astily he inhaled the spirit, and laved
his temples with the sparkling liquid. The same sensation of vigour
and youth, and joy and airy lightness, that he had felt in the morning,
instantaneously replaced the deadly numbness that just before had
invaded the citadel of life. He stood, with his arms folded on his bosom
erect and dauntless, to watch what should ensue.

The vapour had now assumed almost the thickness and seeming consistency
of a snow-cloud; the lamps piercing it like stars. And now he distinctly
saw shapes, somewhat resembling in outline those of the human form,
gliding slowly and with regular evolutions through the cloud. They
appeared bloodless; their bodies were transparent, and contracted or
expanded like the folds of a serpent. As they moved in majestic order,
he heard a low sound--the ghost, as it were, of voice--which each caught
and echoed from the other; a low sound, but musical, which seemed the
chant of some unspeakably tranquil joy. None of these apparitions heeded
him. His intense longing to accost them, to be of them, to make one of
this movement of aerial happiness,--for such it seemed to him,--made him
stretch forth his arms and seek to cry aloud, but only an inarticulate
whisper passed his lips; and the movement and the music went on the same
as if the mortal were not there. Slowly they glided round and aloft,
till, in the same majestic order, one after one, they floated through
the casement and were lost in the moonlight; then, as his eyes followed
them, the casement became darkened with some object undistinguishable at
the first gaze, but which sufficed mysteriously to change into ineffable
horror the delight he had before experienced. By degrees this object
shaped itself to his sight. It was as that of a human head covered with
a dark veil through which glared, with livid and demoniac fire, eyes
that froze the marrow of his bones. Nothing else of the face was
distinguishable,--nothing but those intolerable eyes; but his terror,
that even at the first seemed beyond nature to endure, was increased a
thousand-fold, when, after a pause, the phantom glided slowly into the
chamber.

The cloud retreated from it as it advanced; the bright lamps grew wan,
and flickered restlessly as at the breath of its presence. Its form was
veiled as the face, but the outline was that of a female; yet it moved
not as move even the ghosts that simulate the living. It seemed rather
to crawl as some vast misshape