me into that remote and unsocial region of the country.  Yet although the external abbey, with its verdant decay hanging about it, suffered but little alteration, I gave way, with a child-like perversity, and perchance with a faint hope of alleviating my sorrows, to a display of more than regal magnificence within.  For such follies, even in childhood, I had imbibed a taste, and now they came back to me as if in the dotage of grief.  Alas, I feel how much even of incipient madness might have been discovered in the gorgeous and fantastic draperies, in the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wild cornices and furniture, in the Bedlam patterns of the carpets of tufted gold!  I had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my labors and my orders had taken a coloring from my dreams.  But these absurdities I must not pause to detail.  Let me speak only of that one chamber, ever accursed, whither, in a moment of mental alienation, I led from the altar as my bride—­as the successor of the unforgotten Ligeia—­the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine.

There is no individual portion of the architecture and decoration of that bridal chamber which is not visibly before me.  Where were the souls of the haughty family of the bride, when, through thirst of gold, they permitted to pass the threshold of an apartment so bedecked, a maiden and a daughter so beloved?  I have said, that I minutely remember the details of the chamber—­yet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep moment; and here there was no system, no keeping, in the fantastic display to take hold upon the memory.  The room lay in a high turret of the castellated abbey, was pentagonal in shape, and of capacious size.  Occupying the whole southern face of the pentagonal was the sole window—­an immense sheet of unbroken glass from Venice—­a single pane, and tinted of a leaden hue, so that the rays of either the sun or moon passing through it, fell with a ghastly luster on the objects within.  Over the upper portion of this huge window extended the trellis-work of an aged vine, which clambered up the massy walls of the turret.  The ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device.  From out the most central recess of this melancholy vaulting, depended, by a single chain of gold with long links, a huge censer of the same metal, Saracenic in pattern, and with many perforations so contrived that there writhed in and out of them, as if endued with a serpent vitality, a continual succession of parti-colored fires.