Text: Ruth Leigh Hudson, “Chapter II.V,” Poe's Craftsmanship in the Short Story, dissertation, 1935, pp. 220-248 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 220, continued:]

It will be remembered that as early as 1835 Poe had, for his own purposes, reduced to a formula the nature of the short story appearing in in the now well-known, but only recently discovered, letter of April 30, 1835, he wrote T. W. White that current stories could be placed in four categories: the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque, the witty exaggerated into the burlesque, the fearful colored into the horrible, and the singular heightened into the strange and mystical. Except for his creation of the tale of ratiocination, he made few excursions in the years that followed beyond the types which he had early hit upon, and he added very little to his subject-matter in the way of subject-matter through the years. [page 221:] So far as the basic material of his tales is concerned, its chief sources may be found in the readily, thinking and writing of the young Poe of 1830 to 1335. Though he often wrote upon journalistic topics, his notable stories — the ones upon which he lavished his best efforts — treat the old themes and ideas. He became at an early period preoccupied with the manner of his stories rather than the subject-matter; what he wrote came to be of less importance than how he wrote it. In part this accounts, I think, for the frequency with which he utilized characters, situations, devices, and even descriptive passages from his earlier stories in later ones.

When one reads straight through the critiques which Poe wrote through the years, one is struck by the frequency with which he repeated the same quotations, the same allusions to books, the same theories of creation. For example, it has been pointed out that he made use upon seven different occasions of the quotation from Lord Bacon, ‘There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in its proportion.”(130) He [page 222:] made use again and again of the apothegm from James Puckle, “When speaking of the dead, so fold up your discourse that their virtues may be outwardly shown, while their vices are trapped up in silence.” We, might cite at least a dozen other quotations which apparently belonged to Poe's everyday thinking and which crept, consequently, into his writing. This was a natural habit in a man who wrote so much and of necessity so hurriedly in the critical field. But the same kind of thing appears, though perhaps not so obviously, in the language of his stories. Moreover, an examination of characters, situations, and plots reveals the same habit of repetition. His attitude of mind may have changed somewhat; his reading and store of information expanded; but the key ideas remained essentially the same.

Of his stories written before and during his Messenger days, eight belong to the types of the singular and horrible pointed out by Poe. This group of eight, followed by four others in the same manner in the interval before his first collection in 1840, marks the quality that is Poe to most of us. In these he made use of most of the favorite themes which we have associated with him: the problem of metempsychosis [page 223:] and identity in “Metzengerstein,” “Morella,” and “Ligeia,” treated later in “Eleonora” and “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”; strange diseases and manias in “Berenice,” “Morella,” “Shadow,” “Ligeia,” and “Usher,” and later in “The Man of the Crowd,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Premature Burial”; suspended animation and premature burial in “Loss of Breath,” “Berenice,” and “Usher,” used also in “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Premature Burial”; the horrors of plague in “Shadow” and “King Pest,” as well as in the later tales, The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Sphinx”; the realm of the strange and mystical in “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “Shadow,” “Silence,” and “Eiros and Charmion,” later treated variously in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” “Eleonora,” “The Masque of the Red. Death,” “The Power of Words,” and the studies of mesmerism; conscience in “Metzengerstein,” “Morella,” “Usher,’ and “William Wilson,” later the powerful motif of “The Man of the Crowd,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Imp of the Perverse.” The chief motifs directly associated with the serious stories of Poe which play little part in his early work are those of revenge and premeditated murder. [page 224:]

It becomes obvious, therefore, that no study of Poe's sources would be complete without an examination of him as his own source. His preoccupation with the same themes and his variations upon those themes offer an interesting basis for estimating his development as a craftsman.

