1

The American Short Story:

Immediate Impact versus Narrative Latency
in Structure, Character, and Voice
Reading List (all available on-line)
Students need to read all items below before the first lecture
Lectures
Each lecture, including student comments and questions, is approximately 50 minutes.
There are eight lectures.
1. Young Goodman Brown (1835), Nathaniel Hawthorne
Dr. Heideggers Experiment (1837), Nathaniel Hawthorne
2. Twice-Told Tales. A Review. (1842), Edgar Allan Poe
The Philosophy of Composition (1846), Edgar Allan Poe
3. Bartleby the Scrivener (1853), Herman Melville
4. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1890, 1891), Ambrose Bierce
5. The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Charlotte Perkins Gilman
6. Regret (1897), Kate Chopin
7. I Stand Here Ironing (1961), Tillie Olsen
8. Conclusion and General Comments

1.
from Mosses from an Old Manse, 1854
By Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), 1835

Young Goodman Brown

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN came forth at sunset, into the street of Salem village,
but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his
young wife. And Faith, as the wife was aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the
street, letting the wind play with the pink ribbons of her cap, while she called to Goodman
Brown.
"Dearest heart," whispered she, softly and rather sadly, when her lips were close to
his ear, "pr'y thee, put off your journey until sunrise, and sleep in your own bed to-night.
A lone woman is troubled with such dreams and such thoughts, that she's afeard of
herself, sometimes. Pray, tarry with me this night, dear husband, of all nights in the year!"
"My love and my Faith," replied young Goodman Brown, "of all nights in the year,
this one night must I tarry away from thee. My journey, as thou callest it, forth and back
again, must needs be done 'twixt now and sunrise. What, my sweet, pretty wife, dost thou
doubt me already, and we but three months married!"
"Then God bless you!" said Faith, with the pink ribbons, "and may you find all well,
when you come back."
"Amen!" cried Goodman Brown. "Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to bed at dusk,
and no harm will come to thee."
So they parted; and the young man pursued his way, until, being about to turn the
corner by the meeting-house, he looked back and saw the head of Faith still peeping after
him, with a melancholy air, in spite of her pink ribbons.
"Poor little Faith!" thought he, for his heart smote him. "What a wretch am I, to leave
her on such an errand! She talks of dreams, too. Methought, as she spoke, there was
trouble in her face, as if a dream had warned her what work is to be done to-night. But,
no, no! 'twould kill her to think it. Well; she's a blessed angel on earth; and after this one
night, I'll cling to her skirts and follow her to Heaven."
With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in
making more haste on his present evil purpose. He had taken a dreary road, darkened by
all the gloomiest trees of the forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep
through, and closed immediately behind. It was all as lonely as could be; and there is this
peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveller knows not who may be concealed by the
innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that, with lonely footsteps, he may
yet be passing through an unseen multitude.
"There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree," said Goodman Brown to himself;
and he glanced fearfully behind him, as he added, "What if the devil himself should be at
my very elbow!"
His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, and looking forward again,
beheld the figure of a man, in grave and decent attire, seated at the foot of an old tree. He
arose, at Goodman Brown's approach, and walked onward, side by side with him.
"You are late, Goodman Brown," said he. "The clock of the Old South was striking, as
I came through Boston; and that is full fifteen minutes agone."

"Faith kept me back awhile," replied the young man, with a tremor in his voice, caused
by the sudden appearance of his companion, though not wholly unexpected.
It was now deep dusk in the forest, and deepest in that part of it where these two were
journeying. As nearly as could be discerned, the second traveller was about fifty years old,
apparently in the same rank of life as Goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable
resemblance to him, though perhaps more in expression than features. Still, they might
have been taken for father and son. And yet, though the elder person was as simply clad
as the younger, and as simple in manner too, he had an indescribable air of one who knew
the world, and would not have felt abashed at the governor's dinner-table, or in King
William's court, were it possible that his affairs should call him thither. But the only thing
about him, that could be fixed upon as remarkable, was his staff, which bore the likeness
of a great black snake, so curiously wrought, that it might almost be seen to twist and
wriggle itself like a living serpent. This, of course, must have been an ocular deception,
assisted by the uncertain light.
"Come, Goodman Brown!" cried his fellow-traveller, "this is a dull pace for the
beginning of a journey. Take my staff, if you are so soon weary."
"Friend," said the other, exchanging his slow pace for a full stop, "having kept
covenant by meeting thee here, it is my purpose now to return whence I came. I have
scruples, touching the matter thou wot'st of."
"Sayest thou so?" replied he of the serpent, smiling apart. "Let us walk on,
nevertheless, reasoning as we go, and if I convince thee not, thou shalt turn back. We are
but a little way in the forest, yet."
"Too far, too far!" exclaimed the goodman, unconsciously resuming his walk. "My
father never went into the woods on such an errand, nor his father before him. We have
been a race of honest men and good Christians, since the days of the martyrs. And shall I
be the first of the name of Brown, that ever took this path and kept--"
"Such company, thou wouldst say," observed the elder person, interrupting his pause.
"Well said, Goodman Brown! I have been as well acquainted with your family as with ever
a one among the Puritans; and that's no trifle to say. I helped your grandfather, the
constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem.
And it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set
fire to an Indian village, in King Philip's War. They were my good friends, both; and many
a pleasant walk have we had along this path, and returned merrily after midnight. I would
fain be friends with you, for their sake."
"If it be as thou sayest," replied Goodman Brown, "I marvel they never spoke of these
matters. Or, verily, I marvel not, seeing that the least rumor of the sort would have driven
them from New England. We are a people of prayer, and good works to boot, and abide
no such wickedness."
"Wickedness or not," said the traveller with the twisted staff, "I have a very general
acquaintance here in New England. The deacons of many a church have drunk the
communion wine with me; the selectmen, of divers towns, make me their chairman; and
a majority of the Great and General Court are firm supporters of my interest. The
governor and I, too--but these are state-secrets."
"Can this be so!" cried Goodman Brown, with a stare of amazement at his undisturbed
companion. "Howbeit, I have nothing to do with the governor and council; they have their
own ways, and are no rule for a simple husbandman like me. But, were I to go on with

thee, how should I meet the eye of that good old man, our minister, at Salem village? Oh,
his voice would make me tremble, both Sabbath-day and lecture-day!"
Thus far, the elder traveller had listened with due gravity, but now burst into a fit of
irrepressible mirth, shaking himself so violently that his snake-like staff actually seemed
to wriggle in sympathy.
"Ha! ha! ha!" shouted he, again and again; then composing himself, "Well, go on,
Goodman Brown, go on; but, pr'y thee, don't kill me with laughing!"
"Well, then, to end the matter at once," said Goodman Brown, considerably nettled,
"there is my wife, Faith. It would break her dear little heart; and I'd rather break my own!"
"Nay, if that be the case," answered the other, "e'en go thy ways, Goodman Brown. I
would not, for twenty old women like the one hobbling before us, that Faith should come
to any harm."
As he spoke, he pointed his staff at a female figure on the path, in whom Goodman
Brown recognized a very pious and exemplary dame, who had taught him his catechism
in youth, and was still his moral and spiritual adviser, jointly with the minister and
Deacon Gookin.
"A marvel, truly, that Goody Cloyse should be so far in the wilderness, at night-fall!"
said he. "But, with your leave, friend, I shall take a cut through the woods, until we have
left this Christian woman behind. Being a stranger to you, she might ask whom I was
consorting with, and whither I was going."
"Be it so," said his fellow-traveller. "Betake you to the woods, and let me keep the
path."
Accordingly, the young man turned aside, but took care to watch his companion, who
advanced softly along the road, until he had come within a staff's length of the old dame.
She, meanwhile, was making the best of her way, with singular speed for so aged a woman,
and mumbling some indistinct words, a prayer, doubtless, as she went. The traveller put
forth his staff, and touched her withered neck with what seemed the serpent's tail.
"The devil!" screamed the pious old lady.
"Then Goody Cloyse knows her old friend?" observed the traveller, confronting her,
and leaning on his writhing stick.
"Ah, forsooth, and is it your worship, indeed?" cried the good dame. "Yea, truly is it,
and in the very image of my old gossip, Goodman Brown, the grandfather of the silly
fellow that now is. But--would your worship believe it?--my broomstick hath strangely
disappeared, stolen, as I suspect, by that unhanged witch, Goody Cory, and that, too, when
I was all anointed with the juice of smallage and cinque-foil and wolf's-bane--"
"Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born babe," said the shape of old
Goodman Brown.
"Ah, your worship knows the recipe," cried the old lady, cackling aloud. "So, as I was
saying, being all ready for the meeting, and no horse to ride on, I made up my mind to
foot it; for they tell me, there is a nice young man to be taken into communion to-night.
But now your good worship will lend me your arm, and we shall be there in a twinkling."
"That can hardly be," answered her friend. "I may not spare you my arm, Goody
Cloyse, but here is my staff, if you will."
So saying, he threw it down at her feet, where, perhaps, it assumed life, being one of
the rods which its owner had formerly lent to Egyptian Magi. Of this fact, however,
Goodman Brown could not take cognizance. He had cast up his eyes in astonishment, and

looking down again, beheld neither Goody Cloyse nor the serpentine staff, but his fellowtraveller alone, who waited for him as calmly as if nothing had happened.
"That old woman taught me my catechism!" said the young man; and there was a
world of meaning in this simple comment.
They continued to walk onward, while the elder traveller exhorted his companion to
make good speed and persevere in the path, discoursing so aptly, that his arguments
seemed rather to spring up in the bosom of his auditor, than to be suggested by himself.
As they went, he plucked a branch of maple, to serve for a walking-stick, and began to
strip it of the twigs and little boughs, which were wet with evening dew. The moment his
fingers touched them, they became strangely withered and dried up, as with a week's
sunshine. Thus the pair proceeded, at a good free pace, until suddenly, in a gloomy hollow
of the road, Goodman Brown sat himself down on the stump of a tree, and refused to go
any farther.
"Friend," said he, stubbornly, "my mind is made up. Not another step will I budge on
this errand. What if a wretched old woman do choose to go to the devil, when I thought
she was going to Heaven! Is that any reason why I should quit my dear Faith, and go after
her?"
"You will think better of this by-and-by," said his acquaintance, composedly. "Sit here
and rest yourself awhile; and when you feel like moving again, there is my staff to help
you along."
Without more words, he threw his companion the maple stick, and was as speedily
out of sight, as if he had vanished into the deepening gloom. The young man sat a few
moments by the road-side, applauding himself greatly, and thinking with how clear a
conscience he should meet the minister, in his morning-walk, nor shrink from the eye of
good old Deacon Gookin. And what calm sleep would be his, that very night, which was
to have been spent so wickedly, but purely and sweetly now, in the arms of Faith! Amidst
these pleasant and praiseworthy meditations, Goodman Brown heard the tramp of horses
along the road, and deemed it advisable to conceal himself within the verge of the forest,
conscious of the guilty purpose that had brought him thither, though now so happily
turned from it.
On came the hoof-tramps and the voices of the riders, two grave old voices,
conversing soberly as they drew near. These mingled sounds appeared to pass along the
road, within a few yards of the young man's hiding-place; but owing, doubtless, to the
depth of the gloom, at that particular spot, neither the travellers nor their steeds were
visible. Though their figures brushed the small boughs by the way-side, it could not be
seen that they intercepted, even for a moment, the faint gleam from the strip of bright
sky, athwart which they must have passed. Goodman Brown alternately crouched and
stood on tip-toe, pulling aside the branches, and thrusting forth his head as far as he durst,
without discerning so much as a shadow. It vexed him the more, because he could have
sworn, were such a thing possible, that he recognized the voices of the minister and
Deacon Gookin, jogging along quietly, as they were wont to do, when bound to some
ordination or ecclesiastical council. While yet within hearing, one of the riders stopped to
pluck a switch.
"Of the two, reverend Sir," said the voice like the deacon's, I had rather miss an
ordination-dinner than tonight's meeting. They tell me that some of our community are
to be here from Falmouth and beyond, and others from Connecticut and Rhode-Island;
besides several of the Indian powows, who, after their fashion, know almost as much

deviltry as the best of us. Moreover, there is a goodly young woman to be taken into
communion."
"Mighty well, Deacon Gookin!" replied the solemn old tones of the minister. "Spur
up, or we shall be late. Nothing can be done, you know, until I get on the ground."
The hoofs clattered again, and the voices, talking so strangely in the empty air, passed
on through the forest, where no church had ever been gathered, nor solitary Christian
prayed. Whither, then, could these holy men be journeying, so deep into the heathen
wilderness? Young Goodman Brown caught hold of a tree, for support, being ready to sink
down on the ground, faint and overburthened with the heavy sickness of his heart. He
looked up to the sky, doubting whether there really was a Heaven above him. Yet, there
was the blue arch, and the stars brightening in it.
"With Heaven above, and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!" cried
Goodman Brown.
While he still gazed upward, into the deep arch of the firmament, and had lifted his
hands to pray, a cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried across the zenith, and hid
the brightening stars. The blue sky was still visible, except directly overhead, where this
black mass of cloud was sweeping swiftly northward. Aloft in the air, as if from the depths
of the cloud, came a confused and doubtful sound of voices. Once, the listener fancied that
he could distinguish the accent of town's-people of his own, men and women, both pious
and ungodly, many of whom he had met at the communion-table, and had seen others
rioting at the tavern. The next moment, so indistinct were the sounds, he doubted whether
he had heard aught but the murmur of the old forest, whispering without a wind. Then
came a stronger swell of those familiar tones, heard daily in the sunshine, at Salem village,
but never, until now, from a cloud of night. There was one voice, of a young woman,
uttering lamentations, yet with an uncertain sorrow, and entreating for some favor,
which, perhaps, it would grieve her to obtain. And all the unseen multitude, both saints
and sinners, seemed to encourage her onward.
"Faith!" shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and desperation; and the
echoes of the forest mocked him, crying --"Faith! Faith!" as if bewildered wretches were
seeking her, all through the wilderness.
The cry of grief, rage, and terror, was yet piercing the night, when the unhappy
husband held his breath for a response. There was a scream, drowned immediately in a
louder murmur of voices, fading into far-off laughter, as the dark cloud swept away,
leaving the clear and silent sky above Goodman Brown. But something fluttered lightly
down through the air, and caught on the branch of a tree. The young man seized it, and
beheld a pink ribbon.
"My Faith is gone!" cried he, after one stupefied moment. "There is no good on earth;
and sin is but a name. Come, devil! for to thee is this world given."
And maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did Goodman Brown
grasp his staff and set forth again, at such a rate, that he seemed to fly along the forestpath, rather than to walk or run. The road grew wilder and drearier, and more faintly
traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still
rushing onward, with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil. The whole forest was
peopled with frightful sounds; the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and
the yell of Indians; while, sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church-bell, and
sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to

scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other
horrors.
"Ha! ha! ha!" roared Goodman Brown, when the wind laughed at him. "Let us hear
which will laugh loudest! Think not to frighten me with your deviltry! Come witch, come
wizard, come Indian powow, come devil himself! and here comes Goodman Brown. You
may as well fear him as he fear you!"
In truth, all through the haunted forest, there could be nothing more frightful than
the figure of Goodman Brown. On he flew, among the black pines, brandishing his staff
with frenzied gestures, now giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now
shouting forth such laughter, as set all the echoes of the forest laughing like demons
around him. The fiend in his own shape is less hideous, than when he rages in the breast
of man. Thus sped the demoniac on his course, until, quivering among the trees, he saw a
red light before him, as when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been set
on fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of midnight. He paused,
in a lull of the tempest that had driven him onward, and heard the swell of what seemed
a hymn, rolling solemnly from a distance, with the weight of many voices. He knew the
tune; it was a familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The verse died heavily
away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices, but of all the sounds of the
benighted wilderness, pealing in awful harmony together. Goodman Brown cried out; and
his cry was lost to his own ear, by its unison with the cry of the desert.
In the interval of silence, he stole forward, until the light glared full upon his eyes. At
one extremity of an open space, hemmed in by the dark wall of the forest, arose a rock,
bearing some rude, natural resemblance either to an altar or a pulpit, and surrounded by
four blazing pines, their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles at an evening
meeting. The mass of foliage, that had overgrown the summit of the rock, was all on fire,
blazing high into the night, and fitfully illuminating the whole field. Each pendent twig
and leafy festoon was in a blaze. As the red light arose and fell, a numerous congregation
alternately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow, and again grew, as it were, out of the
darkness, peopling the heart of the solitary woods at once.
"A grave and dark-clad company!" quoth Goodman Brown.
In truth, they were such. Among them, quivering to-and-fro, between gloom and
splendor, appeared faces that would be seen, next day, at the council-board of the
province, and others which, Sabbath after Sabbath, looked devoutly heavenward, and
benignantly over the crowded pews, from the holiest pulpits in the land. Some affirm, that
the lady of the governor was there. At least, there were high dames well known to her, and
wives of honored husbands, and widows, a great multitude, and ancient maidens, all of
excellent repute, and fair young girls, who trembled lest their mothers should espy them.
Either the sudden gleams of light, flashing over the obscure field, bedazzled Goodman
Brown, or he recognized a score of the church-members of Salem village, famous for their
especial sanctity. Good old Deacon Gookin had arrived, and waited at the skirts of that
venerable saint, his reverend pastor. But, irreverently consorting with these grave,
reputable, and pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy
virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over
to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see, that
the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints.
Scattered, also, among their palefaced enemies, were the Indian priests, or powows, who

