mesmerism beyond dispute, including a trance resembling death, and announces he will report, against all prejudice, a conversation with an entranced man.

The narrator says a garbled rumour of the case has spread disbelief, so he must set out the facts: he wanted to learn whether a mesmeric trance could hold off death in a dying man.

A condemned man, due to die tomorrow, sets down a homely but terrible chain of events he does not expect anyone to believe, insisting he is not mad.

The narrator, from a race of ardent fancy, allows that men call him mad and that madness may be the loftiest intelligence; he asks belief for his clear memories of youth and only doubt for his later life.

That night his house burns down, ruining him; in the ruins a crowd gathers at the one standing wall, where the figure of a giant cat with a rope round its neck is printed in the plaster.

He explains the image away as the body thrown in to wake him and pressed into fresh plaster, but cannot shake the phantom, and starts looking for a similar cat to replace it.

In a low tavern he finds a large black cat like the first, except for a white patch on its breast; no one owns it, it follows him home, and his wife loves it.

He comes to loathe the cat's devotion, the more so on finding it too is missing an eye; it follows him everywhere, and only a secret dread stops him killing it.

The white patch slowly takes the clear shape of a gallows; he cannot rest by day or night, and wakes from nightmares with the creature's weight on his chest.

The rival constantly hints advice, always in the right, which the narrator increasingly hates; he admits he would have been better had he listened; his feelings harden into hatred.

In the dim hall a youth dressed exactly like him seizes his arm and whispers his name in warning, in the familiar tone that sobers him instantly, and vanishes.

Everywhere he goes, the rival steps in to frustrate his schemes; he flees to the ends of the earth in vain, and notices the rival only ever blocks what would have done harm.

He notes the rival always hides his face, but he knows him for his school rival, who has thwarted his ambition, revenge, love and avarice.

He wakes at midnight in the library, knowing she has been buried, with no memory of the hours between except a shriek; he has done some deed, but what? On the table lies the doctor's box.

In a strange city's court the signs cease; a beautiful maiden arrives from afar, he falls into abject adoration of her, marries her without fearing the curse, and once more hears the familiar sighing voice.

He tells of a schoolboy who won every marble at guessing even-or-odd by judging how clever each opponent was.

The boy's secret was to copy his opponent's expression and see what thoughts it produced in himself.

He explains that he knew the minister as poet, courtier and intriguer, and reasoned that the man expected every search and even invited them.

His imperious temper gave him mastery over his schoolmates, except for one boy of the same name who alone competed with him and refused to submit to his will.

He secretly fears this rival, whose effortless equality seems superiority, though no one else notices; the rival thwarts him in private, with an unwelcome affectionate, patronising air.

Rumour makes them brothers; the narrator later learns they share a birthday; he cannot quite hate the rival, feeling a mix of animosity, respect, fear and curiosity; they are inseparable.

His attacks on the rival take the form of banter and pranks, which rarely succeed; the only weak spot he finds is a defect that keeps the rival from speaking above a whisper.

The rival retaliates by exploiting the narrator's hatred of his own common name, which the rival shares and which causes their affairs to be confused.

The resemblance extends to height and features; the rival sets out to imitate his dress, walk, manner and voice, until his whisper becomes the very echo of the narrator's own.

The imitation torments him, the more because no one else seems to notice it; the rival seems content to sting him alone.

In a violent quarrel the narrator fancies he has known the rival from infancy or before; the rival sleeps in a closet-like room of his own.

Creeping in at night to play a cruel prank, he lights the sleeping rival's face and is seized by horror at what he sees there; he flees the school that night for good.

He realises the cloak is an exact copy of his own unique one, left by the stranger; covering his shame, he takes it and flees abroad the next morning.

The friend says seizing it openly might have cost his life, and that the minister, unaware, will now ruin himself acting on a power he no longer holds.

For an old wrong the minister once did him, the friend wrote a quotation in the copy so the minister will know who outwitted him.

The narrator, having borne a thousand injuries from a respected man, vows revenge for an insult: he must punish without risk and make his enemy know who punished him, while smiling at him as before; the man's weakness is pride in his knowledge of wine.

At dusk during the carnival he meets his enemy, drunk and dressed as a jester, and baits him with a doubtful cask of rare wine, pretending he will ask a rival judge instead.

Masked, he lets the enemy hurry him home, having made sure the servants are gone, and leads him down into the damp family catacombs, repeatedly urging him to turn back for his health.

He plies his coughing enemy with wine, toasts his long life, recites the family motto that no one injures them with impunity, and again offers to turn back.

The enemy makes a secret brotherhood sign; the narrator claims to belong and produces a trowel as his sign, then leads on into a crypt with air so foul the torches barely burn.