The earliest of his stories which dealt with metempsychosis, “Metzengerstein” treated that theme in the manner traditional among the German tales — it is simply an account of a human being's use of an animal shape in order to compass his purpose of revenge upon his rival. In other ways, it echoes the older Gothic materials; like The Castle of Otranto, it is constructed around the prophecy of a family curse and downfall, and it makes much of the animated portrait motif as does Walpole's romance and many of the early tales of horror. Recently Miss Grace F. Smith has pointed out an interesting parallel between Poe's use of the horse as an agent of revenge and a widely spread folk-tale of a malevolent, or infernal, horse.(131) Certainly, “Metzengerstein,” with its [page 225:] atmosphere of popular superstition, may be called a crude study of metempsychosis in comparison with the subtlety and superior technique of “Morella” and “Ligeia.” In both of these stories there ran established in the temperament and mind of the character who professed a belief in metempsychosis a bent toward the mystical before he was required to witness what he considered to be a manifestation of metempsychosis. Morella exercised an unnatural spell over her husband's weaker nature; she led him into studies of a wild and terrible kind. He thought constantly upon such themes as the doctrines of Identity as urged by Schelling,” and under Morella's tutelage came to ponder with intense interest “the notion of that identity, which at death is or is not lost forever.” And because of Morella's dying words, “I am dying, yet I shall live,” the mania-ridden brain of the husband could easily persuade him that in the daughter he beheld the mother reincarnated. In other words, the reader is left to draw his own conclusions as to the reality or the visionary nature of the husband's obsession. [page 226:]

“Ligeia” not only creates a second time the mysterious and intellectual roman with a stronger and more dominating mind than her husband, and equally preoccupied in bizarre studies, but it presents more forcefully and more artistically the theme of metempsychosis. Poe himself acknowledged the similarity between “Morella” and “Ligeia,”(132) and no doubt his experience with the earlier story aided him in giving the second a power that he had not at first achieved. In spite of the allusions to the narrator's use of opium in “Ligeia” there is less opportunity to interpret the reincarnation as the result of a husband's delusion. Its appeal to our credulity lies almost entirely in the character of Ligeia herself. Her astounding fund of strange knowledge, her gigantic volition, her passionate devotion to her husband, and above all, her vehement desire for life itself prepare us to expect the impossible of her. A recent study of the use which Poe made of the pseudo-science of phrenology points out that Poe drew upon his knowledge of phrenology to depict even Ligeia's head as indicative of her strong will and her desire for life, a [page 227:] subtle touch overlooked by those of us who have no familiarity with the interesting science which occupied attention in Poe's day.(133) If we could conceive of metempsychosis under any circumstances, it would be in the form, I think, of a wife's usurping the body of the woman who had supplanted her. But “Ligeia” induces belief in its weird theme more through the art of its telling than through any essential plausibility. Poe lavished upon it the best of his art and created faith where reason would deny its right to existence.

In “Eleonora” Poe took up once more the theme of metempsychosis. In the earlier version of this story, its similarities to “Ligeia” are much more obvious than in the form with which we are familiar. The lovely Eleonora, who sometimes seemed to her lover to possess two souls embodied in one form, extracted from him a promise that he would not bestow his love upon another after her death. He could not bear, however, to live in the Valley of Many-Coloured Grass after she had departed. He went out into the world and found there the ethereal Ermengarde, and [page 228:] “my passion for the young girl of the valley” was as nothing “In comparison with the fervor, and the delirium and the spirit-lifting ecstasy of adoration with which I poured out my whole soul in tears at the feet of the ethereal Ermengarde.” He wedded Ermengarde and forgot to dread the awful curse which he had invoked upon himself if he broke his pledge to Eleonora. And strangely a voice, sweet and familiar, came through his lattice at night telling him that in wedding Ermengarde he was absolved of his vows to Eleonora “for reasons which shall be made known to thee in Heaven.” “Eleonora” seems to me the apotheosis of Poe's studies of the love of women; in it he has spiritualized and lifted above human understanding the insoluble problems of love and death and identity.

“A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” is so different in general tone from the stories of metempsychosis which preceded it that it seems inappropriate to discuss it in connection with the others. Poe sought in it to give a scientific interpretation to the hallucination of pre-existence. Bedloe for a few hours reenacted certain scenes from what he and his physician Templeton believed a previous existence as [page 229:] Oldeb. But the reader is left his choice of accepting their explanation or of accounting for the strange phenomenon as the result of the powerful mesmeric influence which Templeton exercised over his patient. The death of Bedloe likewise may be explained as a reenactment of his previous death as Oldeb or as the rationally acceptable result of coincident.