had often scared their native forest with more hideous incantations than any known to
English witchcraft.
"But, where is Faith?" thought Goodman Brown; and, as hope came into his heart, he
trembled.
Another verse of the hymn arose, a slow and mournful strain, such as the pious love,
but joined to words which expressed all that our nature can conceive of sin, and darkly
hinted at far more. Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends. Verse after verse
was sung, and still the chorus of the desert swelled between, like the deepest tone of a
mighty organ. And, with the final peal of that dreadful anthem, there came a sound, as if
the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the howling beasts, and every other voice of the
unconverted wilderness, were mingling and according with the voice of guilty man, in
homage to the prince of all. The four blazing pines threw up a loftier flame, and obscurely
discovered shapes and visages of horror on the smoke-wreaths, above the impious
assembly. At the same moment, the fire on the rock shot redly forth, and formed a glowing
arch above its base, where now appeared a figure. With reverence be it spoken, the figure
bore no slight similitude, both in garb and manner, to some grave divine of the NewEngland churches.
"Bring forth the converts!" cried a voice, that echoed through the field and rolled into
the forest.
At the word, Goodman Brown stepped forth from the shadow of the trees, and
approached the congregation, with whom he felt a loathful brotherhood, by the sympathy
of all that was wicked in his heart. He could have well nigh sworn, that the shape of his
own dead father beckoned him to advance, looking downward from a smoke-wreath,
while a woman, with dim features of despair, threw out her hand to warn him back. Was
it his mother? But he had no power to retreat one step, nor to resist, even in thought,
when the minister and good old Deacon Gookin seized his arms, and led him to the blazing
rock. Thither came also the slender form of a veiled female, led between Goody Cloyse,
that pious teacher of the catechism, and Martha Carrier, who had received the devil's
promise to be queen of hell. A rampant hag was she! And there stood the proselytes,
beneath the canopy of fire.
"Welcome, my children," said the dark figure, "to the communion of your race! Ye
have found, thus young, your nature and your destiny. My children, look behind you!"
They turned; and flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame, the fiend-worshippers
were seen; the smile of welcome gleamed darkly on every visage.
"There," resumed the sable form, "are all whom ye have reverenced from youth. Ye
deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with
their lives of righteousness, and prayerful aspirations heavenward. Yet, here are they all,
in my worshipping assembly! This night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds;
how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton words to the young
maids of their households; how many a woman, eager for widow's weeds, has given her
husband a drink at bed-time, and let him sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless
youth have made haste to inherit their father's wealth; and how fair damsels--blush not,
sweet ones--have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole guest, to an
infant's funeral. By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin, ye shall scent out all the
places--whether in church, bed-chamber, street, field, or forest--where crime has been
committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty bloodspot. Far more than this! It shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery

of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses
than human power--than my power at its utmost!--can make manifest in deeds. And now,
my children, look upon each other."
They did so; and, by the blaze of the hell-kindled torches, the wretched man beheld
his Faith, and the wife her husband, trembling before that unhallowed altar.
"Lo! there ye stand, my children," said the figure, in a deep and solemn tone, almost
sad, with its despairing awfulness, as if his once angelic nature could yet mourn for our
miserable race. "Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were
not all a dream! Now are ye undeceived! Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your
only happiness. Welcome, again, my children, to the communion of your race!"
"Welcome!" repeated the fiend-worshippers, in one cry of despair and triumph.
And there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed, who were yet hesitating on the verge
of wickedness, in this dark world. A basin was hollowed, naturally, in the rock. Did it
contain water, reddened by the lurid light? or was it blood? or, perchance, a liquid flame?
Herein did the Shape of Evil dip his hand, and prepare to lay the mark of baptism upon
their foreheads, that they might be partakers of the mystery of sin, more conscious of the
secret guilt of others, both in deed and thought, than they could now be of their own. The
husband cast one look at his pale wife, and Faith at him. What polluted wretches would
the next glance show them to each other, shuddering alike at what they disclosed and
what they saw!
"Faith! Faith!" cried the husband. "Look up to Heaven, and resist the Wicked One!"
Whether Faith obeyed, he knew not. Hardly had he spoken, when he found himself
amid calm night and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind, which died heavily away
through the forest. He staggered against the rock, and felt it chill and damp, while a
hanging twig, that had been all on fire, besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew.
The next morning, young Goodman Brown came slowly into the street of Salem
village, staring around him like a bewildered man. The good old minister was taking a
walk along the graveyard, to get an appetite for breakfast and meditate his sermon, and
bestowed a blessing, as he passed, on Goodman Brown. He shrank from the venerable
saint, as if to avoid an anathema. Old Deacon Gookin was at domestic worship, and the
holy words of his prayer were heard through the open window. "What God doth the wizard
pray to?" quoth Goodman Brown. Goody Cloyse, that excellent old Christian, stood in the
early sunshine, at her own lattice, catechising a little girl, who had brought her a pint of
morning's milk. Goodman Brown snatched away the child, as from the grasp of the fiend
himself. Turning the corner by the meeting-house, he spied the head of Faith, with the
pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, and bursting into such joy at sight of him, that she
skipt along the street, and almost kissed her husband before the whole village. But
Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on without a greeting.
Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a
witch-meeting?
Be it so, if you will. But, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown.
A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man, did he become,
from the night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath-day, when the congregation were
singing a holy psalm, he could not listen, because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon
his ear, and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from the pulpit, with
power and fervid eloquence, and with his hand on the open Bible, of the sacred truths of
our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery

10

unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder
down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, awaking suddenly at midnight,
he shrank from the bosom of Faith, and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt
down at prayer, he scowled, and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and
turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave, a hoary corpse,
followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grand-children, a goodly procession,
besides neighbors, not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone; for his
dying hour was gloom.
From Twice-Told Tales, 1837, 1851
By Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864

Dr. Heidegger's Experiment

THAT VERY SINGULAR man, old Dr. Heidegger, once invited four venerable friends
to meet him in his study. There were three white-bearded gentlemen, Mr. Medbourne,
Colonel Killigrew, and Mr. Gascoigne, and a withered gentlewoman, whose name was the
Widow Wycherly. They were all melancholy old creatures, who had been unfortunate in
life, and whose greatest misfortune it was that they were not long ago in their graves. Mr.
Medbourne, in the vigor of his age, had been a prosperous merchant, but had lost his all
by a frantic speculation, and was now little better than a mendicant. Colonel Killigrew had
wasted his best years, and his health and substance, in the pursuit of sinful pleasures,
which had given birth to a brood of pains, such as the gout, and divers other torments of
soul and body. Mr. Gascoigne was a ruined politician, a man of evil fame, or at least had
been so till time had buried him from the knowledge of the present generation, and made
him obscure instead of infamous. As for the Widow Wycherly, tradition tells us that she
was a great beauty in her day; but, for a long while past, she had lived in deep seclusion,
on account of certain scandalous stories which had prejudiced the gentry of the town
against her. It is a circumstance worth mentioning that each of these three old gentlemen,
Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew, and Mr. Gascoigne, were early lovers of the Widow
Wycherly, and had once been on the point of cutting each other's throats for her sake.
And, before proceeding further, I will merely hint that Dr. Heidegger and all his four
guests were sometimes thought to be a little beside themselves--as is not unfrequently the
case with old people, when worried either by present troubles or woful recollections.
"My dear old friends," said Dr. Heidegger, motioning them to be seated, "I am
desirous of your assistance in one of those little experiments with which I amuse myself
here in my study."
If all stories were true, Dr. Heidegger's study must have been a very curious place. It
was a dim, old-fashioned chamber, festooned with cobwebs, and besprinkled with antique
dust. Around the walls stood several oaken bookcases, the lower shelves of which were
filled with rows of gigantic folios and black-letter quartos, and the upper with little
parchment-covered duodecimos. Over the central bookcase was a bronze bust of
Hippocrates, with which, according to some authorities, Dr. Heidegger was accustomed
to hold consultations in all difficult cases of his practice. In the obscurest corner of the

11

room stood a tall and narrow oaken closet, with its door ajar, within which doubtfully
appeared a skeleton. Between two of the bookcases hung a looking-glass, presenting its
high and dusty plate within a tarnished gilt frame. Among many wonderful stories related
of this mirror, it was fabled that the spirits of all the doctor's deceased patients dwelt
within its verge, and would stare him in the face whenever he looked thitherward. The
opposite side of the chamber was ornamented with the full-length portrait of a young lady,
arrayed in the faded magnificence of silk, satin, and brocade, and with a visage as faded
as her dress. Above half a century ago, Dr. Heidegger had been on the point of marriage
with this young lady; but, being affected with some slight disorder, she had swallowed one
of her lover's prescriptions, and died on the bridal evening. The greatest curiosity of the
study remains to be mentioned; it was a ponderous folio volume, bound in black leather,
with massive silver clasps. There were no letters on the back, and nobody could tell the
title of the book. But it was well known to be a book of magic; and once, when a
chambermaid had lifted it, merely to brush away the dust, the skeleton had rattled in its
closet, the picture of the young lady had stepped one foot upon the floor, and several
ghastly faces had peeped forth from the mirror; while the brazen head of Hippocrates
frowned, and said--"Forbear!"
Such was Dr. Heidegger's study. On the summer afternoon of our tale a small round
table, as black as ebony, stood in the centre of the room, sustaining a cut-glass vase of
beautiful form and elaborate workmanship. The sunshine came through the window,
between the heavy festoons of two faded damask curtains, and fell directly across this
vase; so that a mild splendor was reflected from it on the ashen visages of the five old
people who sat around. Four champagne glasses were also on the table.
"My dear old friends," repeated Dr. Heidegger, "may I reckon on your aid in
performing an exceedingly curious experiment?"
Now Dr. Heidegger was a very strange old gentleman, whose eccentricity had become
the nucleus for a thousand fantastic stories. Some of these fables, to my shame be it
spoken, might possibly be traced back to my own veracious self; and if any passages of the
present tale should startle the reader's faith, I must be content to bear the stigma of a
fiction monger.
When the doctor's four guests heard him talk of his proposed experiment, they
anticipated nothing more wonderful than the murder of a mouse in an air pump, or the
examination of a cobweb by the microscope, or some similar nonsense, with which he was
constantly in the habit of pestering his intimates. But without waiting for a reply, Dr.
Heidegger hobbled across the chamber, and returned with the same ponderous folio,
bound in black leather, which common report affirmed to be a book of magic. Undoing
the silver clasps, he opened the volume, and took from among its black-letter pages a rose,
or what was once a rose, though now the green leaves and crimson petals had assumed
one brownish hue, and the ancient flower seemed ready to crumble to dust in the doctor's
hands.
"This rose, said Dr. Heidegger, with a sigh, "this same withered and crumbling flower,
blossomed five and fifty years ago. It was given me by Sylvia Ward, whose portrait hangs
yonder; and I meant to wear it in my bosom at our wedding. Five and fifty years it has
been treasured between the leaves of this old volume. Now, would you deem it possible
that this rose of half a century could ever bloom again?"
"Nonsense!" said the Widow Wycherly, with a peevish toss of her head. "You might
as well ask whether an old woman's wrinkled face could ever bloom again."

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"See!" answered Dr. Heidegger.

He uncovered the vase, and threw the faded rose into the water which it contained.
At first, it lay lightly on the surface of the fluid, appearing to imbibe none of its moisture.
Soon, however, a singular change began to be visible. The crushed and dried petals stirred,
and assumed a deepening tinge of crimson, as if the flower were reviving from a deathlike
slumber; the slender stalk and twigs of foliage became green; and there was the rose of
half a century, looking as fresh as when Sylvia Ward had first given it to her lover. It was
scarcely full blown; for some of its delicate red leaves curled modestly around its moist
bosom, within which two or three dewdrops were sparkling.
"That is certainly a very pretty deception," said the doctor's friends; carelessly,
however, for they had witnessed greater miracles at a conjurer's show; "pray how was it
effected?"
"Did you never hear of the 'Fountain of Youth'?" asked Dr. Heidegger, "which Ponce
de Leon, the Spanish adventurer, went in search of two or three centuries ago?"
"But did Ponce de Leon ever find it?" said the Widow Wycherly.
"No, answered Dr. Heidegger, "for he never sought it in the right place. The famous
Fountain of Youth, if I am rightly informed, is situated in the southern part of the
Floridian peninsula, not far from Lake Macaco. Its source is overshadowed by several
gigantic magnolias, which, though numberless centuries old, have been kept as fresh as
violets by the virtues of this wonderful water. An acquaintance of mine, knowing my
curiosity in such matters, has sent me what you see in the vase."
"Ahem!" said Colonel Killigrew, who believed not a word of the doctor's story: "and
what may be the effect of this fluid on the human frame?"
"You shall judge for yourself, my dear colonel," replied Dr. Heidegger; "and all of you,
my respected friends, are welcome to so much of this admirable fluid as may restore to
you the bloom of youth. For my own part, having had much trouble in growing old, I am
in no hurry to grow young again. With your permission, therefore, I will merely watch the
progress of the experiment."
While he spoke, Dr. Heidegger had been filling the four champagne glasses with the
water of the Fountain of Youth. It was apparently impregnated with an effervescent gas,
for little bubbles were continually ascending from the depths of the glasses, and bursting
in silvery spray at the surface. As the liquor diffused a pleasant perfume, the old people
doubted not that it possessed cordial and comfortable properties; and though utter
sceptics as to its rejuvenescent power, they were inclined to swallow it at once. But Dr.
Heidegger besought them to stay a moment.
"Before you drink, my respectable old friends," said he, "it would be well that, with
the experience of a lifetime to direct you, you should draw up a few general rules for your
guidance, in passing a second time through the perils of youth. Think what a sin and
shame it would be, if, with your peculiar advantages, you should not become patterns of
virtue and wisdom to all the young people of the age!"
The doctor's four venerable friends made him no answer, except by a feeble and
tremulous laugh; so very ridiculous was the idea that, knowing how closely repentance
treads behind the steps of error, they should ever go astray again.
"Drink, then," said the doctor, bowing: "I rejoice that I have so well selected the
subjects of my experiment."
With palsied hands, they raised the glasses to their lips. The liquor, if it really
possessed such virtues as Dr. Heidegger imputed to it, could not have been bestowed on

13

four human beings who needed it more wofully. They looked as if they had never known
what youth or pleasure was, but had been the offspring of Nature's dotage, and always the
gray, decrepit, sapless, miserable creatures, who now sat stooping round the doctor's
table, without life enough in their souls or bodies to be animated even by the prospect of
growing young again. They drank off the water, and replaced their glasses on the table.
Assuredly there was an almost immediate improvement in the aspect of the party, not
unlike what might have been produced by a glass of generous wine, together with a sudden
glow of cheerful sunshine brightening over all their visages at once. There was a healthful
suffusion on their cheeks, instead of the ashen hue that had made them look so corpselike. They gazed at one another, and fancied that some magic power had really begun to
smooth away the deep and sad inscriptions which Father Time had been so long engraving
on their brows. The Widow Wycherly adjusted her cap, for she felt almost like a woman
again.
"Give us more of this wondrous water!" cried they, eagerly. "We are younger--but we
are still too old! Quick--give us more!"
"Patience, patience!" quoth Dr. Heidegger, who sat watching the experiment with
philosophic coolness. "You have been a long time growing old. Surely, you might be
content to grow young in half an hour! But the water is at your service."
Again he filled their glasses with the liquor of youth, enough of which still remained
in the vase to turn half the old people in the city to the age of their own grandchildren.
While the bubbles were yet sparkling on the brim, the doctor's four guests snatched their
glasses from the table, and swallowed the contents at a single gulp. Was it delusion? even
while the draught was passing down their throats, it seemed to have wrought a change on
their whole systems. Their eyes grew clear and bright; a dark shade deepened among their
silvery locks, they sat around the table, three gentlemen of middle age, and a woman,
hardly beyond her buxom prime.
"My dear widow, you are charming!" cried Colonel Killigrew, whose eyes had been
fixed upon her face, while the shadows of age were flitting from it like darkness from the
crimson daybreak.
The fair widow knew, of old, that Colonel Killigrew's compliments were not always
measured by sober truth; so she started up and ran to the mirror, still dreading that the
ugly visage of an old woman would meet her gaze. Meanwhile, the three gentlemen
behaved in such a manner as proved that the water of the Fountain of Youth possessed
some intoxicating qualities; unless, indeed, their exhilaration of spirits were merely a
lightsome dizziness caused by the sudden removal of the weight of years. Mr. Gascoigne's
mind seemed to run on political topics, but whether relating to the past, present, or future
could not easily be determined, since the same ideas and phrases have been in vogue these
fifty years. Now he rattled forth full-throated sentences about patriotism, national glory,
and the people's right; now he muttered some perilous stuff or other, in a sly and doubtful
whisper, so cautiously that even his own conscience could scarcely catch the secret; and
now, again, he spoke in measured accents, and a deeply deferential tone, as if a royal ear
were listening to his well-turned periods. Colonel Killigrew all this time had been trolling
forth a jolly bottle song, and ringing his glass in symphony with the chorus, while his eyes
wandered toward the buxom figure of the Widow Wycherly. On the other side of the table,
Mr. Medbourne was involved in a calculation of dollars and cents, with which was
strangely intermingled a project for supplying the East Indies with ice, by harnessing a
team of whales to the polar icebergs.

14

As for the Widow Wycherly, she stood before the mirror courtesying and simpering
to her own image, and greeting it as the friend whom she loved better than all the world
beside. She thrust her face close to the glass, to see whether some long-remembered
wrinkle or crow's foot had indeed vanished. She examined whether the snow had so
entirely melted from her hair that the venerable cap could be safely thrown aside. At last,
turning briskly away, she came with a sort of dancing step to the table.
"My dear old doctor," cried she, "pray favor me with another glass!"
"Certainly, my dear madam, certainly!" replied the complaisant doctor; "see! I have
already filled the glasses."
There, in fact, stood the four glasses, brimful of this wonderful water, the delicate
spray of which, as it effervesced from the surface, resembled the tremulous glitter of
diamonds. It was now so nearly sunset that the chamber had grown duskier than ever;
but a mild and moonlike splendor gleamed from within the vase, and rested alike on the
four guests and on the doctor's venerable figure. He sat in a high-backed, elaboratelycarved, oaken arm-chair, with a gray dignity of aspect that might have well befitted that
very Father Time, whose power had never been disputed, save by this fortunate company.
Even while quaffing the third draught of the Fountain of Youth, they were almost awed
by the expression of his mysterious visage.
But, the next moment, the exhilarating gush of young life shot through their veins.
They were now in the happy prime of youth. Age, with its miserable train of cares and
sorrows and diseases, was remembered only as the trouble of a dream, from which they
had joyously awoke. The fresh gloss of the soul, so early lost, and without which the
world's successive scenes had been but a gallery of faded pictures, again threw its
enchantment over all their prospects. They felt like new-created beings in a new-created
universe.
"We are young! We are young!" they cried exultingly.
Youth, like the extremity of age, had effaced the strongly-marked characteristics of
middle life, and mutually assimilated them all. They were a group of merry youngsters,
almost maddened with the exuberant frolicsomeness of their years. The most singular
effect of their gayety was an impulse to mock the infirmity and decrepitude of which they
had so lately been the victims. They laughed loudly at their old-fashioned attire, the wideskirted coats and flapped waist-coats of the young men, and the ancient cap and gown of
the blooming girl. One limped across the floor like a gouty grandfather; one set a pair of
spectacles astride of his nose, and pretended to pore over the black-letter pages of the
book of magic; a third seated himself in an arm-chair, and strove to imitate the venerable
dignity of Dr. Heidegger. Then all shouted mirthfully, and leaped about the room. The
Widow Wycherly--if so fresh a damsel could be called a widow--tripped up to the doctor's
chair, with a mischievous merriment in her rosy face.
"Doctor, you dear old soul," cried she, "get up and dance with me!" And then the four
young people laughed louder than ever, to think what a queer figure the poor old doctor
would cut.
"Pray excuse me," answered the doctor quietly. "I am old and rheumatic, and my
dancing days were over long ago. But either of these gay young gentlemen will be glad of
so pretty a partner."
"Dance with me, Clara!" cried Colonel Killigrew.
"No, no, I will be her partner!" shouted Mr. Gascoigne.
"She promised me her hand, fifty years ago!" exclaimed Mr. Medbourne.