In a crypt lined with bones, the narrator tells his enemy the wine is in a deep recess; the drunken man steps in, and in a moment is chained to the granite wall.

Mockingly imploring him once more to return, the narrator walls up the recess tier by tier, pausing to listen with satisfaction as the chained man sobers, moans and rattles his chain.

He drops a torch in, hears only bells jingling, feels sick, he says, from the damp, seals the last stone and piles the bones back; no one has disturbed them for fifty years.

Long submissive out of awe, he now drinks heavily, begins to resist, fancies the rival weakens as he grows firmer, and resolves to be enslaved no longer.

At a masked ball, drunk and pursuing a young wife, he feels the whisper at his ear, seizes the masked rival dressed exactly as himself, and drags him into a side room, threatening to stab him.

He runs the rival through again and again; looking up, he sees what seems a mirror with his own bloodied image, but it is the dying rival, identical to him in every line.

He says he will perish of fear itself, and hints that the house has a hold over his spirit, which has kept him from leaving it for years.

While a hideous plague ravages his lands, a prince retreats with a thousand chosen courtiers into a walled abbey, welds the gates shut, and fills it with every pleasure, leaving the world outside to fend for itself.

In the fifth or sixth month of seclusion, with the plague at its worst outside, the prince gives a masked ball of unusual magnificence.

The ball is held in seven winding rooms, each a single colour lit through matching windows, except the last, black with blood-red panes, which few dare enter.

In the black room a great clock strikes each hour so solemnly that the music and dancing stop and even the giddiest grow pale, then laugh at their nervousness.

The masquers, dressed to the prince's grotesque taste, swirl like dreams through the rooms, freezing at every chime and avoiding the black chamber as night wears on.

At midnight, during the twelve long strokes, the crowd notices a masked figure no one had seen before, and a murmur of disapproval turns to horror.

The stranger is dressed as a plague corpse, spattered with blood; the prince, first shuddering, then enraged, orders him seized and unmasked to be hanged at dawn.

No one dares touch the figure, who walks slowly through all the rooms; the shamed prince chases him with a dagger into the black room, where the figure turns and the prince falls dead; the revellers seize the mask and find nothing inside.

The plague has come in like a thief; the revellers die one by one in the halls, the clock stops and the fires go out, leaving darkness, decay and death.

His terror spread to waking life: he would not leave home or trust even his friends not to bury him; he extracted oaths and built a vault and coffin that could be opened from inside, with air, food, and a bell.

He thinks of his precautions, but the lid will not open, there is no bell-rope or padding, and he smells earth: strangers have buried him in a common grave; he shrieks, and rough voices answer and shake him.

The guide lounges carelessly on the edge of a sheer drop while the terrified narrator clings to the grass, then points him towards the sea below.

The friend is nervous and erratic, calls his malady a family evil that will soon pass, and describes senses so acute that food, cloth, light, scent and most sounds torment him.

He recalls his friend's wild improvised dirges and paintings of pure abstraction that filled him with an awe he could not explain.

One painting shows a long, smooth, lightless tunnel deep underground flooded with ghastly light; the friend's songs, improvised in rare excitement, include one that reveals he knows his reason is failing.

The friend insists that the stones, fungi and trees of his house are sentient, and that their slow-gathered atmosphere has shaped his family's fate and made him what he is.

They read strange old books of demonology, travel and inquisition, and above all an obscure manual of the vigils for the dead.

In the following days the friend wanders aimlessly, his eyes dull and his voice terrified, as if struggling to reveal a secret or listening to a sound; his terror begins to infect the narrator.

His friend comes in with a lamp and a mad hilarity, asks if he has not seen it, and throws open the window on a whirling storm lit by an unnatural glow around the house.

The narrator leads him away from the window, explains the glow away, and begins reading aloud a clumsy old romance in the hope of calming him.

Hiding his terror so as not to alarm his friend, he notices him turned towards the door, rocking and murmuring, and reads on about a shield falling with a mighty ringing.

The revel is gay and magnificent; the prince's tastes are so bold and bizarre that some would think him mad, though his followers do not.

The host laughs at his guest's amazement, rambles about dying laughing and an altar to laughter, and says only one other person has ever been admitted to the room.

The narrator notices his host's constant intense thought and a nervous trepidation; he often stops mid-sentence, listening for a visitor or an imagined sound.

He has long mesmerised a man dying of consumption to ease his pain; summoned one night, he finds him in agony of body but strangely calm of mind.

The narrator finds his friend terribly wasted but clear-minded, writing notes in bed with two doctors present.

He has come for a stay of some weeks because the owner, a boyhood friend, wrote him a wild, pleading letter describing a mental disorder and begging for his company.