Poe's habit of returning repeatedly to the characterizations of beings afflicted by some strange disease or mania has been interpreted by some of his biographers as reflecting the diseased nature of his own mind. If such was the easel, then we had best accept the fact that the literary people of that generation were a group of men and women affected by similar aberrations. A reasonable amount of familiarity with the stories which circulated then reveals the popularity of such fictitious characterizations. But not only writers were interested in these manifestations of diseases and mental abnormalties [[abnormalities]]; medical men discussed tit with the greatest freedom. It was an age when such a publication as The Diary of a Late Physician,” filled as it was with details of diseases and confidences which no doctor would ever have actually revealed, could be accepted as the genuine [page 230:] reminiscences of a physician; when a sober-headed young scotch physician, Robert Macnish, could write with profound seriousness his Philosophy of Sleep and An Introduction Phrenology; then medical journals gave details of experiences as harrowing as anything conceived in the wildest fictions; and when no inconsiderable portion of the public could accept in good faith the mesmeric miracle of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” It is not to be rendered that Poe, in seeking to satisfy a taste for the lurid, already rendered somewhat callous by its constant diet of horrors, should have recognized that the people of his stories in order to be interesting had best be the victims of extraordinary afflictions.

Berenice suffered from a fatal malady which swept suddenly over her, “pervading her mind, her habits, and in a manner the most subtle and terrible, disturbing even the identity of her person!” This horrible malady brought in its wake “a species of epilepsy not infrequently terminating in trance itself — trance very nearly resembling positive dissolution, and from which her manner of recovery was, in most instances, startlingly abrupt.” She became excessively emaciated, and her once jetty hair turned [page 231:] a “jarringly discordant” and vivid yellow. At the same time her husband was afflicted with an equally strange malady, attentiveness.

His disease, or monomania, explained thus minutely, resulted in the husband's fixing his attention upon the teeth of Berenice so insanely that he was induced to extract them from her living body entombed as a corpse. Thus the two unnatural maladies were necessary to motivate the horrible climax.

“Berenice” was almost a note-book of ideas for Poe: it offered a number of attractive opportunities to play upon the same ideas in varying ways. It reveals Poe's amateur workmanship, also, in a few threads left unused in reaching the ultimate horror. For instance, [page 232:] the husband's insistent belief that he had lived before had no real bearing upon the course of the story; it was made to have meaning in “Morella” and “Eleonora.” The narrator's weird studies probably had something to do with the development of his malady; a similar detail in “Morella” and “Ligeia” assumed more significance in interpreting subsequent events. The fascination and, at the same time, repulsion of Berenice for her husband was a more or less superfluous detail. In “Morella” Poe made it of vital import in the plot. The apparently pointless transformation of Berenice's hair from a jetty hue to a vivid yellow (in the original text, from a golden hue to a ringlets as black as the raven's ring) became in “Ligeia,” when the husband discovered the raven locks of Ligeia in place of the golden ones of the fair Rowena, the key to the climax Ligeia's reanimation in the body of Rowena. In similar fashion the reference in the Messenger text of “Berenice” to her having grown taller since her malady became important in the transformation of Ligeia.

Of more significance, however, was Poe's subsequent treatment of the idea of premature burial used in “Berenice.” Sometime between March, 1835, when [page 233:] “Berenice” appeared in the Messenger, and September of the same year, Poe probably revised his “A Decided Loss” into “Loss of Breath” so as to include a satire not only of the gruesome tales of Blackwood's but also of his own horror materials. One of his most important additions to the second version of his story was an account of the sensations of the victim as he lay ostensibly a corpse and awaited certain interment while alive. In spite of his satire, however, Poe returned to the theme of premature burial in later serious stories, Madeline Usher suffered from the same cataleptic malady that attacked Berenice. In her case there was no suggestion of the horrible transformation of identity which took place in Berenice. A more daring kind of horror was substituted in the details of Madeline's ghastly struggles to escape from her tomb. Roderick Usher's disease, or mania, even more bizarre than that of the husband in “Berenice.” “He suffered from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of a certain texture; the odors of all flowers was oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, [page 234:] which did not inspire him with horror.” He was the prey to nameless fears and to strange belief that the physique of his ancestral home had wrought a change in the morale of his existence. He suffered acutely, too, because of a peculiarly strong affinity which existed between him and his twin sister, Madeline. All of these details of his malady had bearing upon the sinister dénouement of the tale. A comparison of the two stories of “Berenice” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” gives an excellent idea of how much Poe had learned about handling his materials in the interval between the writing of the two. As we have seen, both deal with two people with strange diseases, and both live their climax in the horror of premature burial. But what a difference there is in the quality of the horror — the physical brutality of “Berenice” and the peculiarly refined torture of Usher! Not a stroke of the brush is out of place, not a detail wasted in the latter.