15

They all gathered round her. One caught both her hands in his passionate grasp-another threw his arm about her waist--the third buried his hand among the glossy curls
that clustered beneath the widow's cap. Blushing, panting, struggling, chiding, laughing,
her warm breath fanning each of their faces by turns, she strove to disengage herself, yet
still remained in their triple embrace. Never was there a livelier picture of youthful
rivalship, with bewitching beauty for the prize. Yet, by a strange deception, owing to the
duskiness of the chamber, and the antique dresses which they still wore, the tall mirror is
said to have reflected the figures of the three old, gray, withered grandsires, ridiculously
contending for the skinny ugliness of a shrivelled grandam.
But they were young: their burning passions proved them so. Inflamed to madness
by the coquetry of the girl-widow, who neither granted nor quite withheld her favors, the
three rivals began to interchange threatening glances. Still keeping hold of the fair prize,
they grappled fiercely at one another's throats. As they struggled to and fro, the table was
overturned, and the vase dashed into a thousand fragments. The precious Water of Youth
flowed in a bright stream across the floor, moistening the wings of a butterfly, which,
grown old in the decline of summer, had alighted there to die. The insect fluttered lightly
through the chamber, and settled on the snowy head of Dr. Heidegger.
"Come, come, gentlemen! come, Madam Wycherly," exclaimed the doctor, "I really
must protest against this riot."
They stood still and shivered; for it seemed as if gray Time were calling them back
from their sunny youth, far down into the chill and darksome vale of years. They looked
at old Dr. Heidegger, who sat in his carved arm-chair, holding the rose of half a century,
which he had rescued from among the fragments of the shattered vase. At the motion of
his hand, the four rioters resumed their seats; the more readily, because their violent
exertions had wearied them, youthful though they were.
"My poor Sylvia's rose!" ejaculated Dr. Heidegger, holding it in the light of the sunset
clouds; "it appears to be fading again."
And so it was. Even while the party were looking at it, the flower continued to shrivel
up, till it became as dry and fragile as when the doctor had first thrown it into the vase.
He shook off the few drops of moisture which clung to its petals.
"I love it as well thus as in its dewy freshness," observed he, pressing the withered
rose to his withered lips. While he spoke, the butterfly fluttered down from the doctor's
snowy head, and fell upon the floor.
His guests shivered again. A strange chillness, whether of the body or spirit they could
not tell, was creeping gradually over them all. They gazed at one another, and fancied that
each fleeting moment snatched away a charm, and left a deepening furrow where none
had been before. Was it an illusion? Had the changes of a lifetime been crowded into so
brief a space, and were they now four aged people, sitting with their old friend, Dr.
Heidegger?
"Are we grown old again, so soon?" cried they, dolefully.
In truth they had. The Water of Youth possessed merely a virtue more transient than
that of wine. The delirium which it created had effervesced away. Yes! they were old again.
With a shuddering impulse, that showed her a woman still, the widow clasped her skinny
hands before her face, and wished that the coffin lid were over it, since it could be no
longer beautiful.
"Yes, friends, ye are old again," said Dr. Heidegger, "and lo! the Water of Youth is all
lavished on the ground. Well--I bemoan it not; for if the fountain gushed at my very

16

doorstep, I would not stoop to bathe my lips in it--no, though its delirium were for years
instead of moments. Such is the lesson ye have taught me!"
But the doctor's four friends had taught no such lesson to themselves. They resolved
forthwith to make a pilgrimage to Florida, and quaff at morning, noon, and night, from
the Fountain of Youth.
NOTE. In an English review, not long since, I have been accused of plagiarizing the idea
of this story from a chapter in one of the novels of Alexandre Dumas. There has
undoubtedly been a plagiarism on one side or the other; but as my story was written a
good deal more than twenty years ago, and as the novel is of considerably more recent
date, I take pleasure in thinking that M. Dumas has done me the honor to appropriate one
of the fanciful conceptions of my earlier days. He is heartily welcome to it; nor is it the
only instance, by many, in which the great French romancer has exercised the privilege of
commanding genius by confiscating the intellectual property of less famous people to his
own use and behoof.
September, 1860

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2.
Twice-Told Tales: A Review
by Edgar Allan Poe
Graham's Magazine, May, 1842
[as reprinted in pages 569-77 of Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, The Library of
America, 1984]
TWICE-TOLD TALES
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. TWO VOLUMES. JAMES MUNROE& CO.: BOSTON
We said a few hurried words about Mr. Hawthorne in our last number, with the
design of speaking more fully in the present. We are still, however, pressed for room, and
must necessarily discuss his volumes more briefly and more at random than their high
merits deserve.
The book professes to be a collection of tales yet is, in two respects, misnamed. These
pieces are now in their third republication, and, of course, are thrice-told. Moreover, they
are by no means all tales, either in the ordinary or in the legitimate understanding of the
term. Many of them are pure essays; for example, "Sights from a Steeple," "Sunday at
Home," "Little Annie's Ramble," "A Rill from the Town Pump," "The Toll-Gatherer's Day,"
"The Haunted Mind," "The Sister Years," "Snow-Flakes," "Night Sketches," and "FootPrints on the Sea-Shore." We mention these matters chiefly on account of their
discrepancy with that marked precision and finish by which the body of the work is
distinguished.
Of the essays just named, we must be content to speak in brief. They are each and all
beautiful, without being characterised by the polish and adaptation so visible in the tales
proper. A painter would at once note their leading or predominant feature, and style it
repose. There is no attempt at effect. All is quiet, thoughtful, subdued. Yet this repose may
exist simultaneously with high originality of thought; and Mr. Hawthorne has
demonstrated the fact. At every turn we meet with novel combinations; yet these
combinations never surpass the limits of the quiet. We are soothed as we read; and withal
is a calm astonishment that ideas so apparently obvious have never occurred or been
presented to us before. Herein our author differs materially from Lamb or Hunt or
Hazlitt--who, with vivid originality of manner and expression. have less of the true novelty
of thought than is generally supposed, and whose originality, at best, has an uneasy and
meretricious quaintness, replete with startling effects unfounded in nature, and inducing
trains of reflection which lead to no satisfactory result. The Essays of Hawthorne have
much of the character of Irving, with more of originality, and less of finish; while,
compared with the Spectator, they have a vast superiority at all points. The Spectator, Mr.
Irving, and Mr. Hawthorne have in common that tranquil and subdued manner which we
have chosen to denominate repose; but, in the case of the two former, this repose is
attained rather by the absence of novel combination, or of originality, than otherwise, and
consists chiefly in the calm, quiet, unostentatious expression of commonplace thoughts,
in an unambitious, unadulterated Saxon. In them, by strong effort, we are made to
conceive the absence of all. In the essays before us the absence of effort is too obvious to

18

be mistaken, and a strong undercurrent of suggestion runs continuously beneath the

upper stream of the tranquil thesis. In short, these effusions of Mr. Hawthorne are the
product of a truly imaginative intellect, restrained, and in some measure repressed, by
fastidiousness of taste, by constitutional melancholy and by indolence.
But it is of his tales that we desire principally to speak. The tale proper, in our opinion,
affords unquestionably the fairest field for the exercise of the loftiest talent, which can be
afforded by the wide domains of mere prose. Were we bidden to say how the highest
genius could be most advantageously employed for the best display of its own powers, we
should answer, without hesitation--in the composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed
in length what might be perused in an hour. Within this limit alone can the highest order
of true poetry exist. We need only here say, upon this topic, that, in almost all classes of
composition, the unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance. It is
clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose
perusal cannot be completed at one sitting. We may continue the reading of a prose
composition, from the very nature of prose itself, much longer than we can persevere, to
any good purpose, in the perusal of a poem. This latter, if truly fulfilling the demands of
the poetic sentiment, induces an exaltation of the soul which cannot be long sustained.
All high excitements are necessarily transient. Thus a long poem is a paradox. And,
without unity of impression, the deepest effects cannot be brought about. Epics were the
offspring of an imperfect sense of Art, and their reign is no more. A poem too brief may
produce a vivid, but never an intense or enduring impression. Without a certain
continuity of effort--without a certain duration or repetition of purpose--the soul is never
deeply moved. There must be the dropping of the water upon the rock. De Branger has
wrought brilliant things--pungent and spirit-stirring--but, like all immassive bodies, they
lack momentum, and thus fail to satisfy the Poetic Sentiment. They sparkle and excite,
but, from want of continuity, fail deeply to impress. Extreme brevity will degenerate into
epigrammatism; but the sin of extreme length is even more unpardonable. In medio
tutissimus ibis.
Were we called upon, however, to designate that class of composition which, next to
such a poem as we have suggested, should best fulfil the demands of high genius--should
offer it the most advantageous field of exertion--we should unhesitatingly speak of the
prose tale, as Mr. Hawthorne has here exemplified it. We allude to the short prose
narrative, requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal. The ordinary novel
is objectionable, from its length, for reasons already stated in substance. As it cannot be
read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from
totality. Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal, modify, annul, or
counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book. But simple cessation
in reading, would, of itself, be sufficient to destroy the true unity. In the brief tale,
however, the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention, be it what it may.
During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer's control. There are no
external or extrinsic influences--resulting from weariness or interruption.
A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his
thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a
certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents--he then
combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his
very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first
step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency,

19

direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such
care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who
contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale
has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable
by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length
is yet more to be avoided.
We have said that the tale has a point of superiority even over the poem. In fact, while
the rhythm of this latter is an essential aid in the development of the poet's highest idea-the idea of the Beautiful--the artificialities of this rhythm are an inseparable bar to the
development of all points of thought or expression which have their basis in Truth. But
Truth is often, and in very great degree, the aim of the tale. Some of the finest tales are
tales of ratiocination. Thus the field of this species of composition, if not in so elevated a
region on the mountain of Mind, is a table-land of far vaster extent than the domain of
the mere poem. Its products are never so rich, but infinitely more numerous, and more
appreciable by the mass of mankind. The writer of the prose tale, in short, may bring to
his theme a vast variety of modes or inflections of thought and expression--(the
ratiocinative, for example, the sarcastic, or the humorous) which are not only
antagonistical to the nature of the poem, but absolutely forbidden by one of its most
peculiar and indispensable adjuncts; we allude, of course, to rhythm. It may be added
here, par parenthse, that the author who aims at the purely beautiful in a prose tale is
laboring at great disadvantage. For Beauty can be better treated in the poem. Not so with
terror, or passion, or horror, or a multitude of such other points. And here it will be seen
how full of prejudice are the usual animadversions against those tales of effect, many fine
examples of which were found in the earlier numbers of Blackwood. The impressions
produced were wrought in a legitimate sphere of action, and constituted a legitimate
although sometimes an exaggerated interest. They were relished by every man of genius:
although there were found many men of genius who condemned them without just
ground. The true critic will but demand that the design intended be accomplished, to the
fullest extent, by the means most advantageously applicable.
We have very few American tales of real merit--we may say, indeed, none, with the
exception of "The Tales of a Traveller" of Washington Irving, and these "Twice-Told Tales"
of Mr. Hawthorne. Some of the pieces of Mr. John Neal abound in vigor and originality;
but in general, his compositions of this class are excessively diffuse, extravagant, and
indicative of an imperfect sentiment of Art. Articles at random are, now and then, met
with in our periodicals which might be advantageously compared with the best effusions
of the British Magazines; but, upon the whole, we are far behind our progenitors in this
department of literature
Of Mr. Hawthorne's Tales we would say, emphatically, that they belong to the highest
region of Art--an Art subservient to genius of a very lofty order. We had supposed, with
good reason for so supposing, that he had been thrust into his present position by one of
the impudent cliques which beset our literature, and whose pretensions it is our full
purpose to expose at the earliest opportunity; but we have been most agreeably mistaken.
We know of few compositions which the critic can more honestly commend than these
"Twice-Told Tales." As Americans, we feel proud of the book.
Mr. Hawthorne's distinctive trait is invention, creation, imagination, originality--a
trait which, in the literature of fiction, is positively worth all the rest. But the nature of
originality, so far as regards its manifestation in letters, is but imperfectly understood.

20

The inventive or original mind as frequently displays itself in novelty of tone as in novelty
of matter. Mr. Hawthorne is original at all points.
It would be a matter of some difficulty to designate the best of these tales; we repeat
that, without exception, they are beautiful. "Wakefield" is remarkable for the skill with
which an old idea--a well-known incident--is worked up or discussed. A man of whims
conceives the purpose of quitting his wife and residing incognito, for twenty years, in her
immediate neighborhood. Something of this kind actually happened in London. The force
of Mr. Hawthorne's tale lies in the analysis of the motives which must or might have
impelled the husband to such folly, in the first instance, with the possible causes of his
perseverance. Upon this thesis a sketch of singular power has been constructed.
"The Wedding Knell" is full of the boldest imagination--an imagination fully
controlled by taste. The most captious critic could find no flaw in this production.
"The Minister's Black Veil" is a masterly composition of which the sole defect is that
to the rabble its exquisite skill will be caviare. The obvious meaning of this article will be
found to smother its insinuated one. The moral put into the mouth of the dying minister
will be supposed to convey the true import of the narrative; and that a crime of dark dye
(having reference to the "young lady"), has been committed, is a point which only minds
congenial with that of the author will perceive.
"Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe" is vividly original and managed most dexterously.
"Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" is exceedingly well imagined and executed with
surpassing ability. The artist breathes in every line of it.
"The White Old Maid" is objectionable, even more than the "Minister's Black Veil,"
on the score of its mysticism. Even with the thoughtful and analytic, there will be much
trouble in penetrating its entire import.
"The Hollow of the Three Hills" we would quote in full, had we space;--not as evincing
higher talent than any of the other pieces, but as affording an excellent example of the
author's peculiar ability. The subject is commonplace. A witch subjects the Distant and
the Past to the view of a mourner. It has been the fashion to describe, in such cases, a
mirror in which the images of the absent appear; or a cloud of smoke is made to arise, and
thence the figures are gradually unfolded. Mr. Hawthorne has wonderfully heightened his
effect by making the ear, in place of the eye, the medium by which the fantasy is conveyed.
The head of the mourner is enveloped in the cloak of the witch, and within its magic folds
there arise sounds which have an all-sufficient intelligence. Throughout this article also,
the artist is conspicuous--not more in positive than in negative merits. Not only is all done
that should be done, but (what perhaps is an end with more difficulty attained) there is
nothing done which should not be. Every word tells and there is not a word which does
not tell.
In "Howe's Masquerade" we observe something which resembles plagiarism--but
which may be a very flattering coincidence of thought. We quote the passage in question.
"With a dark flush of wrath upon his brow they saw the general draw his sword and
advance to meet the figure in the cloak before the latter had stepped one pace upon the
floor.
"'Villain, unmuffle yourself,' cried he. 'you pass no farther!'
"The figure, without blenching a hair's breadth from the sword which was pointed at
his breast, made a solemn pause, and lowered the cape of the cloak from his face, yet
sufficiently for the spectators to catch a glimpse of it. But Sir William Howe had evidently
seen enough. The sternness of his countenance gave place to a look of wild amazement, if

21

not horror, while he recoiled several steps from the figure, and let fall his sword upon the
floor."--See vol. 2, page 20.
The idea here is, that the figure in the cloak is the phantom or reduplication of Sir
William Howe; but in an article called "William Wilson," one of the "Tales of the
Grotesque and Arabesque," we have not only the same idea, but the same idea similarly
presented in several respects. We quote two paragraphs, which our readers may compare
with what has been already given. We have italicized, above, the immediate particulars of
resemblance.
"The brief moment in which I averted my eyes had been sufficient to produce,
apparently, a material change in the arrangement at the upper or farther end of the room.
A large mirror, it appeared to me, now stood where none had been perceptible before: and
as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and
dabbled in blood, advanced with a feeble and tottering gait to meet me.
"Thus it appeared I say, but was not. It was Wilson, who then stood before me in the
agonies of dissolution. Not a line in all the marked and singular lineaments of that face
which was not even identically mine own. His mask and cloak lay where he had thrown
them, upon the floor." --Vol. 2 p. 57.
Here it will be observed that, not only are the two general conceptions identical, but
there are various points of similarity. In each case the figure seen is the wraith or
duplication of the beholder. In each case the scene is a masquerade. In each case the figure
is cloaked. In each, there is a quarrel--that is to say, angry words pass between the parties.
In each the beholder is enraged. In each the cloak and sword fall upon the floor. The
"villain, unmuffle yourself," of Mr. H. is precisely paralleled by a passage at page 56 of
"William Wilson."
In the way of objection we have scarcely a word to say of these tales. There is, perhaps,
a somewhat too general or prevalent tone--a tone of melancholy and mysticism. The
subjects are insufficiently varied. There is not so much of versatility evinced as we might
well be warranted in expecting from the high powers of Mr. Hawthorne. But beyond these
trivial exceptions we have really none to make. The style is purity itself. Force abounds.
High imagination gleams from every page. Mr. Hawthorne is a man of the truest genius.
We only regret that the limits of our Magazine will not permit us to pay him that full
tribute of commendation, which, under other circumstances, we should be so eager to
pay.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION

(SEE: Addendum, The Raven, p.93)
(1846)
CHARLES DICKENS, in a note now lying before me, alluding to an examination I once
made of the mechanism of "Barnaby Rudge," says- "By the way, are you aware that
Godwin wrote his 'Caleb Williams' backwards? He first involved his hero in a web of
difficulties, forming the second volume, and then, for the first, cast about him for some
mode of accounting for what had been done."
I cannot think this the precise mode of procedure on the part of Godwin- and indeed
what he himself acknowledges, is not altogether in accordance with Mr. Dickens' ideabut the author of "Caleb Williams" was too good an artist not to perceive the advantage

