Mimes, in the form of God on high,
      Mutter and mumble low,
    And hither and thither fly;
      Mere puppets they, who come and go
    At bidding of vast formless things
      That shift the scenery to and fro,
    Flapping from out their condor wings
      Invisible Wo!

    That motley drama!—­oh, be sure
      It shall not be forgot! 
    With its Phantom chased for evermore
      By a crowd that seize it not,
    Through a circle that ever returneth in
      To the self-same spot;
    And much of Madness, and more of Sin
      And Horror, the soul of the plot!

    But see, amid the mimic rout,
      A crawling shape intrude! 
    A blood-red thing that writhes from out
      The scenic solitude! 
    It writhes!—­it writhes!—­with mortal pangs
      The mimes become its food,
    And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs
      In human gore imbued.

    Out—­out are the lights—­out all: 
      And over each quivering form,
    The curtain, a funeral pall,
      Comes down with the rush of a storm—­
    And the angels, all pallid and wan,
      Uprising, unveiling, affirm
    That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
      And its hero, the conqueror Worm.

“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?  Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.”

And now, as if exhausted with emotion, she suffered her white arms to fall, and returned solemnly to her bed of death.  And as she breathed her last sighs, there came mingled with them a low murmur from her lips.  I bent to them my ear, and distinguished, again, the concluding words of the passage in Glanvill:  “Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.”

She died:  and I, crushed into the very dust with sorrow, could no longer endure the lonely desolation of my dwelling in the dim and decaying city by the Rhine.  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.  The gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the almost savage aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and time-honored memories connected with both, had much in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment which had driven