In “The Pit and the Pendulum” Poe returned again to the idea of premature burial, this time merely as an idea. The victim of the inquisition suffered it the sensations of dying and coming to life in the blackness of the tomb before he discovered that another [page 235:] torture had been reserved for him. In “The Premature Burial” Poe swept all other considerations boldly out of the way and made his tale almost a medical treatise upon catalepsy and its symptoms; again the scientific bent predominated over the artistic treatment.

No one of Poe's tales is more interesting for the light thrown upon the change which took place in his methods of narration than this rather mediocre story. Although his own previous stories dealing with the idea of being buried alive no doubt inspired it, he sought, as I have said, to give it a new turn, and a more substantial basis in reality. Indeed, he opened it with a sweeping condemnation of fictions which attempt to capitalize the august calamities of human beings:

He then attempted to establish in the minds of his readers a willingness to believe in the truth of his own account by listing several apparently authentic oases of catalepsy and burial. He consulted no doubt for this purpose some medical dissertation upon catalepsy and found there his precedent for citing cases of such a malady. Since he probably invented his own cases, one medical treatment of the subject would perhaps do as well as another for purposes of comparison. Robert Macninh's The Philosophy of Sleep(134) contains a chapter on “Trance” which would have attracted Poe greatly and have furnished him with all the material he needed for his handling of the theme. Macnish described trance thus:

Poe described one of his cases in very much the same manner:

The most interesting history of catalepsy related by Macnish was one which he attributed to the Psychological Magazine. A young woman suffered a suspension of all her bodily functions while her mental faculties remained active. She mas thus forced to witness all the preparations for her burial and yet was unable to give a sign that would save her from being buried alive. She said it seemed to her as if she were really dead, yet she was conscious of all that was happening. She had the contradictory feeling of being in her body and yet not in it. At last the great agony she suffered as she heard the singing of the funeral hymns induced a slight tremor in her frame and then stronger movements. The case of Mr. Stapleton cited, by Poe parallels this somewhat. Stapleton “declared that at no period was he altogether insensible that, dully and confusedly, he ‘as aware of everything which happened to him, from the moment in which he was pronounced dead by his physicians.” [page 238:]

Macnish concluded his discussion of the manifestations of trance by a stern Injunction against hasty interment:

It will be remembered that Poe's narrator described minutely the precautions which he had taken against premature burial by his invention of a vault and a coffin which would permit his escape in the event that he should be interred alive.

Even this notion of a coffin which would permit escape from the horror of premature burial Poe took from reality. The thoughts of his generation were so with the terrible experiences told of those who had been buried while still alive that an inventor proceeded to capitalize on those terrors by designing a “life-preserving coffin.” such an article was exhibited at the Fair of the American Institute held in New York in October, 1843. Poe may have seen the coffin itself; if not, he probably cane across accounts of it written by those who had seen it.

The Columbian Magazine for January, 1844, before Poe's story appeared in July of the same year, published an odd little ballad introduced by a prose note and called “The Life-Preserving Coffin.”(135) The introductory note explains the source of the idea of such a coffin, and is probably the thing which directly inspired the detail in Poe's story:

Or Poe might have read the newspaper account to which Smith referred. Such a description appeared in the New York Herald for October 12, 1843:

In addition to his cautious beginning of the tale in such a way as to establish the authenticity of his account and to his insertion of the detail from real life of a “life-preserving coffin,” Poe sought, in the conclusion of his story, to give to the final episode of being buried alive more than the commonplace explanation of a dream. He added a note of reality, of Plausibility, by depicting the victim's awakening in the narrow bunk of a small sloop laden with garden mould — surroundings that might easily have been mistaken for the environment of a tomb. Thus, from beginning [page 242:] to end, the last of Poe's stories of premature burial has its basis in reality and cold reasonableness. It evidences, therefore, a striking development from his earnest treatment of the same theme in “Berenice.”