22

derivable from at least a somewhat similar process. Nothing is more clear than that every
plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted
with the pen. It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its
indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially
the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.
There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a story. Either
history affords a thesis- or one is suggested by an incident of the day- or, at best, the
author sets himself to work in the combination of striking events to form merely the basis
of his narrative-designing, generally, to fill in with description, dialogue, or autorial
comment, whatever crevices of fact, or action, may, from page to page, render themselves
apparent.
I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in
view- for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily
attainable a source of interest- I say to myself, in the first place, "Of the innumerable
effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is
susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?" Having chosen a novel,
first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or
tone- whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity
both of incident and tone- afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such
combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.
I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written by any author
who would- that is to say, who could- detail, step by step, the processes by which any one
of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion. Why such a paper has never
been given to the world, I am much at a loss to say- but, perhaps, the autorial vanity has
had more to do with the omission than any one other cause. Most writers- poets in
especial- prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy- an
ecstatic intuition- and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind
the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought- at the true purposes
seized only at the last moment- at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at
the maturity of full view- at the fully-matured fancies discarded in despair as
unmanageable- at the cautious selections and rejections- at the painful erasures and
interpolations- in a word, at the wheels and pinions- the tackle for scene-shifting- the
step-ladders, and demon-traps- the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches,
which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, constitute the properties of the literary
histrio.
I am aware, on the other hand, that the case is by no means common, in which an
author is at all in condition to retrace the steps by which his conclusions have been
attained. In general, suggestions, having arisen pell-mell are pursued and forgotten in a
similar manner.
For my own part, I have neither sympathy with the repugnance alluded to, nor, at any
time, the least difficulty in recalling to mind the progressive steps of any of my
compositions, and, since the interest of an analysis or reconstruction, such as I have
considered a desideratum, is quite independent of any real or fancied interest in the thing
analysed, it will not be regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to show the modus
operandi by which some one of my own works was put together. I select 'The Raven' as
most generally known. It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its
composition is referable either to accident or intuition- that the work proceeded step by

23

step, to its completion, with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical
problem.
Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem, per se, the circumstance- or say the
necessity- which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that
should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.
We commence, then, with this intention.
The initial consideration was that of extent. If any literary work is too long to be read
at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect
derivable from unity of impression- for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world
interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed. But since, ceteris paribus, no
poet can afford to dispense with anything that may advance his design, it but remains to
be seen whether there is, in extent, any advantage to counterbalance the loss of unity
which attends it. Here I say no, at once. What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a
succession of brief ones- that is to say, of brief poetical effects. It is needless to
demonstrate that a poem is such only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating the
soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief. For this reason,
at least, one-half of the "Paradise Lost" is essentially prose- a succession of poetical
excitements interspersed, inevitably, with corresponding depressions- the whole being
deprived, through the extremeness of its length, of the vastly important artistic element,
totality, or unity of effect.
It appears evident, then, that there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of
literary art- the limit of a single sitting- and that, although in certain classes of prose
composition, such as "Robinson Crusoe" (demanding no unity), this limit may be
advantageously overpassed, it can never properly be overpassed in a poem. Within this
limit, the extent of a poem may be made to bear mathematical relation to its merit- in
other words, to the excitement or elevation-again, in other words, to the degree of the true
poetical effect which it is capable of inducing; for it is clear that the brevity must be in
direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect- this, with one proviso- that a certain
degree of duration is absolutely requisite for the production of any effect at all.
Holding in view these considerations, as well as that degree of excitement which I
deemed not above the popular, while not below the critical taste, I reached at once what I
conceived the proper length for my intended poem- a length of about one hundred lines.
It is, in fact, a hundred and eight.
My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or effect, to be conveyed: and
here I may as well observe that throughout the construction, I kept steadily in view the
design of rendering the work universally appreciable. I should be carried too far out of my
immediate topic were I to demonstrate a point upon which I have repeatedly insisted, and
which, with the poetical, stands not in the slightest need of demonstration- the point, I
mean, that Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem. A few words, however, in
elucidation of my real meaning, which some of my friends have evinced a disposition to
misrepresent. That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and
the most pure is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful. When, indeed,
men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effectthey refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul- not of intellect, or of
heart- upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in consequence of
contemplating the "beautiful." Now I designate Beauty as the province of the poem,
merely because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring from

24

direct causes- that objects should be attained through means best adapted for their
attainment- no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation
alluded to is most readily attained in the poem. Now the object Truth, or the satisfaction
of the intellect, and the object Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although
attainable to a certain extent in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. Truth, in fact,
demands a precision, and Passion, a homeliness (the truly passionate will comprehend
me), which are absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement
or pleasurable elevation of the soul. It by no means follows, from anything here said, that
passion, or even truth, may not be introduced, and even profitably introduced, into a
poem for they may serve in elucidation, or aid the general effect, as do discords in music,
by contrast- but the true artist will always contrive, first, to tone them into proper
subservience to the predominant aim, and, secondly, to enveil them, as far as possible, in
that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the essence of the poem.
Regarding, then, Beauty as my province, my next question referred to the tone of its
highest manifestation- and all experience has shown that this tone is one of sadness.
Beauty of whatever kind in its supreme development invariably excites the sensitive soul
to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.
The length, the province, and the tone, being thus determined, I betook myself to
ordinary induction, with the view of obtaining some artistic piquancy which might serve
me as a key-note in the construction of the poem- some pivot upon which the whole
structure might turn. In carefully thinking over all the usual artistic effects- or more
properly points, in the theatrical sense- I did not fail to perceive immediately that no one
had been so universally employed as that of the refrain. The universality of its
employment sufficed to assure me of its intrinsic value, and spared me the necessity of
submitting it to analysis. I considered it, however, with regard to its susceptibility of
improvement, and soon saw it to be in a primitive condition. As commonly used, the
refrain, or burden, not only is limited to lyric verse, but depends for its impression upon
the force of monotone- both in sound and thought. The pleasure is deduced solely from
the sense of identity- of repetition. I resolved to diversify, and so heighten the effect, by
adhering in general to the monotone of sound, while I continually varied that of thought:
that is to say, I determined to produce continuously novel effects, by the variation of the
application of the refrain- the refrain itself remaining for the most part, unvaried.
These points being settled, I next bethought me of the nature of my refrain. Since its
application was to be repeatedly varied it was clear that the refrain itself must be brief, for
there would have been an insurmountable difficulty in frequent variations of application
in any sentence of length. In proportion to the brevity of the sentence would, of course,
be the facility of the variation. This led me at once to a single word as the best refrain.
The question now arose as to the character of the word. Having made up my mind to
a refrain, the division of the poem into stanzas was of course a corollary, the refrain
forming the close to each stanza. That such a close, to have force, must be sonorous and
susceptible of protracted emphasis, admitted no doubt, and these considerations
inevitably led me to the long o as the most sonorous vowel in connection with r as the
most producible consonant.
The sound of the refrain being thus determined, it became necessary to select a word
embodying this sound, and at the same time in the fullest possible keeping with that
melancholy which I had pre-determined as the tone of the poem. In such a search it would

25

have been absolutely impossible to overlook the word "Nevermore." In fact it was the very
first which presented itself.
The next desideratum was a pretext for the continuous use of the one word
"nevermore." In observing the difficulty which I had at once found in inventing a
sufficiently plausible reason for its continuous repetition, I did not fail to perceive that
this difficulty arose solely from the preassumption that the word was to be so continuously
or monotonously spoken by a human being- I did not fail to perceive, in short, that the
difficulty lay in the reconciliation of this monotony with the exercise of reason on the part
of the creature repeating the word. Here, then, immediately arose the idea of a nonreasoning creature capable of speech, and very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance,
suggested itself, but was superseded forthwith by a Raven as equally capable of speech,
and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone.
I had now gone so far as the conception of a Raven, the bird of ill-omen, monotonously
repeating the one word "Nevermore" at the conclusion of each stanza in a poem of
melancholy tone, and in length about one hundred lines. Now, never losing sight of the
object- supremeness or perfection at all points, I asked myself- "Of all melancholy topics
what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?"
Death, was the obvious reply. "And when," I said, "is this most melancholy of topics most
poetical?" From what I have already explained at some length the answer here also is
obvious- "When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death then of a beautiful woman
is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that
the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover."
I had now to combine the two ideas of a lover lamenting his deceased mistress and a
Raven continuously repeating the word "Nevermore." I had to combine these, bearing in
mind my design of varying at every turn the application of the word repeated, but the only
intelligible mode of such combination is that of imagining the Raven employing the word
in answer to the queries of the lover. And here it was that I saw at once the opportunity
afforded for the effect on which I had been depending, that is to say, the effect of the
variation of application. I saw that I could make the first query propounded by the loverthe first query to which the Raven should reply "Nevermore"- that I could make this first
query a commonplace one, the second less so, the third still less, and so on, until at length
the lover, startled from his original nonchalance by the melancholy character of the word
itself, by its frequent repetition, and by a consideration of the ominous reputation of the
fowl that uttered it, is at length excited to superstition, and wildly propounds queries of a
far different character- queries whose solution he has passionately at heart- propounds
them half in superstition and half in that species of despair which delights in self-torturepropounds them not altogether because he believes in the prophetic or demoniac
character of the bird (which reason assures him is merely repeating a lesson learned by
rote), but because he experiences a frenzied pleasure in so modelling his questions as to
receive from the expected "Nevermore" the most delicious because the most intolerable
of sorrows. Perceiving the opportunity thus afforded me, or, more strictly, thus forced
upon me in the progress of the construction, I first established in my mind the climax or
concluding query- that query to which "Nevermore" should be in the last place an answerthat query in reply to which this word "Nevermore" should involve the utmost conceivable
amount of sorrow and despair.

26

Here then the poem may be said to have had its beginning- at the end where all works
of art should begin- for it was here at this point of my preconsiderations that I first put
pen to paper in the composition of the stanza:
"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! prophet still if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us- by that God we both adore,
Tell this soul with sorrow laden, if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name LenoreClasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
Quoth the Raven- "Nevermore."
I composed this stanza, at this point, first that, by establishing the climax, I might the
better vary and graduate, as regards seriousness and importance, the preceding queries
of the lover, and secondly, that I might definitely settle the rhythm, the metre, and the
length and general arrangement of the stanza, as well as graduate the stanzas which were
to precede, so that none of them might surpass this in rhythmical effect. Had I been able
in the subsequent composition to construct more vigorous stanzas I should without
scruple have purposely enfeebled them so as not to interfere with the climacteric effect.
And here I may as well say a few words of the versification. My first object (as usual)
was originality. The extent to which this has been neglected in versification is one of the
most unaccountable things in the world. Admitting that there is little possibility of variety
in mere rhythm, it is still clear that the possible varieties of metre and stanza are
absolutely infinite, and yet, for centuries, no man, in verse, has ever done, or ever seemed
to think of doing, an original thing. The fact is that originality (unless in minds of very
unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In
general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of the
highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation.
Of course I pretend to no originality in either the rhythm or metre of the "Raven." The
former is trochaic- the latter is octametre acatalectic, alternating with heptametre
catalectic repeated in the refrain of the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrametre
catalectic. Less pedantically the feet employed throughout (trochees) consist of a long
syllable followed by a short, the first line of the stanza consists of eight of these feet, the
second of seven and a half (in effect two-thirds), the third of eight, the fourth of seven and
a half, the fifth the same, the sixth three and a half. Now, each of these lines taken
individually has been employed before, and what originality the "Raven" has, is in their
combination into stanza; nothing even remotely approaching this has ever been
attempted. The effect of this originality of combination is aided by other unusual and
some altogether novel effects, arising from an extension of the application of the
principles of rhyme and alliteration.
The next point to be considered was the mode of bringing together the lover and the
Raven- and the first branch of this consideration was the locale. For this the most natural
suggestion might seem to be a forest, or the fields- but it has always appeared to me that
a close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incidentit has the force of a frame to a picture. It has an indisputable moral power in keeping
concentrated the attention, and, of course, must not be confounded with mere unity of
place.
I determined, then, to place the lover in his chamber- in a chamber rendered sacred
to him by memories of her who had frequented it. The room is represented as richly

27

furnished- this in mere pursuance of the ideas I have already explained on the subject of
Beauty, as the sole true poetical thesis.
The locale being thus determined, I had now to introduce the bird- and the thought of
introducing him through the window was inevitable. The idea of making the lover
suppose, in the first instance, that the flapping of the wings of the bird against the shutter,
is a "tapping" at the door, originated in a wish to increase, by prolonging, the reader's
curiosity, and in a desire to admit the incidental effect arising from the lover's throwing
open the door, finding all dark, and thence adopting the half-fancy that it was the spirit
of his mistress that knocked.
I made the night tempestuous, first to account for the Raven's seeking admission, and
secondly, for the effect of contrast with the (physical) serenity within the chamber.
I made the bird alight on the bust of Pallas, also for the effect of contrast between the
marble and the plumage- it being understood that the bust was absolutely suggested by
the bird- the bust of Pallas being chosen, first, as most in keeping with the scholarship of
the lover, and secondly, for the sonorousness of the word, Pallas, itself.
About the middle of the poem, also, I have availed myself of the force of contrast, with
a view of deepening the ultimate impression. For example, an air of the fantasticapproaching as nearly to the ludicrous as was admissible- is given to the Raven's entrance.
He comes in "with many a flirt and flutter."
Not the least obeisance made he- not a moment stopped or stayed he,
But with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door.
In the two stanzas which follow, the design is more obviously carried out:Then this ebony bird, beguiling my sad fancy into smiling
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no
craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shoreTell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore?"
Quoth the Raven- "Nevermore."
Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning- little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber doorBird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as "Nevermore."
The effect of the denouement being thus provided for, I immediately drop the fantastic
for a tone of the most profound seriousness- this tone commencing in the stanza directly
following the one last quoted, with the line,
But the Raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only, etc.
From this epoch the lover no longer jests- no longer sees anything even of the fantastic
in the Raven's demeanour. He speaks of him as a "grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and
ominous bird of yore," and feels the "fiery eyes" burning into his "bosom's core." This
revolution of thought, or fancy, on the lover's part, is intended to induce a similar one on
the part of the reader- to bring the mind into a proper frame for the denouement- which
is now brought about as rapidly and as directly as possible.

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With the denouement proper- with the Raven's reply, "Nevermore," to the lover's final
demand if he shall meet his mistress in another world- the poem, in its obvious phase,
that of a simple narrative, may be said to have its completion. So far, everything is within
the limits of the accountable- of the real. A raven, having learned by rote the single word
"Nevermore," and having escaped from the custody of its owner, is driven at midnight,
through the violence of a storm, to seek admission at a window from which a light still
gleams- the chamber-window of a student, occupied half in poring over a volume, half in
dreaming of a beloved mistress deceased. The casement being thrown open at the
fluttering of the bird's wings, the bird itself perches on the most convenient seat out of the
immediate reach of the student, who amused by the incident and the oddity of the visitor's
demeanour, demands of it, in jest and without looking for a reply, its name. The raven
addressed, answers with its customary word, "Nevermore"- a word which finds
immediate echo in the melancholy heart of the student, who, giving utterance aloud to
certain thoughts suggested by the occasion, is again startled by the fowl's repetition of
"Nevermore." The student now guesses the state of the case, but is impelled, as I have
before explained, by the human thirst for self-torture, and in part by superstition, to
propound such queries to the bird as will bring him, the lover, the most of the luxury of
sorrow, through the anticipated answer, "Nevermore." With the indulgence, to the
extreme, of this self-torture, the narration, in what I have termed its first or obvious
phase, has a natural termination, and so far there has been no overstepping of the limits
of the real.
But in subjects so handled, however skillfully, or with however vivid an array of
incident, there is always a certain hardness or nakedness which repels the artistical eye.
Two things are invariably required- first, some amount of complexity, or more properly,
adaptation; and, secondly, some amount of suggestiveness- some under-current, however
indefinite, of meaning. It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much
of that richness (to borrow from colloquy a forcible term), which we are too fond of
confounding with the ideal. It is the excess of the suggested meaning- it is the rendering
this the upper instead of the under-current of the theme- which turns into prose (and that
of the very flattest kind), the so-called poetry of the so-called transcendentalists.
Holding these opinions, I added the two concluding stanzas of the poem- their
suggestiveness being thus made to pervade all the narrative which has preceded them.
The under-current of meaning is rendered first apparent in the line"Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
Quoth the Raven "Nevermore!"
It will be observed that the words, "from out my heart," involve the first metaphorical
expression in the poem. They, with the answer, "Nevermore," dispose the mind to seek a
moral in all that has been previously narrated. The reader begins now to regard the Raven
as emblematical- but it is not until the very last line of the very last stanza that the
intention of making him emblematical of Mournful and never ending Remembrance is
permitted distinctly to be seen:
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting,
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming,
And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted- nevermore.

