went, entering all the halls, of which there
were twelve, and finding them all similarly constructed, but filled with
quite various statues, of what seemed both ancient and modern sculpture.
After I had simply walked through them, I found myself sufficiently
tired to long for rest, and went to my own room.

In the night I dreamed that, walking close by one of the curtains, I was
suddenly seized with the desire to enter, and darted in. This time I was
too quick for them. All the statues were in motion, statues no longer,
but men and women--all shapes of beauty that ever sprang from the brain
of the sculptor, mingled in the convolutions of a complicated dance.
Passing through them to the further end, I almost started from my
sleep on beholding, not taking part in the dance with the others, nor
seemingly endued with life like them, but standing in marble coldness
and rigidity upon a black pedestal in the extreme left corner--my lady
of the cave; the marble beauty who sprang from her tomb or her cradle
at the call of my songs. While I gazed in speechless astonishment and
admiration, a dark shadow, descending from above like the curtain of a
stage, gradually hid her entirely from my view. I felt with a shudder
that this shadow was perchance my missing demon, whom I had not seen for
days. I awoke with a stifled cry.

Of course, the next evening I began my journey through the halls (for I
knew not to which my dream had carried me), in the hope of proving the
dream to be a true one, by discovering my marble beauty upon her black
pedestal. At length, on reaching the tenth hall, I thought I
recognised some of the forms I had seen dancing in my dream; and to my
bewilderment, when I arrived at the extreme corner on the left, there
stood, the only one I had yet seen, a vacant pedestal. It was exactly in
the position occupied, in my dream, by the pedestal on which the white
lady stood. Hope beat violently in my heart.

"Now," said I to myself, "if yet another part of the dream would but
come true, and I should succeed in surprising these forms in their
nightly dance; it might be the rest would follow, and I should see on
the pedestal my marble queen. Then surely if my songs sufficed to give
her life before, when she lay in the bonds of alabaster, much more would
they be sufficient then to give her volition and motion, when she alone
of assembled crowds of marble forms, would be standing rigid and cold."

But the difficulty was, t