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from
LIGEIA
, by Edgar Allan Poe
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 in the draping of the apartment lay, alas! the chief phantasy of all. The lofty walls, gigantic in height --even unproportionably so --were hung from summit to foot, in vast folds, with a heavy and massive-looking tapestry --tapestry of a material which was found alike as a carpet on the floor, as a covering for the ottomans and the ebony bed, as a canopy for the bed, and as the gorgeous volutes of the curtains which partially shaded the window. The material was the richest cloth of gold...
To one entering the room, they bore the appearance of simple monstrosities;
ut upon a farther advance, this appearance gradually departed; and step by step,
as the visitor moved his station in the chamber, he saw himself surrounded by an endless
succession of the ghastly forms which belong to the superstition of the Norman, or arise in
the guilty slumbers of the monk. The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the
artificial introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the draperies --giving
a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole.
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