His friend greets him warmly, but has changed so terribly, ghastly pale with luminous eyes and wild hair, that the narrator hardly recognises him.

For days the narrator paints, reads and listens to music with his friend, but finds all attempts to cheer a mind that pours out darkness are futile.

Asked urgently to call at sunrise, the narrator is shown into a room of such blinding splendour that he doubts any subject in Europe could afford it.

The room, still lit though the sun is up, dazzles with a jumble of every age and nation, hidden melancholy music, perfumes and coloured flames; his host has not slept.

The dying man explains he has always doubted the soul's immortality and that no philosophy has ever convinced his reason.

He says that in trance he half-perceives a convincing argument that fades on waking, and asks to be questioned while entranced; entranced, he says he must die, and is not afraid.

In trance he says the state is so near death that it contents him, and tells the questioner to begin with God, whom he says is neither spirit nor matter as men understand it.

Alarmed by his look, the questioner wakes him; he smiles and dies at once, and his body is instantly cold and rigid, as if long dead.

He chooses a friend, a nervous, emaciated scholar dying of consumption, whom he had mesmerised before without full control, and who speaks calmly of his coming death.

The friend, with no relatives to object, is keen, and agrees to send for him a day before the doctors' predicted hour of death; the note comes: come now.

Waiting for a reliable witness, the narrator begins the next evening with a medical student taking notes; the dying man consents, but fears it has been left too late.

With the doctors' consent he makes his passes as the man sinks into the death agony; the breathing changes and the limbs go icy.

By midnight the patient is in a perfect trance, limbs rigid and cold as marble, breathing barely perceptible, yet not dead; the doctors are fascinated.

At three the man's arm follows the narrator's hand; asked if he sleeps, he whispers "Yes, asleep now. Do not wake me! let me die so!"

At dawn, asked again, he whispers that he is still asleep and dying; as the narrator repeats the question, his face collapses into a hideous corpse-like mask.

The student faints and the nurses flee; the body no longer breathes or bleeds, and responds only to the narrator's questions with a vibrating tongue.

For seven months the man lies unchanged, death apparently arrested; at last they try to wake him, and a foul yellow fluid seeps from his eyes.

The voice cries "put me to sleep, or waken me! I am dead!"; as the narrator makes the passes to wake him, the body rots away instantly into liquid putrescence.

The narrator claims an obscure book shows the familiar tale of the storytelling queen ended wrongly, and recalls how a jealous king vowed to wed a maiden each night and kill her each morning.

On the wedding night she tells her sister a story within the king's hearing and leaves it unfinished at dawn, so the curious king postpones her execution.

She keeps it up for a thousand and one nights until the king forgets or breaks his vow, and the killing of brides ends.

She tells of corpses made to move by an unseen fluid, voices heard across the world, lightning tamed and the stars weighed; the king calls it preposterous.

In blood-red rain by moonlight the demon sees a rock carved with the word DESOLATION, and a grave, godlike man upon it, weary and disgusted with mankind, longing for solitude.

The man sits trembling all night on the rock, gazing at the desolation; the hidden demon summons roaring beasts to the rock's foot, but the man only trembles and stays.

The demon calls down a tempest, and still the man sits; then he curses everything with silence, the rock reads SILENCE, and the man, wan with terror, flees.

The narrator calls this the most wonderful of all fables; the demon, finishing, falls back into the tomb laughing and curses him because he cannot laugh too.

Sick after long torture, the narrator hears his death sentence from black-robed judges whose thin white lips shape his name; the candles turn from angels to spectres and he sinks into a swoon.

He finds a slimy stone wall and, his knife gone, marks his starting place with a strip torn from his robe to measure the cell, but falls exhausted and sleeps.

He wakes to find bread and water, completes the circuit to his rag, reckons the cell at fifty yards, then tries to cross it and trips on his torn hem.

Fallen, he finds his face hanging over the edge of a deep pit; a stone he drops falls long before splashing, and a door opens and closes overhead.

He realises the pit was the doom prepared for him, a death of moral horror for a man whose nerves had been destroyed; too cowardly now to end it, he creeps back to the wall.

The pendulum is drawn up at once, showing he is watched; he notices the light comes from a gap around the walls, and the painted demons are glowing ever brighter.

The walls are heating; choking, he runs to the pit for coolness, sees something horrible in its depths, and shrieks and weeps.

Seven or eight nights after the entombment, the narrator cannot sleep, fights a causeless terror, hears low sounds through the storm, and gets up and paces.

As he reads of a knight breaking down a door, he seems to hear, far off in the house, the very sound of wood being ripped apart, and dismisses it.

Reading of the knight slaying a dragon with a horrid shriek, he now distinctly hears a distant screaming, grating sound.

