H since her marriage. Time, and the continued
action of opium, deadening the old sensibilities of the heart and
awakening new ones, have effected a wonderful change in my feelings
towards her. Little as the confession may argue in favor of my early
passion, I seldom think of her, save with a feeling very closely allied
to indifference. Yet I have often seen her in my spectral illusions,
young and beautiful as ever, but always under circumstances which formed
a wide contrast between her spectral appearance and all my recollections
of the real person. The spectral face, which I often saw looking in
upon me, in my study, when the door was ajar, and visible only in the
uncertain lamplight, or peering over me in the moonlight solitude of my
bed-chamber, when I was just waking from sleep, was uniformly subject
to, and expressive of, some terrible hate, or yet more terrible anguish.
Its first appearance was startling in the extreme. It was the face of
one of the fabled furies: the demon glared in the eye, the nostril was
dilated, the pale lip compressed, and the brow bent and darkened; yet
above all, and mingled with all, the supremacy of human beauty was
manifest, as if the dream of Eastern superstition had been realized, and
a fierce and foul spirit had sought out and animated into a fiendish
existence some beautiful sleeper of the grave.
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