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3.
Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street
Herman Melville (18191891). Bartleby, the Scrivener. 1853.
I AM a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years
has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an
interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know
of has ever been written:I mean the law-copyists or scriveners. I have known very
many of them, professionally and privately, and if I pleased, could relate divers
histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls
might weep. But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in
the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener the strangest I ever saw or heard of. While
of other law-copyists I might write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort
can be done. I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of
this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of
whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in his case
those are very small. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I
know of him, except, indeed, one vague report which will appear in the sequel.
Ere introducing the scrivener, as he first appeared to me, it is fit I make some
mention of myself, my employes, my business, my chambers, and general
surroundings; because some such description is indispensable to an adequate
understanding of the chief character about to be presented.
Imprimis: I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a
profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best. Hence, though I belong
to a profession proverbially energetic and nervous, even to turbulence, at times, yet
nothing of that sort have I ever suffered to invade my peace. I am one of those
unambitious lawyers who never addresses a jury, or in any way draws down public
applause; but in the cool tranquillity of a snug retreat, do a snug business among
rich mens bonds and mortgages and title-deeds. All who know me consider me an
eminently safe man. The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic
enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence;
my next, method. I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was
not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I
admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings
like unto bullion. I will freely add, that I was not insensible to the late John Jacob
Astors good opinion.
Some time prior to the period at which this little history begins, my avocations
had been largely increased. The good old office, now extinct in the State of NewYork, of a Master in Chancery, had been conferred upon me. It was not a very
arduous office, but very pleasantly remunerative. I seldom lose my temper; much
more seldom indulge in dangerous indignation at wrongs and outrages; but I must
be permitted to be rash here and declare, that I consider the sudden and violent

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abrogation of the office of Master of Chancery, by the new Constitution, as a

premature act; inasmuch as I had counted upon a life-lease of the profits, whereas
I only received those of a few short years. But this is by the way.
My chambers were up stairs at No. Wall-street. At one end they looked upon 5
the white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft, penetrating the building
from top to bottom. This view might have been considered rather tame than
otherwise, deficient in what landscape painters call life. But if so, the view from
the other end of my chambers offered, at least, a contrast, if nothing more. In that
direction my windows commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black
by age and everlasting shade; which wall required no spy-glass to bring out its
lurking beauties, but for the benefit of all near-sighted spectators, was pushed up
to within ten feet of my window panes. Owing to the great height of the surrounding
buildings, and my chambers being on the second floor, the interval between this
wall and mine not a little resembled a huge square cistern.
At the period just preceding the advent of Bartleby, I had two persons as 6
copyists in my employment, and a promising lad as an office-boy. First, Turkey;
second, Nippers; third, Ginger Nut. These may seem names, the like of which are
not usually found in the Directory. In truth they were nicknames, mutually
conferred upon each other by my three clerks, and were deemed expressive of their
respective persons or characters. Turkey was a short, pursy Englishman of about
my own age, that is, somewhere not far from sixty. In the morning, one might say,
his face was of a fine florid hue, but after twelve oclock, meridianhis dinner
hourit blazed like a grate full of Christmas coals; and continued blazingbut, as
it were, with a gradual wanetill 6 oclock, P. M. or thereabouts, after which I saw
no more of the proprietor of the face, which gaining its meridian with the sun,
seemed to set with it, to rise, culminate, and decline the following day, with the like
regularity and undiminished glory. There are many singular coincidences I have
known in the course of my life, not the least among which was the fact, that exactly
when Turkey displayed his fullest beams from his red and radiant countenance, just
then, too, at that critical moment, began the daily period when I considered his
business capacities as seriously disturbed for the remainder of the twenty-four
hours. Not that he was absolutely idle, or averse to business then; far from it. The
difficulty was, he was apt to be altogether too energetic. There was a strange,
inflamed, flurried, flighty recklessness of activity about him. He would be
incautious in dipping his pen into his inkstand. All his blots upon my documents,
were dropped there after twelve oclock, meridian. Indeed, not only would he be
reckless and sadly given to making blots in the afternoon, but some days he went
further, and was rather noisy. At such times, too, his face flamed with augmented
blazonry, as if cannel coal had been heaped on anthracite. He made an unpleasant
racket with his chair; spilled his sand-box; in mending his pens, impatiently split
them all to pieces, and threw them on the floor in a sudden passion; stood up and
leaned over his table, boxing his papers about in a most indecorous manner, very
sad to behold in an elderly man like him. Nevertheless, as he was in many ways a
most valuable person to me, and all the time before twelve oclock, meridian, was
the quickest, steadiest creature too, accomplishing a great deal of work in a style
not easy to be matchedfor these reasons, I was willing to overlook his

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eccentricities, though indeed, occasionally, I remonstrated with him. I did this very
gently, however, because, though the civilest, nay, the blandest and most reverential
of men in the morning, yet in the afternoon he was disposed, upon provocation, to
be slightly rash with his tongue, in fact, insolent. Now, valuing his morning services
as I did, and resolved not to lose them; yet, at the same time made uncomfortable
by his inflamed ways after twelve oclock; and being a man of peace, unwilling by
my admonitions to call forth unseemly retorts from him; I took upon me, one
Saturday noon (he was always worse on Saturdays), to hint to him, very kindly, that
perhaps now that he was growing old, it might be well to abridge his labors; in short,
he need not come to my chambers after twelve oclock, but, dinner over, had best
go home to his lodgings and rest himself till tea-time. But no; he insisted upon his
afternoon devotions. His countenance became intolerably fervid, as he oratorically
assured megesticulating with a long ruler at the other end of the roomthat if his
services in the morning were useful, how indispensible, then, in the afternoon?
With submission, sir, said Turkey on this occasion, I consider myself your
right-hand man. In the morning I but marshal and deploy my columns; but in the
afternoon I put myself at their head, and gallantly charge the foe, thus!and he
made a violent thrust with the ruler.
But the blots, Turkey, intimated I.
True,but, with submission, sir, behold these hairs! I am getting old. Surely,
sir, a blot or two of a warm afternoon is not to be severely urged against gray hairs.
Old ageeven if it blot the pageis honorable. With submission, sir, we both are
getting old.
This appeal to my fellow-feeling was hardly to be resisted. At all events, I saw
that go he would not. So I made up my mind to let him stay, resolving, nevertheless,
to see to it, that during the afternoon he had to do with my less important papers.
Nippers, the second on my list, was a whiskered, sallow, and, upon the whole,
rather piratical-looking young man of about five and twenty. I always deemed him
the victim of two evil powersambition and indigestion. The ambition was evinced
by a certain impatience of the duties of a mere copyist, an unwarrantable usurpation
of strictly professional affairs, such as the original drawing up of legal documents.
The indigestion seemed betokened in an occasional nervous testiness and grinning
irritability, causing the teeth to audibly grind together over mistakes committed in
copying; unnecessary maledictions, hissed, rather than spoken, in the heat of
business; and especially by a continual discontent with the height of the table where
he worked. Though of a very ingenious mechanical turn, Nippers could never get
this table to suit him. He put chips under it, blocks of various sorts, bits of
pasteboard, and at last went so far as to attempt an exquisite adjustment by final
pieces of folded blotting-paper. But no invention would answer. If, for the sake of
easing his back, he brought the table lid at a sharp angle well up towards his chin,
and wrote there like a man using the steep roof of a Dutch house for his desk:then
he declared that it stopped the circulation in his arms. If now he lowered the table
to his waistbands, and stooped over it in writing, then there was a sore aching in his
back. In short, the truth of the matter was, Nippers knew not what he wanted. Or,
if he wanted any thing, it was to be rid of a scriveners table altogether. Among the
manifestations of his diseased ambition was a fondness he had for receiving visits

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from certain ambiguous-looking fellows in seedy coats, whom he called his clients.
Indeed I was aware that not only was he, at times, considerable of a ward-politician,
but he occasionally did a little business at the Justices courts, and was not unknown
on the steps of the Tombs. I have good reason to believe, however, that one
individual who called upon him at my chambers, and who, with a grand air, he
insisted was his client, was no other than a dun, and the alleged title-deed, a bill.
But with all his failings, and the annoyances he caused me, Nippers, like his
compatriot Turkey, was a very useful man to me; wrote a neat, swift hand; and,
when he chose, was not deficient in a gentlemanly sort of deportment. Added to
this, he always dressed in a gentlemanly sort of way; and so, incidentally, reflected
credit upon my chambers. Whereas with respect to Turkey, I had much ado to keep
him from being a reproach to me. His clothes were apt to look oily and smell of
eating-houses. He wore his pantaloons very loose and baggy in summer. His coats
were execrable; his hat not be to handled. But while the hat was a thing of
indifference to me, inasmuch as his natural civility and deference, as a dependent
Englishman, always led him to doff it the moment he entered the room, yet his coat
was another matter. Concerning his coats, I reasoned with him; but with no effect.
The truth was, I suppose, that a man with so small an income, could not afford to
sport such a lustrous face and a lustrous coat at one and the same time. As Nippers
once observed, Turkeys money went chiefly for red ink. One winter day I presented
Turkey with a highly-respectable looking coat of my own, a padded gray coat, of a
most comfortable warmth, and which buttoned straight up from the knee to the
neck. I thought Turkey would appreciate the favor, and abate his rashness and
obstreperousness of afternoons. But no. I verily believe that buttoning himself up
in so downy and blanket-like a coat had a pernicious effect upon him; upon the
same principle that too much oats are bad for horses. In fact, precisely as a rash,
restive horse is said to feel his oats, so Turkey felt his coat. It made him insolent.
He was a man whom prosperity harmed.
Though concerning the self-indulgent habits of Turkey I had my own private 12
surmises, yet touching Nippers I was well persuaded that whatever might be his
faults in other respects, he was, at least, a temperate young man. But indeed, nature
herself seemed to have been his vintner, and at his birth charged him so thoroughly
with an irritable, brandy-like disposition, that all subsequent potations were
needless. When I consider how, amid the stillness of my chambers, Nippers would
sometimes impatiently rise from his seat, and stooping over his table, spread his
arms wide apart, seize the whole desk, and move it, and jerk it, with a grim, grinding
motion on the floor, as if the table were a perverse voluntary agent, intent on
thwarting and vexing him; I plainly perceive that for Nippers, brandy and water
were altogether superfluous.
It was fortunate for me that, owing to its peculiar causeindigestionthe 13
irritability and consequent nervousness of Nippers, were mainly observable in the
morning, while in the afternoon he was comparatively mild. So that Turkeys
paroxysms only coming on about twelve oclock, I never had to do with their
eccentricities at one time. Their fits relieved each other like guards. When Nippers
was on, Turkeys was off; and vice versa. This was a good natural arrangement
under the circumstances.

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Ginger Nut, the third on my list, was a lad some twelve years old. His father was
a carman, ambitious of seeing his son on the bench instead of a cart, before he died.
So he sent him to my office as student at law, errand boy, and cleaner and sweeper,
at the rate of one dollar a week. He had a little desk to himself, but he did not use it
much. Upon inspection, the drawer exhibited a great array of the shells of various
sorts of nuts. Indeed, to this quick-witted youth the whole noble science of the law
was contained in a nut-shell. Not the least among the employments of Ginger Nut,
as well as one which he discharged with the most alacrity, was his duty as cake and
apple purveyor for Turkey and Nippers. Copying law papers being proverbially a
dry, husky sort of business, my two scriveners were fain to moisten their mouths
very often with Spitzenbergs to be had at the numerous stalls nigh the Custom
House and Post Office. Also, they sent Ginger Nut very frequently for that peculiar
cakesmall, flat, round, and very spicyafter which he had been named by them.
Of a cold morning when business was but dull, Turkey would gobble up scores of
these cakes, as if they were mere wafersindeed they sell them at the rate of six or
eight for a pennythe scrape of his pen blending with the crunching of the crisp
particles in his mouth. Of all the fiery afternoon blunders and flurried rashnesses
of Turkey, was his once moistening a ginger-cake between his lips, and clapping it
on to a mortgage for a seal. I came within an ace of dismissing him then. But he
mollified me by making an oriental bow, and sayingWith submission, sir, it was
generous of me to find you in stationery on my own account.
Now my original businessthat of a conveyancer and title hunter, and drawerup of recondite documents of all sortswas considerably increased by receiving the
masters office. There was now great work for scriveners. Not only must I push the
clerks already with me, but I must have additional help. In answer to my
advertisement, a motionless young man one morning, stood upon my office
threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can see that figure now
pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby.
After a few words touching his qualifications, I engaged him, glad to have
among my corps of copyists a man of so singularly sedate an aspect, which I thought
might operate beneficially upon the flighty temper of Turkey, and the fiery one of
Nippers.
I should have stated before that ground glass folding-doors divided my
premises into two parts, one of which was occupied by my scriveners, the other by
myself. According to my humor I threw open these doors, or closed them. I resolved
to assign Bartleby a corner by the folding-doors, but on my side of them, so as to
have this quiet man within easy call, in case any trifling thing was to be done. I
placed his desk close up to a small side-window in that part of the room, a window
which originally had afforded a lateral view of certain grimy back-yards and bricks,
but which, owing to subsequent erections, commanded at present no view at all,
though it gave some light. Within three feet of the panes was a wall, and the light
came down from far above, between two lofty buildings, as from a very small
opening in a dome. Still further to a satisfactory arrangement, I procured a high
green folding screen, which might entirely isolate Bartleby from my sight, though
not remove him from my voice. And thus, in a manner, privacy and society were
conjoined.

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At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing

for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no
pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candlelight. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had be been cheerfully
industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically.
It is, of course, an indispensable part of a scriveners business to verify the
accuracy of his copy, word by word. Where there are two or more scriveners in an
office, they assist each other in this examination, one reading from the copy, the
other holding the original. It is a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair. I can
readily imagine that to some sanguine temperaments it would be altogether
intolerable. For example, I cannot credit that the mettlesome poet Byron would
have contentedly sat down with Bartleby to examine a law document of, say five
hundred pages, closely written in a crimpy hand.
Now and then, in the haste of business, it had been my habit to assist in
comparing some brief document myself, calling Turkey or Nippers for this purpose.
One object I had in placing Bartleby so handy to me behind the screen, was to avail
myself of his services on such trivial occasions. It was on the third day, I think, of
his being with me, and before any necessity had arisen for having his own writing
examined, that, being much hurried to complete a small affair I had in hand, I
abruptly called to Bartleby. In my haste and natural expectancy of instant
compliance, I sat with my head bent over the original on my desk, and my right
hand sideways, and somewhat nervously extended with the copy, so that
immediately upon emerging from his retreat, Bartleby might snatch it and proceed
to business without the least delay.
In this very attitude did I sit when I called to him, rapidly stating what it was I
wanted him to donamely, to examine a small paper with me. Imagine my surprise,
nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a
singularly mild, firm voice, replied, I would prefer not to.
I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties. Immediately it
occurred to me that my ears had deceived me, or Bartleby had entirely
misunderstood my meaning. I repeated my request in the clearest tone I could
assume. But in quite as clear a one came the previous reply, I would prefer not to.
Prefer not to, echoed I, rising in high excitement, and crossing the room with
a stride. What do you mean? Are you moon-struck? I want you to help me compare
this sheet heretake it, and I thrust it towards him.
I would prefer not to, said he.
I looked at him steadfastly. His face was leanly composed; his gray eye dimly
calm. Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him. Had there been the least uneasiness,
anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been
any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed
him from the premises. But as it was, I should have as soon thought of turning my
pale plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero out of doors. I stood gazing at him awhile, as he
went on with his own writing, and then reseated myself at my desk. This is very
strange, thought I. What had one best do? But my business hurried me. I concluded

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to forget the matter for the present, reserving it for my future leisure. So calling
Nippers from the other room, the paper was speedily examined.
A few days after this, Bartleby concluded four lengthy documents, being
quadruplicates of a weeks testimony taken before me in my High Court of
Chancery. It became necessary to examine them. It was an important suit, and great
accuracy was imperative. Having all things arranged I called Turkey, Nippers and
Ginger Nut from the next room, meaning to place the four copies in the hands of
my four clerks, while I should read from the original. Accordingly Turkey, Nippers
and Ginger Nut had taken their seats in a row, each with his document in hand,
when I called to Bartleby to join this interesting group.
Bartleby! quick, I am waiting.
I heard a slow scrape of his chair legs on the uncarpeted floor, and soon he
appeared standing at the entrance of his hermitage.
What is wanted? said he mildly.
The copies, the copies, said I hurriedly. We are going to examine them.
Thereand I held towards him the fourth quadruplicate.
I would prefer not to, he said, and gently disappeared behind the screen.
For a few moments I was turned into a pillar of salt, standing at the head of my
seated column of clerks. Recovering myself, I advanced towards the screen, and
demanded the reason for such extraordinary conduct.
Why do you refuse?
I would prefer not to.
With any other man I should have flown outright into a dreadful passion,
scorned all further words, and thrust him ignominiously from my presence. But
there was something about Bartleby that not only strangely disarmed me, but in a
wonderful manner touched and disconcerted me. I began to reason with him.
These are your own copies we are about to examine. It is labor saving to you,
because one examination will answer for your four papers. It is common usage.
Every copyist is bound to help examine his copy. Is it not so? Will you not speak?
Answer!
I prefer not to, he replied in a flute-like tone. It seemed to me that while I had
been addressing him, he carefully revolved every statement that I made; fully
comprehended the meaning; could not gainsay the irresistible conclusion; but, at
the same time, some paramount consideration prevailed with him to reply as he
did.
You are decided, then, not to comply with my requesta request made
according to common usage and common sense?
He briefly gave me to understand that on that point my judgment was sound.
Yes: his decision was irreversible.
It is not seldom the case that when a man is browbeaten in some unprecedented
and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his own plainest faith. He
begins, as it were, vaguely to surmise that, wonderful as it may be, all the justice
and all the reason is on the other side. Accordingly, if any disinterested persons are
present, he turns to them for some reinforcement for his own faltering mind.

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Turkey, said I, what do you think of this? Am I not right?

With submission, sir, said Turkey, with his blandest tone, I think that you
are.
Nippers, said I, what do you think of it?
I think I should kick him out of the office.
(The reader of nice perceptions will here perceive that, it being morning,
Turkeys answer is couched in polite and tranquil terms, but Nippers replies in illtempered ones. Or, to repeat a previous sentence, Nipperss ugly mood was on duty,
and Turkeys off.)
Ginger Nut, said I, willing to enlist the smallest suffrage in my behalf, what
do you think of it?
I think, sir, hes a little luny, replied Ginger Nut, with a grin.
You hear what they say, said I, turning towards the screen, come forth and
do your duty.
But he vouchsafed no reply. I pondered a moment in sore perplexity. But once
more business hurried me. I determined again to postpone the consideration of this
dilemma to my future leisure. With a little trouble we made out to examine the
papers without Bartleby, though at every page or two, Turkey deferentially dropped
his opinion that this proceeding was quite out of the common; while Nippers,
twitching in his chair with a dyspeptic nervousness, ground out between his set
teeth occasional hissing maledictions against the stubborn oaf behind the screen.
And for his (Nipperss) part, this was the first and the last time he would do another
mans business without pay.
Meanwhile Bartleby sat in his hermitage, oblivious to every thing but his own
peculiar business there.
Some days passed, the scrivener being employed upon another lengthy work.
His late remarkable conduct led me to regard his ways narrowly. I observed that he
never went to dinner; indeed that he never went any where. As yet I had never of
my personal knowledge known him to be outside of my office. He was a perpetual
sentry in the corner. At about eleven oclock though, in the morning, I noticed that
Ginger Nut would advance toward the opening in Bartlebys screen, as if silently
beckoned thither by a gesture invisible to me where I sat. The boy would then leave
the office jingling a few pence, and reappear with a handful of ginger-nuts which he
delivered in the hermitage, receiving two of the cakes for his trouble.
He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner, properly speaking;
he must be a vegetarian then; but no; he never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing
but ginger-nuts. My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects
upon the human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts. Ginger-nuts are so
called because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents, and the
final flavoring one. Now what was ginger? A hot, spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and
spicy? Not at all. Ginger, then, had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably he preferred
it should have none.
Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. If the
individual so resisted be of a not inhumane temper, and the resisting one perfectly

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harmless in his passivity; then, in the better moods of the former, he will endeavor
charitably to construe to his imagination what proves impossible to be solved by his
judgment. Even so, for the most part, I regarded Bartleby and his ways. Poor fellow!
thought I, he means no mischief; it is plain he intends no insolence; his aspect
sufficiently evinces that his eccentricities are involuntary. He is useful to me. I can
get along with him. If I turn him away, the chances are he will fall in with some less
indulgent employer, and then he will be rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth
miserably to starve. Yes. Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To
befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange wilfulness, will cost me little or
nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my
conscience. But this mood was not invariable with me. The passiveness of Bartleby
sometimes irritated me. I felt strangely goaded on to encounter him in new
opposition, to elicit some angry spark from him answerable to my own. But indeed
I might as well have essayed to strike fire with my knuckles against a bit of Windsor
soap. But one afternoon the evil impulse in me mastered me, and the following little
scene ensued:
Bartleby, said I, when those papers are all copied, I will compare them with
you.
I would prefer not to.
How? Surely you do not mean to persist in that mulish vagary?
No answer.
I threw open the folding-doors near by, and turning upon Turkey and Nippers,
exclaimed in an excited manner
He says, a second time, he wont examine his papers. What do you think of it,
Turkey?
It was afternoon, be it remembered. Turkey sat glowing like a brass boiler, his
bald head steaming, his hands reeling among his blotted papers.
Think of it? roared Turkey; I think Ill just step behind his screen, and black
his eyes for him!
So saying, Turkey rose to his feet and threw his arms into a pugilistic position.
He was hurrying away to make good his promise, when I detained him, alarmed at
the effect of incautiously rousing Turkeys combativeness after dinner.
Sit down, Turkey, said I, and hear what Nippers has to say. What do you
think of it, Nippers? Would I not be justified in immediately dismissing Bartleby?
Excuse me, that is for you to decide, sir. I think his conduct quite unusual, and
indeed unjust, as regards Turkey and myself. But it may only be a passing whim.
Ah, exclaimed I, you have strangely changed your mind thenyou speak very
gently of him now.
All beer, cried Turkey; gentleness is effects of beerNippers and I dined
together to-day. You see how gentle I am, sir. Shall I go and black his eyes?
You refer to Bartleby, I suppose. No, not to-day, Turkey, I replied; pray, put
up your fists.