He became obsessed with premature burial and dreaded sleep; in one dream an icy hand wakes him in the dark, and a gibbering voice commands him to arise.

He hears the old man's groan of mortal terror, a sound he knows from his own nights, pities him while chuckling inside, and at last lets a thin ray fall on the eye.

The narrator looks out on a desolate black coast, bleak islands and a sea churning with strange cross-currents.

Riding alone through dreary country on a dark autumn day, the narrator comes in sight of an ancient house and is overcome by a gloom he cannot explain, which deepens when he looks at its reflection in a black pool.

Looking up from the pool, he fancies that the house and grounds give off an atmosphere of their own, a sluggish, leaden vapour from the decayed trees and still water.

Examining the house, he finds it intact but fungus-covered and decaying stone by stone, with a barely perceptible crack running from roof to water.

A silent valet leads him through dark passages where familiar things stir strange fancies; on the stair he meets the family physician, who looks cunning and perplexed.

He is shown into a vast, dim, comfortless room of scattered books and instruments that breathes an atmosphere of sorrow.

The island's eastern end lies in deep shade, with mournful trees, grave-like mounds, and shadows he fancies are swallowed by the water; he imagines it the haunt of the last dying fairies.

He sees the walls are iron plates painted with fiends and skeletons, blurred by damp, and the pit the only one in the stone floor.

As they near the inner edge, his crazed brother tries to wrench his hands off the ring-bolt; the narrator yields it and moves to a water cask just as the boat plunges.

He signals his plan to his brother, who refuses to leave the ring-bolt; with a bitter struggle he abandons him, lashes himself to the cask and jumps overboard.

A muffled metallic clang sounds; the narrator leaps up and finds his friend rigid, rocking, smiling sickly, and murmuring without seeing him.

The cat was his favourite, but drink changed his temper: he grew moody, abused his wife and his pets, and at last even the cat felt his ill-temper.

Drunk one night, when the cat bites him in fright, he is seized by a demonic fury and cuts out one of its eyes; next morning his remorse is feeble, and he drowns it in drink.

His goodness gone, he vents his fury on his patient wife; in the cellar the cat trips him, he swings an axe at it, she stops his arm, and he buries the axe in her head.

He will not recount his later crimes, only the single event that made him fall all at once from petty vice to monstrous evil; near death, he wants pity and to be thought a slave of fate.

Months later, at a new school, he has laughed off his fright and plunges into reckless dissipation that washes away every serious memory.

After three years of vice, he holds an all-night carouse; at dawn, as he proposes a profane toast, a servant says someone urgently wants him in the hall.

He cannot learn who the rival is or what he wants, only that he left the old school the day the narrator fled; soon he goes to a great university and outdoes all in extravagant vice.

He secretly becomes a card-sharp, cheating weak fellow students, protected by his reputation for generous, dashing folly.

He marks a rich, dim young nobleman as his victim, lets him win at first, and arranges a party where the game seems to arise by chance.

Late at night he draws the drunken nobleman into doubling the stakes and quadruples his debt; the victim turns deathly pale, and it emerges that he is utterly ruined.

She stands barefoot and nearly unclothed, still as a statue, but her eyes are fixed not on the water but on a dark niche in the prison opposite her window.

Her bored husband idly strums a guitar and gives directions; as hope fades, a cloaked man steps from the niche, dives in and brings up the living child, revealed as a famous young man.

Someone else carries the child inside; the mother blushes deeply, touches the rescuer's hand as her husband turns away, and murmurs that he has conquered: they will meet an hour after sunrise.

In a book the narrator finds a tear-blotted page and a poem in his host's hand lamenting a love carried off across the sea to a titled old man.

The poem is dated from the city where the lady lived before her marriage, though his host once denied ever going there; then the host unveils a full-length portrait of her.

The portrait shows her smiling with a trace of melancholy, pointing at a vase; the host, statue-still, then drinks goblet after goblet from vases like the one in the painting.

He says dreaming has been his life and he is departing for the land of real dreams, quotes a vow to meet his love in the valley of death, and collapses; a page bursts in crying that his mistress is poisoned.

Dying, she grieves only that he will leave the valley and love another; he vows before Heaven never to marry, calling down a terrible curse if he breaks the vow; comforted, she promises to watch over him, and dies.

She keeps her promise with perfume, sighs and once a spirit kiss, but the emptiness remains; at last the valley's memories pain him and he leaves for the world.

He admits his gloom comes partly from his twin sister's wasting illness; she passes through the room unseeing, and that evening takes to her bed, not expected to be seen alive again.

He and his cousin grew up together, he sickly and brooding, she lively and carefree; then a fatal disease swept over her, changing even her very identity until he knew her no longer.

