Chapter 250

AND OTHER STORIES 237 hissingly into my brain. Years — years may pass away, but the memory of that epoch never ! Nor was I indeed ignorant of the flowers and the vine — but the hemlock and the cypress overshadowed me night and day. And I kept no reckoning of time or place, and the stars of my fate faded from heaven, and therefore the earth grew dark, and its figures passed by me like flitting shadows, and among them all I beheld only— Morelia. The winds of the firmament breathed but one sound within my ears, and the ripples upon the sea murmured evermore — Morelia. But she died; and with my own hands I bore her to the tomb; and I laughed with a long and bitter laugh as I found no traces of the first in the charnel where I laid the second — Morelia. METZENGERSTEIN Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages. Why then give a date to the story I have to tell? Let it suffice to say, that at the period of which I speak there existed in the interior of Hungary a settled although hidden belief in the doctrines of the Metempsychosis. Of the doctrines themselves — that is, of their falsity or of their probability — I say nothing. I assert, however, that much of our incredulity (as La Bruyere says of all our unhappiness) “vient de ne pouvoir etre seuls ” But there were some points in the Hungarian superstition which were fast verging to absurdity. They, the Hungarians, differed very essentially from their Eastern authorities. For example — “The soul ” said the former — I give the words of an acute and intelligent Parisian — “ne demeure qu’une seule fois dans un corps sensible. Ainsi — un cheval, un chien, un homme meme, ne que la ressemblance illusoire des ces etres.”