The
      crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries; their
      eyes have an eager and uneasy meaning; and when their fingers
      fall athwart my path in the wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I
      feel as I have never felt before, although I have been all my
      life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of
      fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my
      very soul has become a ruin. When I look around me I feel ashamed of my former apprehensions. If I trembled at the blast which has hitherto attended us, shall
      I not stand aghast at a warring of wind and ocean, to convey any
      idea of which the words tornado and simoom are trivial and
      ineffective? All in the immediate vicinity of the ship is the
      blackness of eternal night, and a chaos of foamless water; but,
      about a league on either side of us, may be seen, indistinctly
      and at intervals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into
      the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe. As I imagined, the ship proves to be in a current—if that
      appellation can properly be given to a tide which, howling and
      shrieking by the white ice, thunders on to the southward with a
      velocity like the headlong dashing of a cataract. To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly
      impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these
      awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will
      reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident
      that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge—some
      never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. Perhaps this current leads us to the southern pole itself. It
      must be confessed that a supposition apparently so wild has every
      probability in its favor. The crew pace the deck with unquiet and tremulous step; but there
      is upon their countenances an expression more of the eagerness of
      hope than of the apathy of despair. In the meantime the wind is still in our poop, and, as we carry a
      crowd of canvas, the ship is at times lifted bodily from out the
      sea! Oh, horror upon horror!—the ice opens suddenly to the right,
      and to the left, and we are whirling dizzily, in immense
      concentric circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic
      amphitheatre, the summit of whose walls is lost in the darkness
      and the distance. But little time will be left me to ponder upon
      my destiny! The circles rapidly grow small—we are plunging madly
      within the grasp of the whirlpool—and amid a roaring, and
      bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is
      quivering—oh God! and—going down. NOTE.—The “MS. Found in a Bottle,” was originally published in
      1831, and it was not until many years afterwards that I became
      acquainted with the maps of Mercator, in which the ocean is
      represented as rushing, by four mouths, into the (northern) Polar
      Gulf, to be absorbed into the bowels of the earth; the Pole
      itself being represented by a black rock, towering to a
      prodigious height. THE OVAL PORTRAIT


      The château into which my valet had ventured to make forcible
      entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded
      condition, to pass a night in the open air, was one of those
      piles of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned
      among the Appennines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs.
      Radcliffe. To all appearance it had been temporarily and very
      lately abandoned. We established ourselves in one of the smallest
      and least sumptuously furnished apartments. It lay in a remote
      turret of the building. Its decorations were rich, yet tattered
      and antique. Its walls were hung with tapestry and bedecked with
      manifold and multiform armorial trophies, together with an
      unusually great number of very spirited modern paintings in
      frames of rich golden arabesque. In these paintings, which
      depended from the walls not only in their main surfaces, but in
      very many nooks which the bizarre architecture of the château
      rendered necessary—in these paintings my incipient delirium,
      perhaps, had caused me to take deep interest; so that I bade
      Pedro to close the heavy shutters of the room—since it was
      already night—to light the tongues of a tall candelabrum which
      stood by the head of my bed, and to throw open far and wide the
      fringed curtains of black velvet which enveloped the bed itself. I wished all this done that I might resign myself, if not to
      sleep, at least alternately to the contemplation of these
      pictures, and the perusal of a small volume which had been found
      upon the pillow, and which purported to criticise and describe
      them. Long, long I read—and devoutly, devotedly I gazed. Rapidly and
      gloriously the hours flew by and the deep midnight came. The
      position of the candelabrum displeased me, and outreaching my
      hand with difficulty, rather than disturb my slumbering valet, I
      placed it so as to throw its rays more fully upon the book. But the action produced an effect altogether unanticipated. The
      rays of the numerous candles (for there were many) now fell
      within a niche of the room which had hitherto been thrown into
      deep shade by one of the bed-posts. I thus saw in vivid light a
      picture all unnoticed before. It was the portrait of a young girl
      just ripening into womanhood. I glanced at the painting
      hurriedly, and then closed my eyes. Why I did this was not at
      first apparent even to my own perception. But while my lids
      remained thus shut, I ran over in my mind my reason for so
      shutting them. It was an impulsive movement to gain time for
      thought—to make sure that my vision had not deceived me—to calm
      and subdue my fancy for a more sober and more certain gaze. In a
      very few moments I again looked fixedly at the painting. That I now saw aright I could not and would not doubt; for the
      first flashing of the candles upon that canvas had seemed to
      dissipate the dreamy stupor which was stealing over my senses,
      and to startle me at once into waking life. The portrait, I have already said, was that of a young girl. It
      was a mere head and shoulders, done in what is technically termed
      a vignette manner; much in the style of the favorite heads of
      Sully. The arms, the bosom, and even the ends of the radiant hair
      melted imperceptibly into the vague yet deep shadow which formed
      the back-ground of the whole. The frame was oval, richly gilded
      and filigreed in Moresque. As a thing of art nothing could be
      more admirable than the painting itself.