His reason was shaken only by trifles; his cousin's moral ruin grieved him normally, but his disease fastened on the startling changes in her body.

He never loved her in her beauty, seeing her only as an object of thought; now he shudders at her, yet out of pity he asks her to marry him, and one afternoon she appears before him in the library.

He stares at her wasted body, hollow temples and lifeless eyes; she smiles, slowly showing her teeth, which he wishes he had never seen.

His innocent, guileless cousin speaks of their love openly, but one day speaks in tears of death, and thereafter dwells only on that theme.

After her death, he says, his sanity grows doubtful; over the years the valley's flowers, birds, fish, music and golden cloud all fade and depart.

Poor all his life, the discoverer was suspected of a forgery after buying property with money he would not explain; police followed him to a hidden garret and burst in.

After his partial confession and release, it is plain that he can make gold from lead, but no one knows how until he chooses to tell.

The narrator speculates that the discovery will make gold nearly worthless, dismaying emigrants to the goldfields, and notes that lead prices have already soared.

Handsome, brilliant, well-born and married to a devoted wife, at twenty-one he inherits an ancestor's fortune left to grow for a century, some four hundred and fifty million dollars, despite attempts to overturn the will.

Everyone speculates about how he will spend a sum so vast that ordinary extravagances, politics or charity seem too small; he gives his earlier fortune to his nearest relatives.

The lady, desperate, has handed the recovery to the official, who must search the minister's house without ever letting him suspect it.

He has ransacked the house every night for three months, spurred by honour and an enormous reward, and has even had the thief waylaid and searched in the street.

The friend says the thief must have foreseen the waylaying; the official dismisses the thief as a poet and describes taking every piece of furniture apart.

The official describes examining every joint, mirror, bed and square inch of the house and its neighbours with a microscope.

Even the books, carpets and cellars yielded nothing; the friend's only advice is to search the whole house again.

A month later the official admits the second search failed, that the reward has doubled, and that he would pay fifty thousand francs himself for the letter.

Alone with the narrator, the friend begins explaining that the police are able and did their search perfectly, within its limits.

The friend argues the police fail because they search only where they themselves would hide something, and underrated the thief as a mere poet.

He explains that the largest names on a map go unnoticed, and concludes that the minister hid the letter by not hiding it at all.

Wearing green spectacles as an excuse, the friend calls on the minister, scans the room, and notices a soiled, torn letter stuffed carelessly in a card-rack.

Though it looks nothing like the description, its dirt, its tears and its obvious place convince him it is the stolen letter, disguised.

He memorises the letter, leaves a snuff-box as an excuse to return, and next day, while the minister runs to the window at a gunshot outside, swaps it for a copy.

Searching his bedroom, the officers find a trunk under the bed so heavy that three strong men cannot move it, full of what looks like old brass.

They drag it out and cart the metal contemptuously to the police office, and the next day it proves to be purest gold.

The narrator argues that music, and still more natural scenery, is best enjoyed alone, and that he sees the earth as one vast living, thinking being to which men are like parasites.

His solitary wanderings have given his thoughts a fantastic tinge; in a remote mountain region he comes upon a stream and an island, and lies down to half-dream as he watches.

The narrator is not surprised by his decision: having satisfied his conscience with private charity and having little faith in improving mankind, he is thrown back on himself.

A poet in the widest sense but with a materialist bent, he believes the true use of the poetic sentiment is creating new forms of physical beauty, and scorns ambition.

He devotes his fortune to this vision, and in it, and in the love of his wife, finds exemption from ordinary cares and great happiness; the narrator despairs of describing it.

He first considers remote Pacific islands, but rejects them: he wants the calm of solitude, not its gloom, and must be near a city; they search for years together for the right place.

At a glorious mountain panorama he says grandeur of distance tires and depresses, and that the heart-sick avoid distant views; after four years they find the spot, since opened to visitors on his death.

He and his cousin lived alone with her mother in a hidden valley of many-coloured grass, walled by mountains and untouched by strangers, crossed by a silent river.

He describes the valley's flowered grass and strange slanting trees, whose beauty spoke to them of the love and glory of God.

After fifteen years as companions, they fall in love one evening by the river; the valley blooms with new flowers, birds, fish and music, and a golden cloud shuts them in.

The narrator and his reasoning friend are sitting in the dark when the head of the police, an old acquaintance, arrives to consult them on troublesome official business.

The official laughs at the friend's hint that the matter may be too simple, and warns that he would lose his post if it were known he had confided in anyone.

He explains that a compromising document has been stolen from the royal apartments by a known man, who holds it as a weapon over the lady it belongs to.

The thief, a daring minister, took the letter from the table in front of the lady, who could not object without drawing the attention of the person she was hiding it from.

