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Updated: May 19, 2025
But swiftly the blazing footlights began to dance like witches of Walpurgis night on Brocken heights; now they flickered, suddenly grew blue, then black, an icy darkness as from some ghoul-haunted crypt seized her, and while she threw out her hands with a strange groping motion, like a bird beating the air with dying wings, her own voice sounded far off, a mere fading echo: "Farewell farewell.
When I think of the lost days and the lost lives of which I have cognizance, then it seems as though I were gazing on some vast charnel-house, some ghoul-haunted place of skulls. Memories of those who trifled with life come to me, and their very faces flash past with looks of tragic significance.
There is for instance Poe's ``Dark tarn of Auber, the ghoul-haunted region of Weir''; there are some queer twists in the river Alph as imagined by Coleridge; two lines of Swinburne: By the tideless dolorous inland sea In a land of sand and ruin and gold are as haunting as any.
Jowala Singh knows and takes care to avoid the three or four ghoul-haunted fields on the outskirts of the village; but he is not urged by millions of devils to run about all day in the sun and swear that his plowshares are the best in the Punjab; nor does Purun Dass fly forth in an ekka more than once or twice a year, and he knows, on a pinch, how to use the railway and the telegraph as well as any son of Israel in Chicago.
It seemed natural enough that something should be dead in this sepulcher; but the living weeds, fighting bitterly for life, seemed out of place. I looked about and thought of Poe. Surely just beyond those summits where the melancholy sky touched the melancholy hills, one would come upon the "dank tarn of Auber" and the "ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."
The spell of this incomparable sorcerer was upon her imagination; the sluggish, lurid tarn of Usher; the pale, gigantic water lilies, nodding their ghastly, everlasting heads over the dreary Zaire; the shrouding shadow of Helusion; the ashen skies, and sere, crisped leaves in the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir, hard by the dim lake of Auber all lay with grim distinctness before her; and from the red bars of the grate the wild, lustrous, appalling eyes of Ligeia looked out at her, while the unearthly tones of Morella whispered from every corner of the room.
Through gaping skylights a sunny beam would penetrate; it played about the mildewy stucco partitions encrusted, in patches, with a poisonous lichen of bright green. Wandering about this dank and mournful pile of wreckage, he could understand why simple folks should dread to enter so ghoul-haunted a spot. Gladly he issued, by way of an obscure passage, into what had once been a trim garden.
In the evening light they catch the last rays of the sun and shine like diaphanous spectres upon the darkened ground, but at sunrise, when the yellow sands sparkle with light, they tower up grim and menacing: a mournful, ghoul-haunted region, like those veritable townships of the past, Dougga, Timgad and the rest of them, standing all forlorn in their African desolation.
"It is Ruysdael's 'Churchyard, and, from this distance, seems a remarkably fine copy of that sombre, desolate, ghoul-haunted picture." "Thank you. That is the only piece of work of which I feel really proud. Some day, when the light is pure and strong, come in and examine it. Now there is a greenish tinge over all things in the room thrown by sea-shimmer through the clustering leaves.
The end of the poem is like the beginning, and who can utter the feelings it excites? That "dark tarn of Auber," those "Ghoul-haunted woodlands of Weir" convey, more thrillingly than a thousand words of description, what we have actually felt, long ago, far off, in that strange country of our forbidden dreams. What a master he is!
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