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I closed the doors, and again advanced towards Bartleby. I felt additional
incentives tempting me to my fate. I burned to be rebelled against again. I
remembered that Bartleby never left the office.
Bartleby, said I, Ginger Nut is away; just step round to the Post Office, wont
you? (it was but a three minutes walk,) and see if there is any thing for me.
I would prefer not to.
You will not?
I prefer not.
I staggered to my desk, and sat there in a deep study. My blind inveteracy
returned. Was there any other thing in which I could procure myself to be
ignominiously repulsed by this lean, penniless wight?my hired clerk? What added
thing is there, perfectly reasonable, that he will be sure to refuse to do?
Bartleby!
No answer.
Bartleby, in a louder tone.
No answer.
Bartleby, I roared.
Like a very ghost, agreeably to the laws of magical invocation, at the third
summons, he appeared at the entrance of his hermitage.
Go to the next room, and tell Nippers to come to me.
I prefer not to, he respectfully and slowly said, and mildly disappeared.
Very good, Bartleby, said I, in a quiet sort of serenely severe self-possessed
tone, intimating the unalterable purpose of some terrible retribution very close at
hand. At the moment I half intended something of the kind. But upon the whole, as
it was drawing towards my dinner-hour, I thought it best to put on my hat and walk
home for the day, suffering much from perplexity and distress of mind.
Shall I acknowledge it? The conclusion of this whole business was, that it soon
became a fixed fact of my chambers, that a pale young scrivener, by the name of
Bartleby, had a desk there; that he copied for me at the usual rate of four cents a
folio (one hundred words); but he was permanently exempt from examining the
work done by him, that duty being transferred to Turkey and Nippers, one of
compliment doubtless to their superior acuteness; moreover, said Bartleby was
never on any account to be dispatched on the most trivial errand of any sort; and
that even if entreated to take upon him such a matter, it was generally understood
that he would prefer not toin other words, that he would refuse point-blank.
As days passed on, I became considerably reconciled to Bartleby. His
steadiness, his freedom from all dissipation, his incessant industry (except when he
chose to throw himself into a standing revery behind his screen), his great stillness,
his unalterableness of demeanor under all circumstances, made him a valuable
acquisition. One prime thing was this,he was always there;first in the morning,
continually through the day, and the last at night. I had a singular confidence in his
honesty. I felt my most precious papers perfectly safe in his hands. Sometimes to
be sure I could not, for the very soul of me, avoid falling into sudden spasmodic

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passions with him. For it was exceeding difficult to bear in mind all the time those
strange peculiarities, privileges, and unheard of exemptions, forming the tacit
stipulations on Bartlebys part under which he remained in my office. Now and
then, in the eagerness of dispatching pressing business, I would inadvertently
summon Bartleby, in a short, rapid tone, to put his finger, say, on the incipient tie
of a bit of red tape with which I was about compressing some papers. Of course,
from behind the screen the usual answer, I prefer not to, was sure to come; and
then, how could a human creature with the common infirmities of our nature,
refrain from bitterly exclaiming upon such perversenesssuch unreasonableness.
However, every added repulse of this sort which I received only tended to lessen the
probability of my repeating the inadvertence.
Here it must be said, that according to the custom of most legal gentlemen 85
occupying chambers in densely-populated law buildings, there were several keys to
my door. One was kept by a woman residing in the attic, which person weekly
scrubbed and daily swept and dusted my apartments. Another was kept by Turkey
for convenience sake. The third I sometimes carried in my own pocket. The fourth
I knew not who had.
Now, one Sunday morning I happened to go to Trinity Church, to hear a 86
celebrated preacher, and finding myself rather early on the ground, I thought I
would walk round to my chambers for a while. Luckily I had my key with me; but
upon applying it to the lock, I found it resisted by something inserted from the
inside. Quite surprised, I called out; when to my consternation a key was turned
from within; and thrusting his lean visage at me, and holding the door ajar, the
apparition of Bartleby appeared, in his shirt sleeves, and otherwise in a strangely
tattered dishabille, saying quietly that he was sorry, but he was deeply engaged just
then, andpreferred not admitting me at present. In a brief word or two, he
moreover added, that perhaps I had better walk round the block two or three times,
and by that time he would probably have concluded his affairs.
Now, the utterly unsurmised appearance of Bartleby, tenanting my law- 87
chambers of a Sunday morning, with his cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance,
yet withal firm and self-possessed, had such a strange effect upon me, that
incontinently I slunk away from my own door, and did as desired. But not without
sundry twinges of impotent rebellion against the mild effrontery of this
unaccountable scrivener. Indeed, it was his wonderful mildness chiefly, which not
only disarmed me, but unmanned me, as it were. For I consider that one, for the
time, is a sort of unmanned when he tranquilly permits his hired clerk to dictate to
him, and order him away from his own premises. Furthermore, I was full of
uneasiness as to what Bartleby could possibly be doing in my office in his shirt
sleeves, and in an otherwise dismantled condition of a Sunday morning. Was any
thing amiss going on? Nay, that was out of the question. It was not to be thought of
for a moment that Bartleby was an immoral person. But what could he be doing
there?copying? Nay again, whatever might be his eccentricities, Bartleby was an
eminently decorous person. He would be the last man to sit down to his desk in any
state approaching to nudity. Besides, it was Sunday; and there was something about
Bartleby that forbade the supposition that we would by any secular occupation
violate the proprieties of the day.

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Nevertheless, my mind was not pacified; and full of a restless curiosity, at last I
returned to the door. Without hindrance I inserted my key, opened it, and entered.
Bartleby was not to be seen. I looked round anxiously, peeped behind his screen;
but it was very plain that he was gone. Upon more closely examining the place, I
surmised that for an indefinite period Bartleby must have ate, dressed, and slept in
my office, and that too without plate, mirror, or bed. The cushioned seat of a ricketty
old sofa in one corner bore the faint impress of a lean, reclining form. Rolled away
under his desk, I found a blanket; under the empty grate, a blacking box and brush;
on a chair, a tin basin, with soap and a ragged towel; in a newspaper a few crumbs
of ginger-nuts and a morsel of cheese. Yet, thought I, it is evident enough that
Bartleby has been making his home here, keeping bachelors hall all by himself.
Immediately then the thought came sweeping across me, What miserable
friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his
solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall-street is deserted as Petra;
and every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building too, which of weekdays hums with industry and life, at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy, and all
through Sunday is forlorn. And here Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator of a
solitude which he has seen all populousa sort of innocent and transformed Marius
brooding among the ruins of Carthage!
For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized
me. Before, I had never experienced aught but a not-unpleasing sadness. The bond
of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy!
For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam. I remembered the bright silks and
sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swan-like sailing down the
Mississippi of Broadway; and I contrasted them with the pallid copyist, and thought
to myself, Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery
hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none. These sad fancyingschimeras,
doubtless, of a sick and silly brainled on to other and more special thoughts,
concerning the eccentricities of Bartleby. Presentiments of strange discoveries
hovered round me. The scriveners pale form appeared to me laid out, among
uncaring strangers, in its shivering winding sheet.
Suddenly I was attracted by Bartlebys closed desk, the key in open sight left in
the lock.
I mean no mischief, seek the gratification of no heartless curiosity, thought I;
besides, the desk is mine, and its contents too, so I will make bold to look within.
Every thing was methodically arranged, the papers smoothly placed. The pigeon
holes were deep, and removing the files of documents, I groped into their recesses.
Presently I felt something there, and dragged it out. It was an old bandanna
handkerchief, heavy and knotted. I opened it, and saw it was a savings bank.
I now recalled all the quiet mysteries which I had noted in the man. I
remembered that he never spoke but to answer; that though at intervals he had
considerable time to himself, yet I had never seen him readingno, not even a
newspaper; that for long periods he would stand looking out, at his pale window
behind the screen, upon the dead brick wall; I was quite sure he never visited any
refectory or eating house; while his pale face clearly indicated that he never drank
beer like Turkey, or tea and coffee even, like other men; that he never went any

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where in particular that I could learn; never went out for a walk, unless indeed that
was the case at present; that he had declined telling who he was, or whence he came,
or whether he had any relatives in the world; that though so thin and pale, he never
complained of ill health. And more than all, I remembered a certain unconscious
air of pallidhow shall I call it?of pallid haughtiness, say, or rather an austere
reserve about him, which had positively awed me into my tame compliance with his
eccentricities, when I had feared to ask him to do the slightest incidental thing for
me, even though I might know, from his long-continued motionlessness, that
behind his screen he must be standing in one of those dead-wall reveries of his.
Revolving all these things, and coupling them with the recently discovered fact
that he made my office his constant abiding place and home, and not forgetful of
his morbid moodiness; revolving all these things, a prudential feeling began to steal
over me. My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity;
but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my
imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion. So
true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery
enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does
not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent
selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of
remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor,
common sense bids the soul be rid of it. What I saw that morning persuaded me
that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms
to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul
I could not reach.
I did not accomplish the purpose of going to Trinity Church that morning.
Somehow, the things I had seen disqualified me for the time from church-going. I
walked homeward, thinking what I would do with Bartleby. Finally, I resolved upon
this;I would put certain calm questions to him the next morning, touching his
history, &c., and if he declined to answer then openly and reservedly (and I
supposed he would prefer not), then to give him a twenty dollar bill over and above
whatever I might owe him, and tell him his services were no longer required; but
that if in any other way I could assist him, I would be happy to do so, especially if
he desired to return to his native place, wherever that might be, I would willingly
help to defray the expenses. Moreover, if, after reaching home, he found himself at
any time in want of aid, a letter from him would be sure of a reply.
The next morning came.
Bartleby, said I, gently calling to him behind his screen.
No reply.
Bartleby, said I, in a still gentler tone, come here; I am not going to ask you
to do any thing you would prefer not to doI simply wish to speak to you.
Upon this he noiselessly slid into view.
Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?
I would prefer not to.
Will you tell me any thing about yourself?

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I would prefer not to.

But what reasonable objection can you have to speak to me? I feel friendly
towards you.
He did not look at me while I spoke, but kept his glance fixed upon my bust of
Cicero, which as I then sat, was directly behind me, some six inches above my head.
What is your answer, Bartleby? said I, after waiting a considerable time for a
reply, during which his countenance remained immovable, only there was the
faintest conceivable tremor of the white attenuated mouth.
At present I prefer to give no answer, he said, and retired into his hermitage.
It was rather weak in me I confess, but his manner on this occasion nettled me.
Not only did there seem to lurk in it a certain disdain, but his perverseness seemed
ungrateful, considering the undeniable good usage and indulgence he had received
from me.
Again I sat ruminating what I should do. Mortified as I was at his behavior, and
resolved as I had been to dismiss him when I entered my office, nevertheless I
strangely felt something superstitious knocking at my heart, and forbidding me to
carry out my purpose, and denouncing me for a villain if I dared to breathe one
bitter word against this forlornest of mankind. At last, familiarly drawing my chair
behind his screen, I sat down and said: Bartleby, never mind then about revealing
your history; but let me entreat you, as a friend, to comply as far as may be with the
usages of this office. Say now you will help to examine papers to-morrow or next
day: in short, say now that in a day or two you will begin to be a little reasonable:
say so, Bartleby.
At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable, was his mildly
cadaverous reply.
Just then the folding-doors opened, and Nippers approached. He seemed
suffering from an unusually bad nights rest, induced by severer indigestion than
common. He overheard those final words of Bartleby.
Prefer not, eh? gritted NippersId prefer him, if I were you, sir, addressing
meId prefer him; Id give him preferences, the stubborn mule! What is it, sir,
pray, that he prefers not to do now?
Bartleby moved not a limb.
Mr. Nippers, said I, Id prefer that you would withdraw for the present.
Somehow, of late I had got into the way of involuntarily using this word prefer
upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions. And I trembled to think that my
contact with the scrivener had already and seriously affected me in a mental way.
And what further and deeper aberration might it not yet produce? This
apprehension had not been without efficacy in determining me to summary means.
As Nippers, looking very sour and sulky, was departing, Turkey blandly and
deferentially approached.
With submission, sir, said he, yesterday I was thinking about Bartleby here,
and I think that if he would but prefer to take a quart of good ale every day, it would
do much towards mending him, and enabling him to assist in examining his
papers.

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So you have got the word too, said I, slightly excited.

With submission, what word, sir, asked Turkey, respectfully crowding himself
into the contracted space behind the screen, and by so doing, making me jostle the
scrivener. What word, sir?
I would prefer to be left alone here, said Bartleby, as if offended at being
mobbed in his privacy.
Thats the word, Turkey, said Ithats it.
Oh, prefer? oh yesqueer word. I never use it myself. But, sir, as I was saying,
if he would but prefer
Turkey, interrupted I, you will please withdraw.
Oh, certainly, sir, if you prefer that I should.
As he opened the folding-door to retire, Nippers at his desk caught a glimpse of
me, and asked whether I would prefer to have a certain paper copied on blue paper
or white. He did not in the least roguishly accent the word prefer. It was plain that
it involuntarily rolled from his tongue. I thought to myself, surely I must get rid of
a demented man, who already has in some degree turned the tongues, if not the
heads of myself and clerks. But I thought it prudent not to break the dismission at
once.
The next day I noticed that Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window in his
dead-wall revery. Upon asking him why he did not write, he said that he had decided
upon doing no more writing.
Why, how now? what next? exclaimed I, do no more writing?
No more.
And what is the reason?
Do you not see the reason for yourself, he indifferently replied.
I looked steadfastly at him, and perceived that his eyes looked dull and glazed.
Instantly it occurred to me, that his unexampled diligence in copying by his dim
window for the first few weeks of his stay with me might have temporarily impaired
his vision.
I was touched. I said something in condolence with him. I hinted that of course
he did wisely in abstaining from writing for a while; and urged him to embrace that
opportunity of taking wholesome exercise in the open air. This, however, he did not
do. A few days after this, my other clerks being absent, and being in a great hurry
to dispatch certain letters by the mail, I thought that, having nothing else earthly to
do, Bartleby would surely be less inflexible than usual, and carry these letters to the
post-office. But he blankly declined. So, much to my inconvenience, I went myself.
Still added days went by. Whether Bartlebys eyes improved or not, I could not
say. To all appearance, I thought they did. But when I asked him if they did, he
vouchsafed no answer. At all events, he would do no copying. At last, in reply to my
urgings, he informed me that he had permanently given up copying.
What! exclaimed I; suppose your eyes should get entirely wellbetter than
ever beforewould you not copy then?
I have given up copying, he answered, and slid aside.