The friend tells him to write the cheque, then hands over the letter; the stunned official snatches it and rushes out without a word.

The narrator objects that the thief is a mathematician, not a poet; the friend answers that he is both, and attacks the received view of mathematical reason.

The friend argues at length that mathematical truths do not hold in morals or motive, and that mathematicians will fight anyone who says so.

He argues that great minds, like large bodies, are slow to start, and asks the narrator which shop signs draw the eye.

The man who fired the musket was paid by the friend; the narrator asks why he did not simply seize the letter and leave.

The vizier's daughter resolves to end the killings or die trying, and marries the king against her father's advice, knowing he means to keep his vow.

The king grunts his attention and she begins the sailor's account of how, in old age, he left home secretly with his goods to seek new lands.

Waiting by the shore with a porter, the sailor hears a humming and sees a vast fiery monster racing towards them across the sea.

The sailor describes the monster: black and solid as rock, belted in red, scaled beneath, with rows of protruding eyes.

He explains the beast moves with no visible fins or wings and breathes out noisily through holes near its tail.

On its back he sees man-like creatures in tight painful clothing, heavy boxes on their heads and stiff collars round their necks.

The beast fires a gun with thunder and smoke; one creature shouts through a trumpet, and the terrified porter says the monster is a demon goaded by vermin.

The sailor runs, the porter escapes with his goods, and the sailor is caught and carried out to sea, where he wins over the creatures' leader and learns their language.

When she describes the women's fashion for enormous bustles, the king declares he has had enough of her lies, remembers his vow, and orders her to be strangled.

She submits gracefully, consoling herself as she is strangled that her husband's impatience has cost him the rest of the story.

As the guide names the islands, a roar rises and the sea between the island and the coast breaks into a furious eastward torrent full of whirlpools.

The small whirlpools merge into one vast funnel with shining black walls and a shrieking roar; the narrator throws himself down, knowing it is the great whirlpool.

The narrator reflects that no written account, including the most detailed one, conveys the horror of the whirlpool seen in a storm from the summit.

He quotes an old account of the whirlpool: its roar, ships drawn down and broken, whales and a bear dragged under, trees thrown up shredded.

He finds the account's claims about depth naive, since any ship caught by the whirl would vanish as easily as a feather.

The narrator finds the learned explanations of the whirlpool unconvincing in its presence; the guide leads him into shelter to tell his own story.

The guide tells how he and his two brothers alone fished the dangerous grounds by the whirlpool, risking their lives for catches the timid could never match.

They crossed only in the short slack between tides, with a sure wind, and once were stranded near starving for a week before a lucky current saved them.

They kept their sons out of the danger; three years ago, on a day of bright weather, came the worst hurricane anyone had known.

Loaded with fish, they set off home in time for the slack, but an unusual wind headed them, a copper cloud rose, and in minutes the storm struck in total darkness.

The masts go at once, taking the youngest brother; the narrator flattens himself on deck, clinging to a ring-bolt by instinct.

The narrator, writing on a famous new discovery, insists it was not unforeseen: a dead chemist's private diary had already hinted at it, and the discoverer surely borrowed the idea.

He dismisses a rival newspaper claim that another man made the discovery years earlier, since no real discoverer would have sat on such a prize.

He argues the dead chemist's diary was a private notebook he wanted burned, and that the discoverer and his friends will soon get rich from the hint it gave.

He corrects mistranslations in a published account of the discoverer, and notes that he himself once met this soon-to-be-famous man.

He describes the discoverer from a week's acquaintance at a hotel years ago: short, stout, friendly, nothing like the misanthrope the papers claim.

He explains that God is an ultimate, unparticled matter that pervades and moves all things, and that thought is this matter in motion.

He argues that spirit is only matter too rare to perceive, and that what we call spirit is infinitely rarefied matter.

The questioner objects that such dense matter would stop the stars; the entranced man answers the objection easily, and the questioner asks whether it is irreverent.

He explains that individual men are portions of the divine mind given bodies, then seems to deny what he said, until the questioner reads it back from his notes.

He explains that man will never be bodiless: death is a metamorphosis, like worm to butterfly, from a rudimental body to an ultimate one the senses cannot perceive.

He explains that the ultimate body perceives the whole world directly, without organs, which are cages confining rudimental beings until fledged.

He says every star and planet is peopled by rudimental beings, and that bodies and pain exist so that the divine law can be broken.

He says pleasure is only the contrast of pain, so earthly suffering is the basis of heavenly bliss, and that to the angels space is solid and stars unreal.

The doctors explain the lungs are nearly destroyed and predict death at midnight the next day; they say farewell but agree to look in again.

