uttermost agonies of
living inhumation, a wretch to these agonies foredoomed!

There arrived an epoch--as often before there had arrived--in which I
found myself emerging from total unconsciousness into the first
feeble and indefinite sense of existence. Slowly--with a tortoise
gradation--approached the faint gray dawn of the psychal day. A torpid
uneasiness. An apathetic endurance of dull pain. No care--no hope--no
effort. Then, after a long interval, a ringing in the ears; then,
after a lapse still longer, a prickling or tingling sensation in the
extremities; then a seemingly eternal period of pleasurable quiescence,
during which the awakening feelings are struggling into thought; then a
brief re-sinking into non-entity; then a sudden recovery. At length the
slight quivering of an eyelid, and immediately thereupon, an electric
shock of a terror, deadly and indefinite, which sends the blood in
torrents from the temples to the heart. And now the first positive
effort to think. And now the first endeavor to remember. And now a
partial and evanescent success. And now the memory has so far regained
its dominion, that, in some measure, I am cognizant of my state. I feel
that I am not awaking from ordinary sleep. I recollect that I have been
subject to catalepsy. And now, at last, as if by the rush of an ocean,
my shuddering spirit is overwhelmed by the one grim Danger--by the one
spectral and ever-prevalent idea.

For some minutes after this fancy possessed me, I remained without
motion. And why? I could not summon courage to move. I dared not
make the effort which was to satisfy me of my fate--and yet there was
something at my heart which whispered me it was sure. Despair--such as
no other species of wretchedness ever calls into being--despair alone
urged me, after long irresolution, to uplift the heavy lids of my eyes.
I uplifted them. It was dark--all dark. I knew that the fit was over. I
knew that the crisis of my disorder had long passed. I knew that I
had now fully recovered the use of my visual faculties--and yet it was
dark--all dark--the intense and utter raylessness of the Night that
endureth for evermore.

I endeavored to shriek-, and my lips and my parched tongue moved
convulsively together in the attempt--but no voice issued from the
cavernous lungs, which oppressed as if by the weight of some incumbent
mountain, gasped and palpitated, with the heart, at every elaborate and
struggling inspiration.

The mo