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 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 now 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 pentagon 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 lustre on the
      objects within. Over the upper portion of this huge window,
      extended the trellice-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. Some few ottomans and golden candelabra, of Eastern figure, were
      in various stations about—and there was the couch, too—bridal
      couch—of an Indian model, and low, and sculptured of solid ebony,
      with a pall-like canopy above. In each of the angles of the
      chamber stood on end a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite,
      from the tombs of the kings over against Luxor, with their aged
      lids full of immemorial sculpture. 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. It was spotted all over, at irregular
      intervals, with arabesque figures, about a foot in diameter, and
      wrought upon the cloth in patterns of the most jetty black. But
      these figures partook of the true character of the arabesque only
      when regarded from a single point of view. By a contrivance now
      common, and indeed traceable to a very remote period of
      antiquity, they were made changeable in aspect. To one entering
      the room, they bore the appearance of simple monstrosities; but
      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.