He recalls being a gentle, animal-loving boy; he married young a like-minded wife, and they kept many pets, among them a large, clever black cat she half-jokingly called a witch.

The story's epigraph: a French couplet comparing the heart to a suspended lute that sounds the moment it is touched.

He reflects that he knew little of his reserved friend, except that the old family, famous for art and music, had never branched, so that the name and the house had become one.

The ballad tells of a radiant palace ruled by Thought, overthrown by evil things, where travellers now see monstrous forms and a hideous throng that laughs but never smiles.

A demon, hand on the narrator's head, describes a desolate land by a sickly river where lilies sigh, trees rock without wind and clouds rush forever, a place of neither quiet nor silence.

The prince, a bold man, speaks from the blue room, and at his gesture the music falls silent.

The narrator argues that the phrenologists and moralists, by deducing man's faculties from what they assumed God intended, have overlooked one basic impulse.

He says it would have been wiser to classify people by what they actually do than by what God supposedly meant them to do.

The story's epigraph, a Latin line: no place is without its guardian spirit.

He argues that bulk matters to God, that life exists within life at every scale, and that man is madly proud to deny the earth a soul.

He describes the enclosed valley: a river seemingly without exit, a golden waterfall of sunset, and a small island whose western end glows with flowers, bright trees and butterflies.

In the dusk he seems to see a fairy in a frail canoe glide from light into shade, joyful then sorrowful, her shadow falling from her into the black water, a year nearer death.

She circles again and again, sadder and fainter each time, until with the sunset she drifts into the dark water and is seen no more.

The narrator addresses the memory of an ill-fated, visionary young man, now dead, whom he defends against blame, and recalls meeting him at midnight under a Venetian bridge.

Returning home by gondola on a gloomy night, he hears a woman's long shriek; his gondolier loses the oar, and they drift as torches flood the palace with light.

A child has slipped from its mother's arms into the canal; swimmers search in vain, and on the palace steps stands the child's mother, the most admired beauty of the city and young wife of an old, scheming nobleman.

Left alone and shaking with agitation, the young man accepts the narrator's gondola home and recovers his composure, speaking cordially of their slight acquaintance.

The narrator describes the young man: slight but capable of great strength, with godlike features and a face that holds each passion only while it lasts and is instantly forgotten.

He shows paintings and scorns famous sculptures, preferring lesser ones, in a mix of levity and solemnity.

The story's epigraph: a Latin quatrain for a market to be built on the site of a revolutionary club, where an impious mob once fed on innocent blood and death now gives way to life.

He reflects that even in a swoon consciousness is not wholly lost, and that impressions from that gulf return unbidden to those who have fainted.

He half-recalls being carried down and down in silence by tall figures, a horror at his heart's stillness, then flatness and dampness.

Sensation, then thought and terror, return; he remembers the trial and sentence, but nothing of what followed.

The narrator argues that some themes are too horrible for fiction and are bearable only as fact, and that the worst suffering is borne by one person alone, not by crowds.

He declares burial alive the most terrible fate, and says it must often happen, since the line between life and death is vague and some diseases only suspend life.

He has suffered for years from catalepsy, trances that can last weeks and look exactly like death; sufferers are usually saved only because friends know their history.

His trances came sometimes gradually and sometimes as a sudden plunge into weeks of nothingness; even ordinary sleep left him confused and without memory for a while on waking.

The voice, a pitying fiend, opens all the graves of mankind to show that many of the buried are not at rest but stir and struggle; the graves slam shut amid cries.

It was a dream: he had slept in a narrow berth on a small boat carrying garden soil, his jaw bound with a handkerchief, and the sailors had woken him.

The horror cured him: he took to exercise and fresh air, burned his medical books, stopped thinking of death, and the catalepsy vanished with the fear; such terrors must be let sleep, or they devour us.

After an epigraph on a garden like a sleeping lady, the narrator says his friend was borne through life on unbroken happiness, proof that a man can be happy under rare conditions.

His friend's happiness was planned: he held four conditions of bliss, open-air exercise, the love of a woman, contempt of ambition, and an unending, spiritual object of pursuit.

Loving music and poetry but choosing neither, he decides that landscape gardening is the greatest and most neglected field for the poet's imagination.

He explains why nature's landscapes can always be improved by an artist, though its details cannot, and why every true artist agrees on the correction.

He proposes that the earth's disorder was prepared for man's mortality, having first been designed for an immortal race.

He suggests that what looks disordered to us may look ordered to beings viewing it from afar, once human, now invisible, and quotes a writer on gardening.

The quoted writer describes the natural style, which avoids defects, and the artificial style, which shows human care and interest.