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He remained as ever, a fixture in my chamber. Nayif that were possiblehe

became still more of a fixture than before. What was to be done? He would do
nothing in the office: why should he stay there? In plain fact, he had now become a
millstone to me, not only useless as a necklace, but afflictive to bear. Yet I was sorry
for him. I speak less than truth when I say that, on his own account, he occasioned
me uneasiness. If he would but have named a single relative or friend, I would
instantly have written, and urged their taking the poor fellow away to some
convenient retreat. But he seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of
wreck in the mid Atlantic. At length, necessities connected with my business
tyrannized over all other considerations. Decently as I could, I told Bartleby that in
six days time he must unconditionally leave the office. I warned him to take
measures, in the interval, for procuring some other abode. I offered to assist him in
this endeavor, if he himself would but take the first step towards a removal. And
when you finally quit me, Bartleby, added I, I shall see that you go not away
entirely unprovided. Six days from this hour, remember.
At the expiration of that period, I peeped behind the screen, and lo! Bartleby
was there.
I buttoned up my coat, balanced myself; advanced slowly towards him, touched
his shoulder, and said, The time has come; you must quit this place; I am sorry for
you; here is money; but you must go.
I would prefer not, he replied, with his back still towards me.
You must.
He remained silent.
Now I had an unbounded confidence in this mans common honesty. He had
frequently restored to me sixpences and shillings carelessly dropped upon the floor,
for I am apt to be very reckless in such shirt-button affairs. The proceeding then
which followed will not be deemed extraordinary.
Bartleby, said I, I owe you twelve dollars on account; here are thirty-two; the
odd twenty are yours.Will you take it? and I handed the bills towards him.
But he made no motion.
I will leave them here then, putting them under a weight on the table. Then
taking my hat and cane and going to the door I tranquilly turned and addedAfter
you have removed your things from these offices, Bartleby, you will of course lock
the doorsince every one is now gone for the day but youand if you please, slip
your key underneath the mat, so that I may have it in the morning. I shall not see
you again; so good-bye to you. If hereafter in your new place of abode I can be of
any service to you, do not fail to advise me by letter. Good-bye, Bartleby, and fare
you well.
But he answered not a word; like the last column of some ruined temple, he
remained standing mute and solitary in the middle of the otherwise deserted room.
As I walked home in a pensive mood, my vanity got the better of my pity. I could
not but highly plume myself on my masterly management in getting rid of Bartleby.
Masterly I call it, and such it must appear to any dispassionate thinker. The beauty
of my procedure seemed to consist in its perfect quietness. There was no vulgar

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bullying, no bravado of any sort, no choleric hectoring, and striding to and fro
across the apartment, jerking out vehement commands for Bartleby to bundle
himself off with his beggarly traps. Nothing of the kind. Without loudly bidding
Bartleby departas an inferior genius might have doneI assumed the ground that
depart he must; and upon the assumption built all I had to say. The more I thought
over my procedure, the more I was charmed with it. Nevertheless, next morning,
upon awakening, I had my doubts,I had somehow slept off the fumes of vanity.
One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the
morning. My procedure seemed as sagacious as ever,but only in theory. How it
would prove in practicethere was the rub. It was truly a beautiful thought to have
assumed Bartlebys departure; but, after all, that assumption was simply my own,
and none of Bartlebys. The great point was, not whether I had assumed that he
would quit me, but whether he would prefer so to do. He was more a man of
preferences than assumptions.
AFTER breakfast, I walked down town, arguing the probabilities pro and con.
One moment I thought it would prove a miserable failure, and Bartleby would be
found all alive at my office as usual; the next moment it seemed certain that I should
see his chair empty. And so I kept veering about. At the corner of Broadway and
Canal-street, I saw quite an excited group of people standing in earnest
conversation.
Ill take odds he doesnt, said a voice as I passed.
Doesnt go?done! said I, put up your money.
I was instinctively putting my hand in my pocket to produce my own, when I
remembered that this was an election day. The words I had overheard bore no
reference to Bartleby, but to the success or non-success of some candidate for the
mayoralty. In my intent frame of mind, I had, as it were, imagined that all Broadway
shared in my excitement, and were debating the same question with me. I passed
on, very thankful that the uproar of the street screened my momentary absentmindedness.
As I had intended, I was earlier than usual at my office door. I stood listening
for a moment. All was still. He must be gone. I tried the knob. The door was locked.
Yes, my procedure had worked to a charm; he indeed must be vanished. Yet a
certain melancholy mixed with this: I was almost sorry for my brilliant success. I
was fumbling under the door mat for the key, which Bartleby was to have left there
for me, when accidentally my knee knocked against a panel, producing a
summoning sound, and in response a voice came to me from withinNot yet; I am
occupied.
It was Bartleby.
I was thunderstruck. For an instant I stood like the man who, pipe in mouth,
was killed one cloudless afternoon long ago in Virginia, by summer lightning; at his
own warm open window he was killed, and remained leaning out there upon the
dreamy afternoon, till some one touched him, when he fell.
Not gone! I murmured at last. But again obeying that wondrous ascendancy
which the inscrutable scrivener had over me, and from which ascendency, for all
my chafing, I could not completely escape, I slowly went down stairs and out into

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the street, and while walking round the block, considered what I should next do in
this unheard-of perplexity. Turn the man out by an actual thrusting I could not; to
drive him away by calling him hard names would not do; calling in the police was
an unpleasant idea; and yet, permit him to enjoy his cadaverous triumph over me,
this too I could not think of. What was to be done? or, if nothing could be done, was
there any thing further that I could assume in the matter? Yes, as before I had
prospectively assumed that Bartleby would depart, so now I might retrospectively
assume that departed he was. In the legitimate carrying out of this assumption, I
might enter my office in a great hurry, and pretending not to see Bartleby at all,
walk straight against him as if he were air. Such a proceeding would in a singular
degree have the appearance of a home-thrust. It was hardly possible that Bartleby
could withstand such an application of the doctrine of assumptions. But upon
second thoughts the success of the plan seemed rather dubious. I resolved to argue
the matter over with him again.
Bartleby, said I, entering the office, with a quietly severe expression, I am
seriously displeased. I am pained, Bartleby. I had thought better of you. I had
imagined you of such a gentlemanly organization, that in any delicate dilemma a
slight hint would sufficein short, an assumption. But it appears I am deceived.
Why, I added, unaffectedly starting, you have not even touched the money yet,
pointing to it, just where I had left it the evening previous.
He answered nothing.
Will you, or will you not, quit me? I now demanded in a sudden passion,
advancing close to him.
I would prefer not to quit you, he replied, gently emphasizing the not.
What earthly right have you to stay here? Do you pay any rent? Do you pay my
taxes? Or is this property yours?
He answered nothing.
Are you ready to go on and write now? Are your eyes recovered? Could you
copy a small paper for me this morning? or help examine a few lines? or step round
to the post-office? In a word, will you do any thing at all, to give a coloring to your
refusal to depart the premises?
He silently retired into his hermitage.
I was now in such a state of nervous resentment that I thought it but prudent
to check myself at present from further demonstrations. Bartleby and I were alone.
I remembered the tragedy of the unfortunate Adams and the still more unfortunate
Colt in the solitary office of the latter; and how poor Colt, being dreadfully incensed
by Adams, and imprudently permitting himself to get wildly excited, was at
unawares hurried into his fatal actan act which certainly no man could possibly
deplore more than the actor himself. Often it had occurred to me in my ponderings
upon the subject, that had that altercation taken place in the public street, or at a
private residence, it would not have terminated as it did. It was the circumstance of
being alone in a solitary office, up stairs, of a building entirely unhallowed by
humanizing domestic associationsan uncarpeted office, doubtless, of a dusty,
haggard sort of appearance;this it must have been, which greatly helped to
enhance the irritable desperation of the hapless Colt.

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But when this old Adam of resentment rose in me and tempted me concerning
Bartleby, I grappled him and threw him. How? Why, simply by recalling the divine
injunction: A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another. Yes,
this it was that saved me. Aside from higher considerations, charity often operates
as a vastly wise and prudent principlea great safeguard to its possessor. Men have
committed murder for jealousys sake, and angers sake, and hatreds sake, and
selfishness sake, and spiritual prides sake; but no man that ever I heard of, ever
committed a diabolical murder for sweet charitys sake. Mere self-interest, then, if
no better motive can be enlisted, should, especially with high-tempered men,
prompt all beings to charity and philanthropy. At any rate, upon the occasion in
question, I strove to drown my exasperated feelings towards the scrivener by
benevolently construing his conduct. Poor fellow, poor fellow! thought I, he dont
mean any thing; and besides, he has seen hard times, and ought to be indulged.
I endeavored also immediately to occupy myself, and at the same time to
comfort my despondency. I tried to fancy that in the course of the morning, at such
time as might prove agreeable to him, Bartleby, of his own free accord, would
emerge from his hermitage, and take up some decided line of march in the direction
of the door. But no. Half-past twelve oclock came; Turkey began to glow in the face,
overturn his inkstand, and become generally obstreperous; Nippers abated down
into quietude and courtesy; Ginger Nut munched his noon apple; and Bartleby
remained standing at his window in one of his profoundest dead-wall reveries. Will
it be credited? Ought I to acknowledge it? That afternoon I left the office without
saying one further word to him.
Some days now passed, during which, at leisure intervals I looked a little into
Edwards on the Will, and Priestley on Necessity. Under the circumstances,
those books induced a salutary feeling. Gradually I slid into the persuasion that
these troubles of mine touching the scrivener, had been all predestinated from
eternity, and Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an allwise Providence, which it was not for a mere mortal like me to fathom. Yes,
Bartleby, stay there behind your screen, thought I; I shall persecute you no more;
you are harmless and noiseless as any of these old chairs; in short, I never feel so
private as when I know you are here. At least I see it, I feel it; I penetrate to the
predestinated purpose of my life. I am content. Others may have loftier parts to
enact; but my mission in this world, Bartleby, is to furnish you with office-room for
such period as you may see fit to remain.
I believe that this wise and blessed frame of mind would have continued with
me, had it not been for the unsolicited and uncharitable remarks obtruded upon me
by my professional friends who visited the rooms. But thus it often is, that the
constant friction of illiberal minds wears out at last the best resolves of the more
generous. Though to be sure, when I reflected upon it, it was not strange that people
entering my office should be struck by the peculiar aspect of the unaccountable
Bartleby, and so be tempted to throw out some sinister observations concerning
him. Sometimes an attorney having business with me, and calling at my office, and
finding no one but the scrivener there, would undertake to obtain some sort of
precise information from him touching my whereabouts; but without heeding his
idle talk, Bartleby would remain standing immovable in the middle of the room. So

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after contemplating him in that position for a time, the attorney would depart, no
wiser than he came.
Also, when a Reference was going on, and the room full of lawyers and witnesses
and business was driving fast; some deeply occupied legal gentleman present,
seeing Bartleby wholly unemployed, would request him to run round to his (the
legal gentlemans) office and fetch some papers for him. Thereupon, Bartleby would
tranquilly decline, and yet remain idle as before. Then the lawyer would give a great
stare, and turn to me. And what could I say? At last I was made aware that all
through the circle of my professional acquaintance, a whisper of wonder was
running round, having reference to the strange creature I kept at my office. This
worried me very much. And as the idea came upon me of his possibly turning out a
long-lived man, and keep occupying my chambers, and denying my authority; and
perplexing my visitors; and scandalizing my professional reputation; and casting a
general gloom over the premises; keeping soul and body together to the last upon
his savings (for doubtless he spent but half a dime a day), and in the end perhaps
outlive me, and claim possession of my office by right of his perpetual occupancy:
as all these dark anticipations crowded upon me more and more, and my friends
continually intruded their relentless remarks upon the apparition in my room; a
great change was wrought in me. I resolved to gather all my faculties together, and
for ever rid me of this intolerable incubus.
Ere revolving any complicated project, however, adapted to this end, I first
simply suggested to Bartleby the propriety of his permanent departure. In a calm
and serious tone, I commended the idea to his careful and mature consideration.
But having taken three days to meditate upon it, he apprised me that his original
determination remained the same; in short, that he still preferred to abide with me.
What shall I do? I now said to myself, buttoning up my coat to the last button.
What shall I do? what ought I to do? what does conscience say I should do with this
man, or rather ghost. Rid myself of him, I must; go, he shall. But how? You will not
thrust him, the poor, pale, passive mortal,you will not thrust such a helpless
creature out of your door? you will not dishonor yourself by such cruelty? No, I will
not, I cannot do that. Rather would I let him live and die here, and then mason up
his remains in the wall. What then will you do? For all your coaxing, he will not
budge. Bribes he leaves under your own paperweight on your table; in short, it is
quite plain that he prefers to cling to you.
Then something severe, something unusual must be done. What! surely you
will not have him collared by a constable, and commit his innocent pallor to the
common jail? And upon what ground could you procure such a thing to be done?
a vagrant, is he? What! he a vagrant, a wanderer, who refuses to budge? It is because
he will not be a vagrant, then, that you seek to count him as a vagrant. That is too
absurd. No visible means of support: there I have him. Wrong again: for indubitably
he does support himself, and that is the only unanswerable proof that any man can
show of his possessing the means so to do. No more then. Since he will not quit me,
I must quit him. I will change my offices; I will move elsewhere; and give him fair
notice, that if I find him on my new premises I will then proceed against him as a
common trespasser.

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Acting accordingly, next day I thus addressed him: I find these chambers too
far from the City Hall; the air is unwholesome. In a word, I propose to remove my
offices next week, and shall no longer require your services. I tell you this now, in
order that you may seek another place.
He made no reply, and nothing more was said.
On the appointed day I engaged carts and men, proceeded to my chambers, and
having but little furniture, every thing was removed in a few hours. Throughout, the
scrivener remained standing behind the screen, which I directed to be removed the
last thing. It was withdrawn; and being folded up like a huge folio, left him the
motionless occupant of a naked room. I stood in the entry watching him a moment,
while something from within me upbraided me.
I re-entered, with my hand in my pocketandand my heart in my mouth.
Good-bye, Bartleby; I am goinggood-bye, and God some way bless you; and
take that, slipping something in his hand. But it dropped upon the floor, and
then,strange to sayI tore myself from him whom I had so longed to be rid of.
Established in my new quarters, for a day or two I kept the door locked, and
started at every footfall in the passages. When I returned to my rooms after any
little absence, I would pause at the threshold for an instant, and attentively listen,
ere applying my key. But these fears were needless. Bartleby never came nigh me.
I thought all was going well, when a perturbed looking stranger visited me,
inquiring whether I was the person who had recently occupied rooms at No. Wallstreet.
Full of forebodings, I replied that I was.
Then sir, said the stranger, who proved a lawyer, you are responsible for the
man you left there. He refuses to do any copying; he refuses to do any thing; he says
he prefers not to; and he refuses to quit the premises.
I am very sorry, sir, said I, with assumed tranquillity, but an inward tremor,
but, really, the man you allude to is nothing to mehe is no relation or apprentice
of mine, that you should hold me responsible for him.
In mercys name, who is he?
I certainly cannot inform you. I know nothing about him. Formerly I employed
him as a copyist; but he has done nothing for me now for some time past.
I shall settle him then,good morning, sir.
Several days passed, and I heard nothing more; and though I often felt a
charitable prompting to call at the place and see poor Bartleby, yet a certain
squeamishness of I know not what withheld me.
All is over with him, by this time, thought I at last, when through another week
no further intelligence reached me. But coming to my room the day after, I found
several persons waiting at my door in a high state of nervous excitement.
Thats the manhere he comes, cried the foremost one, whom I recognized
as the lawyer who had previously called upon me alone.
You must take him away, sir, at once, cried a portly person among them,
advancing upon me, and whom I knew to be the landlord of No. Wall-street.

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These gentlemen, my tenants, cannot stand it any longer; Mr. B pointing to

the lawyer, has turned him out of his room, and he now persists in haunting the
building generally, sitting upon the banisters of the stairs by day, and sleeping in
the entry by night. Every body is concerned; clients are leaving the offices; some
fears are entertained of a mob; something you must do, and that without delay.
Aghast at this torrent, I fell back before it, and would fain have locked myself in
my new quarters. In vain I persisted that Bartleby was nothing to meno more than
to any one else. In vain:I was the last person known to have any thing to do with
him, and they held me to the terrible account. Fearful then of being exposed in the
papers (as one person present obscurely threatened) I considered the matter, and
at length said, that if the lawyer would give me a confidential interview with the
scrivener, in his (the lawyers) own room, I would that afternoon strive my best to
rid them of the nuisance they complained of.
Going up stairs to my old haunt, there was Bartleby silently sitting upon the
banister at the landing.
What are you doing here, Bartleby? said I.
Sitting upon the banister, he mildly replied.
I motioned him into the lawyers room, who then left us.
Bartleby, said I, are you aware that you are the cause of great tribulation to
me, by persisting in occupying the entry after being dismissed from the office?
No answer.
Now one of two things must take place. Either you must do something, or
something must be done to you. Now what sort of business would you like to engage
in? Would you like to re-engage in copying for some one?
No; I would prefer not to make any change.
Would you like a clerkship in a dry-goods store?
There is too much confinement about that. No, I would not like a clerkship;
but I am not particular.
Too much confinement, I cried, why you keep yourself confined all the time!
I would prefer not to take a clerkship, he rejoined, as if to settle that little item
at once.
How would a bar-tenders business suit you? There is no trying of the eyesight
in that.
I would not like it at all; though, as I said before, I am not particular.
His unwonted wordiness inspirited me. I returned to the charge.
Well then, would you like to travel through the country collecting bills for the
merchants? That would improve your health.
No, I would prefer to be doing something else.
How then would going as a companion to Europe, to entertain some young
gentleman with your conversation,how would that suit you?
Not at all. It does not strike me that there is any thing definite about that. I like
to be stationary. But I am not particular.

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Stationary you shall be then, I cried, now losing all patience, and for the first
time in all my exasperating connection with him fairly flying into a passion. If you
do not go away from these premises before night, I shall feel boundindeed I am
boundtototo quit the premises myself! I rather absurdly concluded, knowing
not with what possible threat to try to frighten his immobility into compliance.
Despairing of all further efforts, I was precipitately leaving him, when a final
thought occurred to meone which had not been wholly unindulged before.
Bartleby, said I, in the kindest tone I could assume under such exciting
circumstances, will you go home with me nownot to my office, but my dwelling
and remain there till we can conclude upon some convenient arrangement for you
at our leisure? Come, let us start now, right away.
No: at present I would prefer not to make any change at all.
I answered nothing; but effectually dodging every one by the suddenness and
rapidity of my flight, rushed from the building, ran up Wall-street towards
Broadway, and jumping into the first omnibus was soon removed from pursuit. As
soon as tranquillity returned I distinctly perceived that I had now done all that I
possibly could, both in respect to the demands of the landlord and his tenants, and
with regard to my own desire and sense of duty, to benefit Bartleby, and shield him
from rude persecution. I now strove to be entirely care-free and quiescent; and my
conscience justified me in the attempt; though indeed it was not so successful as I
could have wished. So fearful was I of being again hunted out by the incensed
landlord and his exasperated tenants, that, surrendering my business to Nippers,
for a few days I drove about the upper part of the town and through the suburbs, in
my rockaway; crossed over to Jersey City and Hoboken, and paid fugitive visits to
Manhattanville and Astoria. In fact I almost lived in my rockaway for the time.
When again I entered my office, lo, a note from the landlord lay upon the desk.
I opened it with trembling hands. It informed me that the writer had sent to the
police, and had Bartleby removed to the Tombs as a vagrant. Moreover, since I knew
more about him than any one else, he wished me to appear at that place, and make
a suitable statement of the facts. These tidings had a conflicting effect upon me. At
first I was indignant; but at last almost approved. The landlords energetic,
summary disposition had led him to adopt a procedure which I do not think I would
have decided upon myself; and yet as a last resort, under such peculiar
circumstances, it seemed the only plan.
As I afterwards learned, the poor scrivener, when told that he must be
conducted to the Tombs, offered not the slightest obstacle, but in his pale unmoving
way, silently acquiesced.
Some of the compassionate and curious bystanders joined the party; and
headed by one of the constables arm in arm with Bartleby, the silent procession
filed its way through all the noise, and heat, and joy of the roaring thoroughfares at
noon.
The same day I received the note I went to the Tombs, or to speak more
properly, the Halls of Justice. Seeking the right officer, I stated the purpose of my
call, and was informed that the individual I described was indeed within. I then
assured the functionary that Bartleby was a perfectly honest man, and greatly to be

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compassionated, however unaccountably eccentric. I narrated all I knew, and

closed by suggesting the idea of letting him remain in as indulgent confinement as
possible till something less harsh might be donethough indeed I hardly knew
what. At all events, if nothing else could be decided upon, the alms-house must
receive him. I then begged to have an interview.
Being under no disgraceful charge, and quite serene and harmless in all his
ways, they had permitted him freely to wander about the prison, and especially in
the inclosed grass-platted yards thereof. And so I found him there, standing all
alone in the quietest of the yards, his face towards a high wall, while all around,
from the narrow slits of the jail windows, I thought I saw peering out upon him the
eyes of murderers and thieves.
Bartleby!
I know you, he said, without looking round,and I want nothing to say to
you.
It was not I that brought you here, Bartleby, said I, keenly pained at his
implied suspicion. And to you, this should not be so vile a place. Nothing
reproachful attaches to you by being here. And see, it is not so sad a place as one
might think. Look, there is the sky, and here is the grass.
I know where I am, he replied, but would say nothing more, and so I left him.
As I entered the corridor again, a broad meat-like man, in an apron, accosted
me, and jerking his thumb over his shoulder saidIs that your friend?
Yes.
Does he want to starve? If he does, let him live on the prison fare, thats all.
Who are you? asked I, not knowing what to make of such an unofficially
speaking person in such a place.
I am the grub-man. Such gentlemen as have friends here, hire me to provide
them with something good to eat.
Is this so? said I, turning to the turnkey.
He said it was.
Well then, said I, slipping some silver into the grub-mans hands (for so they
called him). I want you to give particular attention to my friend there; let him have
the best dinner you can get. And you must be as polite to him as possible.
Introduce me, will you? said the grub-man, looking at me with an expression
which seem to say he was all impatience for an opportunity to give a specimen of
his breeding.
Thinking it would prove of benefit to the scrivener, I acquiesced; and asking the
grub-man his name, went up with him to Bartleby.
Bartleby, this is Mr. Cutlets; you will find him very useful to you.
Your sarvant, sir, your sarvant, said the grub-man, making a low salutation
behind his apron. Hope you find it pleasant here, sir;spacious groundscool
apartments, sirhope youll stay with us some timetry to make it agreeable. May
Mrs. Cutlets and I have the pleasure of your company to dinner, sir, in Mrs. Cutlets
private room?

