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Updated: May 17, 2025
Sometimes as the winter blast stirred them, they knocked against the panes with a sound the knuckles of a skeleton might have made. There was not the slightest suggestion of the soft-voiced "Ligeia" in that harsh, horrible sound. Upon the bed the girl-wife lay well nigh as still and as white as the snow outside. Now and again she coughed a weak, ghostly sort of cough.
I had no lack of what the world calls wealth. Ligeia had brought me far more, very far more than ordinarily falls to the lot of mortals. After a few months, therefore, of weary and aimless wandering, I purchased, and put in some repair, an abbey, which I shall not name, in one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England.
It came like a sigh of tender pity across the stillness and he bent his head to listen. It was the voice of the faintest of breezes blowing up from the south and passing his window. He threw wide his arms to empty space as if to embrace some invisible form. "Ligeia, Ligeia, my beautiful one," he breathed, invoking his dream-lady, "Be my counsellor and guide!
I saw not then what I now clearly perceive, that the acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic, were astounding; yet I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself, with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation at which I was most busily occupied during the earlier years of our marriage.
Strangely in forlorn silence passes before us, as we close his pages, that procession of "dead, cold Maids." Ligeia follows Ulalume; and Lenore follows Ligeia; and after them Eulalie and Annabel; and the moaning of the sea-tides that wash their feet is the moaning of eternity.
It is of that finer sort which the inner ear alone can estimate. It seems simple, like a Greek column, because of its perfection. In a poem named "Ligeia," under which title he intended to personify the music of nature, our boy-poet gives us the following exquisite picture: Ligeia! Ligeia!
And, indeed, if ever that spirit which is entitled Romance if ever she, the wan misty-winged Ashtophet of idolatrous Egypt, presided, as they tell, over marriages ill-omened, then most surely she presided over mine. There is one dear topic, however, on which my memory fails me not. It is the person of Ligeia. In stature she was tall, somewhat slender, and, in her latter days, even emaciated.
"O God!" half shrieked Ligeia, leaping to her feet and extending her arms aloft with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of these lines "O God! O Divine Father! shall these things be undeviatingly so? shall this Conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in Thee? Who who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor?
In The American Museum, of Baltimore appeared his fantastic prose-poem, "Ligeia," with his theory of the power of the human will for a text his favorite of all of his "tales" his favorite, in the weakness of whose own will lay the real tragedy of his life!
The place was found, the time midnight decided upon: but the question remained, how should Ligeia be resurrected? And here arose almost an insuperable difficulty. Yet now she must be revived.
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