It is a fair day for the sons of
      earth and life—ah, more fair for the daughters of heaven and
      death!”

      I kissed her forehead, and she continued:

      “I am dying, yet shall I live.”

      “Morella!”

      “The days have never been when thou couldst love me—but her whom
      in life thou didst abhor, in death thou shalt adore.”

      “Morella!”

      “I repeat that I am dying. But within me is a pledge of that
      affection—ah, how little!—which thou didst feel for me, Morella. And when my spirit departs shall the child live—thy child and
      mine, Morella’s. But thy days shall be days of sorrow—that sorrow
      which is the most lasting of impressions, as the cypress is the
      most enduring of trees. For the hours of thy happiness are over
      and joy is not gathered twice in a life, as the roses of Paestum
      twice in a year. Thou shalt no longer, then, play the Teian with
      time, but, being ignorant of the myrtle and the vine, thou shalt
      bear about with thee thy shroud on the earth, as do the Moslemin
      at Mecca.”

      “Morella!” I cried, “Morella! how knowest thou this?” but she
      turned away her face upon the pillow and a slight tremor coming
      over her limbs, she thus died, and I heard her voice no more. Yet, as she had foretold, her child, to which in dying she had
      given birth, which breathed not until the mother breathed no
      more, her child, a daughter, lived. And she grew strangely in
      stature and intellect, and was the perfect resemblance of her who
      had departed, and I loved her with a love more fervent than I had
      believed it possible to feel for any denizen of earth. But, ere long the heaven of this pure affection became darkened,
      and gloom, and horror, and grief swept over it in clouds. I said
      the child grew strangely in stature and intelligence. Strange,
      indeed, was her rapid increase in bodily size—but terrible, oh! terrible were the tumultuous thoughts which crowded upon me while
      watching the development of her mental being. Could it be
      otherwise, when I daily discovered in the conceptions of the
      child the adult powers and faculties of the woman?—when the
      lessons of experience fell from the lips of infancy? and when the
      wisdom or the passions of maturity I found hourly gleaming from
      its full and speculative eye? When, I say, all this became
      evident to my appalled senses—when I could no longer hide it from
      my soul, nor throw it off from those perceptions which trembled
      to receive it—is it to be wondered at that suspicions, of a
      nature fearful and exciting, crept in upon my spirit, or that my
      thoughts fell back aghast upon the wild tales and thrilling
      theories of the entombed Morella? I snatched from the scrutiny of
      the world a being whom destiny compelled me to adore, and in the
      rigorous seclusion of my home, watched with an agonizing anxiety
      over all which concerned the beloved. And as years rolled away, and I gazed day after day upon her
      holy, and mild, and eloquent face, and poured over her maturing
      form, day after day did I discover new points of resemblance in
      the child to her mother, the melancholy and the dead. And hourly
      grew darker these shadows of similitude, and more full, and more
      definite, and more perplexing, and more hideously terrible in
      their aspect. For that her smile was like her mother’s I could
      bear; but then I shuddered at its too perfect _identity_—that her
      eyes were like Morella’s I could endure; but then they, too,
      often looked down into the depths of my soul with Morella’s own
      intense and bewildering meaning. And in the contour of the high
      forehead, and in the ringlets of the silken hair, and in the wan
      fingers which buried themselves therein, and in the sad musical
      tones of her speech, and above all—oh! above all—in the phrases
      and expressions of the dead on the lips of the loved and the
      living, I found food for consuming thought and horror—for a worm
      that _would_ not die. Thus passed away two lustra of her life, and as yet my daughter
      remained nameless upon the earth. “My child,” and “my love,” were
      the designations usually prompted by a father’s affection, and
      the rigid seclusion of her days precluded all other intercourse. Morella’s name died with her at her death. Of the mother I had
      never spoken to the daughter;—it was impossible to speak. Indeed,
      during the brief period of her existence, the latter had received
      no impressions from the outward world, save such as might have
      been afforded by the narrow limits of her privacy. But at length
      the ceremony of baptism presented to my mind, in its unnerved and
      agitated condition, a present deliverance from the terrors of my
      destiny. And at the baptismal font I hesitated for a name. And
      many titles of the wise and beautiful, of old and modern times,
      of my own and foreign lands, came thronging to my lips, with
      many, many fair titles of the gentle, and the happy, and the
      good. What prompted me then to disturb the memory of the buried
      dead? What demon urged me to breathe that sound, which in its
      very recollection was wont to make ebb the purple blood in
      torrents from the temples to the heart? What fiend spoke from the
      recesses of my soul, when amid those dim aisles, and in the
      silence of the night, I whispered within the ears of the holy man
      the syllables—Morella? What more than fiend convulsed the
      features of my child, and overspread them with hues of death, as
      starting at that scarcely audible sound, she turned her glassy
      eyes from the earth to heaven, and falling prostrate on the black
      slabs of our ancestral vault, responded—“I am here!”

      Distinct, coldly, calmly distinct, fell those few simple sounds
      within my ear, and thence like molten lead rolled hissingly into
      my brain. Years—years may pass away, but the memory of that
      epoch—never! Nor was I indeed ignorant of the flowers and the
      vine—but the hemlock and the cypress overshadowed me night and
      day. And I kept no reckoning of time or place, and the stars of
      my fate faded from heaven, and therefore the earth grew dark, and
      its figures passed by me like flitting shadows, and among them
      all I beheld only—Morella. The winds of the firmament breathed
      but one sound within my ears, and the ripples upon the sea
      murmured evermore—Morella. But she died; and with my own hands I
      bore her to the tomb; and I laughed with a long and bitter laugh
      as I found no traces of the first in the charnel where I laid the
      second, Morella.