It is necessary, in connection with Poe's studies of semi-death and sentience in the charnel-house, to take into consideration also his variation upon this theme in his tales which treat actual sentience in death itself. In “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” he protrayed [[portrayed]] with allegorical implications the experience of death as described from the spirit world. In “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” he gave his most daring and terrible picture of the combination of death and sentience. Here again he combined with the sheer horror of his tale the rational explanation of pseudo-science, in that manner inducing actual belief in what was perhaps his most exaggerated study of the life-in-death motif.

In the course of the preceding discussion of horror materials current in Poe's time, I have mentioned various accounts which parallel his own manner [page 243:] of dealing with the theme of living interment.(137) Again, I should like to emphasize the obvious fact that Poe's preoccupation with such materials was in no way peculiar to him and that it does not afford a legitimate basis for inferring that his mind had a particular bent for this form of refined torture. It is interesting, therefore, in this connection to note that some critics of Poe even insist won an autobiographical interpretation of this phase of his subject-matter. In a recent review of a late biography of Poe, Conrad Aiken commented as follows upon the author's treatment of “psychic impotence”:

No better phrase can be coined than Poe's own “the singular heightened into the strange and mystical” — to describe one group of his fictions. From “MS. Found in a Bottle” to his final prose poem, “Eureka,” he sought in this mood to reach the unreal, the unknown, the ineffable. The first of these, less bizarre and more genuinely a tale than its kindred sketches, in, in spite of its unmistakable debt to Coleridge's “The Ancient Mariner,” strikingly original. In it we catch sight briefly of the rationally inclined. Poe who allowed his natural bent of mind to express itself frequently in later years. Unlike the narrator of “Berenice,” “Morella,” and “Ligeia,” the young man of this story disclaimed any fondness for the mystical. He had been known among his friends for his coldly scientific attitude and had had a habit of “referring occurrences, even the least susceptible of such reference,” to the principles of physical science. But in his account of the mystic ship and its crew, grown frightfully into a hoary old age, he entered the realm of unreality, of those things that haunt men in their wildest dreams. There is in the tale, too, more [page 245:] than a suggestion of allegory — in the wonder and awe of Discovery.(139)

“Shadow” and “Silence” are allegorically mood poems which belong almost more properly to a study of Poe's poetry than to his fiction. The first deals in a subdued tone that is more moving than the sound of trumpets with the omnipresence of death. Poe touched upon the same theme again in “The Masque of the Red Death,” but more terribly, shall I say, more shriekingly. “Silence” is a study of loneliness, of spiritual desolation. “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” [page 246:] the first of his dialogues of the dead, is a curious reminder of his early poem, “Al Aaraaf.” There is enough of the startling, of the journalistic, in its account of the destruction of the world by a comet to catch the popular fancy. Poe himself was, I think, more interested in his brief glimpse of the triumph of Truth and his vision of “perfected knowledge,” when humanity should forget ulterior matters in the face of the ultimate calamity. I have fancied that the influence of Shelley can be detected in this conception of Truth regnant and in the “light of enduring Love” which penetrated the Shadow that held Monos in Death in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una.” in the latter he attempted to answer, from the other side, some of the questions about death which he had propounded in other stories. In “The Power of Words” he was concerned again with the idea of a perfect knowledge and with the poetry of creation. Certainly the poet of “Al Aaraaf” spoke once more in this: “Come! we will leave to the left the loud harmony of the Pleiades, and swoop outward from the throne into the starry meadows beyond Orion, where, for pansies and violets, and heart's-ease, are the beds of the triplicate and triple-tinted sum.” The philosopher was [page 247:] struggling for that expression which was heard more plainly in his essay-fiction, “Mesmeric Revelation,” and his “Eureka,” in both of which Poe dealt, but gropingly, with the idea of God.

