o arouse the sleeper
to a sense of the startling intelligence. But his limbs were rigid--his
lips were livid--his lately beaming eyes were riveted in _death_.
I staggered back towards the table--my hand fell upon a cracked and
blackened goblet--and a consciousness of the entire and terrible truth
flashed suddenly over my soul.

THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM

Impia tortorum longos hic turba furores
Sanguinis innocui, non satiata, aluit.
Sospite nunc patria, fracto nunc funeris antro,
Mors ubi dira fuit vita salusque patent.

[_Quatrain composed for the gates of a market to be erected
upon the site of the Jacobin Club House at Paris_.]

I WAS sick--sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at
length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses
were leaving me. The sentence--the dread sentence of death--was the last
of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of
the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate
hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution--perhaps from its
association in fancy with the burr of a mill wheel. This only for a
brief period; for presently I heard no more. Yet, for a while, I saw;
but with how terrible an exaggeration! I saw the lips of the black-robed
judges. They appeared to me white--whiter than the sheet upon which
I trace these words--and thin even to grotesqueness; thin with the
intensity of their expression of firmness--of immoveable resolution--of
stern contempt of human torture. I saw that the decrees of what to me
was Fate, were still issuing from those lips. I saw them writhe with
a deadly locution. I saw them fashion the syllables of my name; and I
shuddered because no sound succeeded. I saw, too, for a few moments of
delirious horror, the soft and nearly imperceptible waving of the sable
draperies which enwrapped the walls of the apartment. And then my vision
fell upon the seven tall candles upon the table. At first they wore the
aspect of charity, and seemed white and slender angels who would save
me; but then, all at once, there came a most deadly nausea over my
spirit, and I felt every fibre in my frame thrill as if I had touched
the wire of a galvanic battery, while the angel forms became meaningless
spectres, with heads of flame, and I saw that from them there would be
no help. And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note,
the thought of what sweet res