The friend rejects recreating original beauty and scorns merely avoiding defects: rules govern only what refrains, and the doubters of genius applaud loudest once it succeeds.

He proposes a landscape so vast and strange it seems tended by beings between man and God, a project only a poet with vast wealth could achieve.

The approach is by river, from pastoral farmland into an ever narrower, winding, gloomy gorge of spotless moss and granite, so strange and clean that the visitor loses all sense of direction.

The boat emerges into a round, clear basin ringed with hills covered entirely in flowers, like a silent cascade of jewels.

Facing the setting sun, the visitor is transferred alone to a small ivory canoe with no oarsman, told the fates will care for him, and the canoe moves off by itself to unseen music.

The canoe approaches a gate in the hills, between wild wooded mountains and a smooth emerald lawn backed by a vast ivy-covered wall.

The seeming gate proves to be a bend; the canoe glides on into a winding channel still hemmed in by the wall and wild hills.

At last a gate of burnished gold opens, and the canoe descends into a vast amphitheatre of mountains, where the whole paradise appears: music, perfume, birds, flowers, and a floating fairy palace.

The story's subtitle, announcing it as a companion piece to the story of the great landscape garden.

On a walking trip the narrator loses his way at dusk in misty, winding country, unconcerned, and comes upon a carriage track of velvety grass, cleared of every twig, its stones deliberately placed.

He sits and marvels that the lane is the work of an artist with a scrupulous eye, balancing neatness and wildness, then follows its winding course.

Hearing water, he sees a building in a misty valley below; as the fog lifts piece by piece and the sun breaks through a cleft, the whole valley appears like a stage scene.

He describes the small valley: a granite cliff to the north, gentler slopes to the south, trees graded from wild to gentle, and three great trees, the finest a vast flowering tulip-tree.

The valley floor is carpeted with the same velvety, miraculously green grass, and he cannot conceive how such beauty was achieved.

A stream runs through the valley into a perfectly clear lake where fish seem to float in air, with a flowering island joined by a single-plank bridge, and spills over a cliff towards the great river.

If there is any fault it is excessive neatness; potted plants are buried to look wild, sheep, deer and ducks roam under a watchful mastiff, and ivy and vines hide the cliffs.

A low wall and the cliffs enclose the domain, with a single gate the only way in or out; on a near-island in the brook stands a house of novel yet fitting design.

The cottage is utterly simple, its charm entirely in its composition, as if painted by a landscape artist; he will describe it from its best viewpoint.

He describes the cottage's modest proportions: a main building and two small wings, steep curved roofs forming porches, a tall striped chimney, lozenge-paned windows.

An outside staircase leads to a loft, stone slabs make paths through the turf, outhouses are hidden by trees, and a dead tree covered in blossom holds cages of songbirds.

Jasmine and a rampant grape-vine climb the porch and roof; the grey shingles and pots of flowers melt into the greenery, best seen from the southern wall.

Having lost his road, he has an excuse to open the gate and ask the way; a huge mastiff bounds at him in silence but is won over by an offered hand.

A young woman of natural grace and unworldly, romantic eyes answers his knock and invites him in; he notes the vestibule and the study beyond.

He meets the owner, civil and cordial, but is more interested in the rooms: simple, graceful furniture and three fine lithographs, one of a beautiful, enigmatic face.

Flowers are the only decoration; he says he means only to picture the house as he found it, and may tell another time how and why the owner made it.

After an epigraph about conscience as a spectre in one's path, the narrator, hiding his real name because it is infamous throughout the world, laments himself as an outcast dead to honour and hope.

From a family of excitable temperament, he grew wilful and ungoverned, and his weak parents let him rule the house; he recalls his first school in an old, dreamlike English village.

He lingers fondly on the prison-like walled school, and on the paradox of the principal, benign in the pulpit on Sunday and a stern tyrant with the cane at school.

He recalls the massive spiked gate, opened only three times a week, the bare gravel playground, and the front garden entered only at arrivals and departures.

The old house was a maze of rooms and steps, so intricate that in five years he never learned exactly where his own dormitory lay.

He describes the long, low schoolroom with the principal's dreaded enclosure, the ushers' boxes, and endless carved, battered desks.

Within those walls his childhood was intensely vivid; the school's small routine was a whole world of passionate excitement that he remembers sharply.

After an Arabic epigraph about visiting a beloved's grave for relief, the narrator reflects that sorrow is born of joy, and introduces himself as heir to a gloomy ancestral house of a race of visionaries.

Born in the library where his mother died, he spent his boyhood in books and reverie, and by manhood the real world seemed a dream to him while his dreams became his only real life.

He sits motionless through a night and a day with the phantom of the teeth, until a weeping servant tells him his cousin died of a fit that morning and is ready for burial.