Poe's studies of conscience do not belong properly to an examination of his early fiction, since among the stories of his youth “Metzengerstein” alone suggests the working of conscience; and even here it is implied but vaguely in the sufferings of the young nobleman as he lived with the revengeful spirit of his enemy. Poe's recurrence to the theme of conscience, however, does throw light upon his habit of mining again and again the same material from different angles until he had extracted the valuable ore. “The Man of the Crowd” pictures a man troubled by a haunting consciousness of vague and intangible guilt. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a study of conscience in the insane mind. “The Black Cat” is a more terrible treatment of conscience in a drunkard's in the rational intervals between insane moments and insane acts. In “The Imp of the Perverse” Poe attempted to sketch a deliberate mind that rules conscience out of consideration until it was born of the very effort at suppression. [page 248:] In the same way, his treatments of a certain kind of crime — that of murder and hiding the corous delicti — continued from the madman's crime in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and the drunkard's in “The Black Cat,” revealed in both cases by their perverted attempts at over-boldness, through the murder in “The Imp of the Perverse,” perfect in all its details except in the temperament of the murderer himself, until he pictured finally the cold and calculating and perfect murderer in the revengeful Montresor in “The Cask of Amontillado.”

A brief survey of the foregoing discussion reveals that in all his favorite themes Poe tended from a purely artistic treatment to scientific or philosophical, and rational explanations. Perhaps the popular mind which he sought to please had become mated with the purely horrible and demanded a more rational diet; perhaps it was merely that in him the critical point of view had predominated. The fact that he found so few new fields as the years Tent on is indicative either of the drying up of the springs of his inspiration, or of his weariness in seeking to please a public, which, after all, had not been too kind to him.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 221:]

130.  Killis Campbell, “Poe's Reading,” Univ. of Texas Studies in English, No. 5, (Oct. 8, 1925), 166ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 224:]

131.  “Poe's Metzengerstein,” Mod. Language Notes, XLVIII (June, 1933), 356ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 226:]

132.  Letter to P. P. Cooke, Sept. 21, 1839). Letters, 51.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 227:]

133.  Edward Hungerford, “Poe and Phrenology,” Amer. Lit., II (Jan., 1931), 433ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 236:]

134.  Glasgow: W. R.McPhun, 1834. There was an American edition the following year.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 239:]

135.  By Seba Smith. I, 36. Poe's tale appeared in the Dollar Newspaper, July 31, 1844. His “Mesmeric Revelation” and “The Angel of the Odd,” as well is a sketch of “Byron and Miss Chaworth,” were published in the same year in the newly established Columbian.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 241:]

136.  The last paragraph of the inventor's account of his coffin is apparently very much garbled in the newspaper version. It is to be presumed that the proof-reader was responsible for the mixed-up sentences.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 243:]

137.  Particularly striking treatments were cited in “The Metempsychosis,” The Confessions of a Metempsychosis,” “Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician,” and Macnish's The Philosophy of Sleep. One of the most gruesome accounts, “The Buried Alive,” will be examined in connection with the satire of “Loss of Breath.”

138.  Review of Una Pope-Hennessy's A Critical Biography of Poe, in “Books of the Quarter,” The Criterion, XIV (April, 1935), 503ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 245:]

139.  Among the tales current in Poe's time, I have found only one reference to a narrative that remotely suggests the tone of this story. In his article on “French Dramas and Melodramas” in The Paris Sketch Book (277ff.), Thackeray mentioned a play “which in the midst of its absurdities and claptraps, had much of good in it,” “Le Maudit des Mers.” He described it thus: “Le Maudit is a Dutch Captain, who, in the midst of a storm, while his crew were on their knees at prayers, blasphemed and drank punch; but that was his astonishment at beholding an archangel with a sword all covered with flaming resin, who told him that as he, in the hour of danger, was too daring, or too wicked, to utter a prayer, he never should cease roaming the seas until he could find some being who would pray to heaven for him. Once, only, in a hundred years, was the skipper allowed to land for this purpose; and this piece runs through four centuries, in as many acts, describing the agonies and unavailing attempts of the miserable Dutchman.” Again and again, according to Thacheray, the angel sent Le Maudit back — “A la mer! A la mer! ... to be lonely, and tempest-tossed, and seasick for a hundred years more.”