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I prefer not to dine to-day, said Bartleby, turning away. It would disagree
with me; I am unused to dinners. So saying he slowly moved to the other side of
the inclosure, and took up a position fronting the dead-wall.
Hows this? said the grub-man, addressing me with a stare of astonishment.
Hes odd, aint he?
I think he is a little deranged, said I, sadly.
Deranged? deranged is it? Well now, upon my word, I thought that friend of
yourn was a gentleman forger; they are always pale and genteel-like, them forgers.
I cant help pity emcant help it, sir. Did you know Monroe Edwards? he added
touchingly, and paused. Then, laying his hand pityingly on my shoulder, sighed, he
died of consumption at Sing-Sing. So you werent acquainted with Monroe?
No, I was never socially acquainted with any forgers. But I cannot stop longer.
Look to my friend yonder. You will not lose by it. I will see you again.
Some few days after this, I again obtained admission to the Tombs, and went
through the corridors in quest of Bartleby; but without finding him.
I saw him coming from his cell not long ago, said a turnkey, may be hes gone
to loiter in the yards.
So I went in that direction.
Are you looking for the silent man? said another turnkey passing me. Yonder
he liessleeping in the yard there. Tis not twenty minutes since I saw him lie
down.
The yard was entirely quiet. It was not accessible to the common prisoners. The
surrounding walls, of amazing thickness, kept off all sounds behind them. The
Egyptian character of the masonry weighed upon me with its gloom. But a soft
imprisoned turf grew under foot. The heart of the eternal pyramids, it seemed,
wherein, by some strange magic, through the clefts, grass-seed, dropped by birds,
had sprung.
Strangely huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up, and lying on his
side, his head touching the cold stones, I saw the wasted Bartleby. But nothing
stirred. I paused; then went close up to him; stooped over, and saw that his dim
eyes were open; otherwise he seemed profoundly sleeping. Something prompted
me to touch him. I felt his hand, when a tingling shiver ran up my arm and down
my spine to my feet.
The round face of the grub-man peered upon me now. His dinner is ready.
Wont he dine to-day, either? Or does he live without dining?
Lives without dining, said I, and closed the eyes.
Eh!Hes asleep, aint he?
With kings and counsellors, murmured I.

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There would seem little need for proceeding further in this history. Imagination
will readily supply the meagre recital of poor Bartlebys interment. But ere parting

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with the reader, let me say, that if this little narrative has sufficiently interested him,
to awaken curiosity as to who Bartleby was, and what manner of life he led prior to
the present narrators making his acquaintance, I can only reply, that in such
curiosity I fully share, but am wholly unable to gratify it. Yet here I hardly know
whether I should divulge one little item of rumor, which came to my ear a few
months after the scriveners decease. Upon what basis it rested, I could never
ascertain; and hence, how true it is I cannot now tell. But inasmuch as this vague
report has not been without a certain strange suggestive interest to me, however
sad, it may prove the same with some others; and so I will briefly mention it. The
report was this: that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office
at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the
administration. When I think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express the
emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive
a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business
seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters
and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned.
Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:the finger it was
meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:
he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who
died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died
stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.
Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!

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4.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
by Ambrose Bierce
A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift
water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a
cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his
head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the sleepers
supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners--two
private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been
a deputy sheriff. At a short remove upon the same temporary platform was an officer in
the uniform of his rank, armed. He was a captain. A sentinel at each end of the bridge
stood with his rifle in the position known as "support," that is to say, vertical in front of
the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest--a
formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It did not appear
to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge;
they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.
Beyond one of the sentinels nobody was in sight; the railroad ran straight away into a
forest for a hundred yards, then, curving, was lost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost
farther along. The other bank of the stream was open ground--a gentle acclivity topped
with a stockade of vertical tree trunks, loopholed for rifles, with a single embrasure
through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon commanding the bridge. Midway
of the slope between the bridge and fort were the spectators--a single company of infantry
in line, at "parade rest," the butts of the rifles on the ground, the barrels inclining slightly
backward against the right shoulder, the hands crossed upon the stock. A lieu tenant stood
at the right of the line, the point of his sword upon the ground, his left hand resting upon
his right. Excepting the group of four at the center of the bridge, not a man moved. The
company faced the bridge, staring stonily, motionless. The sentinels, facing the banks of
the stream, might have been statues to adorn the bridge. The captain stood with folded
arms, silent, observing the work of his subordinates, but making no sign. Death is a
dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of
respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and
fixity are forms of deference.
The man who was engaged in being hanged was apparently about thirty-five years of
age. He was a civilian, if one might judge from his habit, which was that of a planter. His
features were good--a straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long,
dark hair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collar of his well-fitting
frock coat. He wore a mustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large
and dark gray, and had a kindly expression which one would hardly have expected in one
whose neck was in the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar assassin. The liberal military
code makes provision for hanging many kinds of persons, and gentlemen are not
excluded.
The preparations being complete, the two private soldiers stepped aside and each drew
away the plank upon which he had been standing. The sergeant turned to the captain,

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saluted and placed himself immediately behind that officer, who in turn moved apart one
pace. These movements left the condemned man and the sergeant standing on the two
ends of the same plank, which spanned three of the cross-ties of the bridge. The end upon
which the civilian stood almost, but not quite, reached a fourth. This plank had been held
in place by the weight of the captain; it was now held by that of the sergeant. At a signal
from the former the latter would step aside, the plank would tilt and the condemned man
go down between two ties. The arrangement commended itself to his judgment as simple
and effective. His face had not been covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment
at his "unsteadfast footing," then let his gaze wander to the swirling water of the stream
racing madly beneath his feet. A piece of dancing driftwood caught his attention and his
eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared to move, What a sluggish
stream!
He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children. The
water, touched to gold by the early sun, the brooding mists under the banks at some
distance down the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift--all had distracted him.
And now he became conscious of a new disturbance. Striking through the thought of his
dear ones was a sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct,
metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith's hammer upon the anvil; it had the
same ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or
near by--it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death
knell. He awaited each stroke with impatience and--he knew not why--apprehension. The
intervals of silence grew progressively longer, the delays became maddening. With their
greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear
like the thrust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his
watch.
He unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him. "If I could free my hands," he
thought, "I might throw off the noose and spring into the stream. By diving I could evade
the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away
home. My home, thank God, is as yet outside their lines; my wife and little ones are still
beyond the invader's farthest advance."
As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the
doomed man's brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. The
sergeant stepped aside.
II
Peyton Farquhar was a well-to-do planter, of an old and highly respected Alabama
family. Being a slave owner and like other slave owners a politician he was naturally an
original secessionist and ardently devoted to the Southern cause. Circumstances of an
imperious nature, which it is unnecessary to relate here, had prevented him from taking
service with the gallant army that had fought the disastrous campaigns ending with the
fall of Corinth, and he chafed under the inglorious restraint, longing for the release of his
energies, the larger life of the soldier, the opportunity for distinction. That opportunity,
he felt, would come, as it comes to all in war time. Meanwhile he did what he could. No
service was too humble for him to perform in aid of the South, no adventure too perilous
for him to undertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was at heart a
soldier, and who in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a
part of the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war.

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One evening while Farquhar and his wife were sitting on a rustic bench near the
entrance to his grounds, a gray-clad soldier rode up to the gate and asked for a drink of
water. Mrs. Farquhar was only toe, happy to serve him with her own white hands. While
she was fetching the water her husband approached the dusty horseman and inquired
eagerly for news from the front.
"The Yanks are repairing the railroads," said the man, "and are getting ready for
another advance. They have reached the Owl Creek bridge, put it in order and built a
stockade on the north bank. The commandant has issued an order, which is posted
everywhere, declaring that any civilian caught interfering with the railroad, its bridges,
tunnels or trains will be summarily hanged. I saw the order."
"How far is it to the Owl Creek bridge?" Farquhar asked.
"About thirty miles."
"Is there no force on this side the creek?"
"Only a picket post half a mile out, on the railroad, and a single sentinel at this end of
the bridge."
"Suppose a man--a civilian and student of hanging--should elude the picket post and
perhaps get the better of the sentinel," said Farquhar, smiling, "what could he
accomplish?"
The soldier reflected. "I was there a month ago," he replied. "I observed that the flood
of last winter had lodged a great quantity of driftwood against the wooden pier at this end
of the bridge. It is now dry and would burn like tow."
The lady had now brought the water, which the soldier drank. He thanked her
ceremoniously, bowed to her husband and rode away. An hour later, after nightfall, he
repassed the plantation, going northward in the direction from which he had come. He
was a Federal scout.
III
As Peyton Farquhar fell straight downward through the bridge he lost consciousness
and was as one already dead. From this state he was awakened--ages later, it seemed to
him--by the pain of a sharp pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation.
Keen, poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every fiber of
his body and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along well-defined lines of ramification
and to beat with an inconceivably rapid periodicity. They seemed like streams of pulsating
fire heating him to an intolerable temperature. As to his head, he was conscious of nothing
but a feeling of fulness--of congestion. These sensations were unaccompanied by thought.
The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and
feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of
which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through
unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum. Then all at once, with terrible
suddenness, the light about him shot upward with the noise of a loud splash; a frightful
roaring was in his ears, and all was cold and dark. The power of thought was restored; he
knew that the rope had broken and he had fallen into the stream. There was no additional
strangulation; the noose about his neck was already suffocating him and kept the water
from his lungs. To die of hanging at the bottom of a river!--the idea seemed to him
ludicrous. He opened his eyes in the darkness and saw above him a gleam of light, but
how distant, how inaccessible! He was still sinking, for the light became fainter and fainter
until it was a mere glimmer. Then it began to grow and brighten, and he knew that he was

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rising toward the surface--knew it with reluctance, for he was now very comfortable. "To
be hanged and drowned," he thought? "that is not so bad; but I do not wish to be shot.
No; I will not be shot; that is not fair."
He was not conscious of an effort, but a sharp pain in his wrist apprised him that he
was trying to free his hands. He gave the struggle his attention, as an idler might observe
the feat of a juggler, without interest in the outcome. What splendid effort!--what
magnificent, what superhuman strength! Ah, that was a fine endeavor! Bravo! The cord
fell away; his arms parted and floated upward, the hands dimly seen on each side in the
growing light. He watched them with a new interest as first one and then the other
pounced upon the noose at his neck. They tore it away and thrust it fiercely aside, its
undulations resembling those of a water snake. "Put it back, put it back!" He thought he
shouted these words to his hands, for the undoing of the noose had been succeeded by the
direst pang that he had yet experienced. His neck ached horribly; his brain was on fire;
his heart, which had been fluttering faintly, gave a great leap, trying to force itself out at
his mouth. His whole body was racked and wrenched with an insupportable anguish! But
his disobedient hands gave no heed to the command. They beat the water vigorously with
quick, downward strokes, forcing him to the surface. He felt his head emerge; his eyes
were blinded by the sunlight; his chest expanded convulsively, and with a supreme and
crowning agony his lungs engulfed a great draught of air, which instantly he expelled in a
shriek!
He was now in full possession of his physical senses. They were, indeed, preternaturally
keen and alert. Something in the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted
and refined them that they made record of things never before perceived. He felt the
ripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the
forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of
each leaf--saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the grey
spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colors in all the
dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. The humming of the gnats that danced above
the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragon flies' wings, the strokes of the waterspiders' legs, like oars which had lifted their boat--all these made audible music. A fish
slid along beneath his eyes and he heard the rush of its body parting the water.
He had come to the surface facing down the stream; in a moment the visible world
seemed to wheel slowly round, himself the pivotal point, and he saw the bridge, the fort,
the soldiers upon the bridge, the captain, the sergeant, the two privates, his executioners.
They were in silhouette against the blue sky. They shouted and gesticulated, pointing at
him. The captain had drawn his pistol, but did not fire; the others were unarmed. Their
movements were grotesque and horrible, their forms gigantic.
Suddenly he heard a sharp report and something struck the water smartly within a few
inches of his head, spattering his face with spray. He heard a second report, and saw one
of the sentinels with his rifle at his shoulder, a light cloud of blue smoke rising from the
muzzle. The man in the water saw the eye of the man on the bridge gazing into his own
through the sights of the rifle. He observed that it was a grey eye and remembered having
read that grey eyes were keenest, and that all famous marksmen had them. Nevertheless,
this one had missed.
A counter-swirl had caught Farquhar and turned him half round; he was again looking
into the forest on the bank opposite the fort. The sound of a clear, high voice in a
monotonous singsong now rang out behind him and came across the water with a

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distinctness that pierced and subdued all other sounds, even the beating of the ripples in
his ears. Although no soldier, he had frequented camps enough to know the dread
significance of that deliberate, drawling, aspirated chant; the lieu. tenant on shore was
taking a part in the morning's work. How coldly and pitilessly--with what an even, calm
intonation, presaging, and enforcing tranquillity in the men--with what accurately
measured inter vals fell those cruel words:
"Attention, company! . . Shoulder arms! . . . Ready! . . . Aim! . . . Fire!"
Farquhar dived--dived as deeply as he could. The water roared in his ears like the voice
of Niagara, yet he heard the dulled thunder of the volley and, rising again toward the
surface, met shining bits of metal, singularly flattened, oscillating slowly downward. Some
of them touched him on the face and hands, then fell away, continuing their descent. One
lodged between his collar and neck; it was uncomfortably warm and he snatched it out.
As he rose to the surface, gasping for breath, he saw that he had been a long time under
water; he was perceptibly farther down stream nearer to safety. The soldiers had almost
finished reloading; the metal ramrods flashed all at once in the sunshine as they were
drawn from the barrels, turned in the air, and thrust into their sockets. The two sentinels
fired again, independently and ineffectually.
The hunted man saw all this over his shoulder; he was now swimming vigorously with
the current. His brain was as energetic as his arms and legs; he thought with the rapidity
of lightning.
The officer," he reasoned, "will not make that martinet's error a second time. It is as
easy to dodge a volley as a single shot. He has probably already given the command to fire
at will. God help me, I cannot dodge them all!"
An appalling plash within two yards of him was followed by a loud, rushing sound,
diminuendo, which seemed to travel back through the air to the fort and died in an
explosion which stirred the very river to its deeps!
A rising sheet of water curved over him, fell down upon him, blinded him, strangled
him! The cannon had taken a hand in the game. As he shook his head free from the
commotion of the smitten water he heard the deflected shot humming through the air
ahead, and in an instant it was cracking and smashing the branches in the forest beyond.
"They will not do that again," he thought; "the next time they will use a charge of grape.
I must keep my eye upon the gun; the smoke will apprise me--the report arrives too late;
it lags behind the missile. That is a good gun."
Suddenly he felt himself whirled round and round--spinning like a top. The water, the
banks, the forests, the now distant bridge, fort and men--all were commingled and
blurred. Objects were represented by their colors only; circular horizontal streaks of
color--that was all he saw. He had been caught in a vortex and was being whirled on with
a velocity of advance and gyration that made him giddy and sick. In a few moments he
was flung upon the gravel at the foot of the left bank of the stream--the southern bank-and behind a projecting point which concealed him from his enemies. The sudden arrest
of his motion, the abrasion of one of his hands on the gravel, restored him, and he wept
with delight. He dug his fingers into the sand, threw it over himself in handfuls and
audibly blessed it. It looked like diamonds, rubies, emeralds; he could think of nothing
beautiful which it did not resemble. The trees upon the bank were giant garden plants; he
noted a definite order in their arrangement, inhaled the fragrance of their blooms. A
strange, roseate light shone through the spaces among their trunks and the wind made in

60

their branches the music of olian harps. He had no wish to perfect his escape--was
content to remain in that enchanting spot until retaken.
A whiz and rattle of grapeshot among the branches high above his head roused him
from his dream. The baffled cannoneer had fired him a random farewell. He sprang to his
feet, rushed up the sloping bank, and plunged into the forest.
All that day he traveled, laying his course by the rounding sun. The forest seemed
interminable; nowhere did he discover a break in it, not even a woodman's road. He had
not known that he lived in so wild a region. There was something uncanny in the
revelation.
By nightfall he was fatigued, footsore, famishing. The thought of his wife and children
urged him on. At last he found a road which led him in what he knew to be the right
direction. It was as wide and straight as a city street, yet it seemed untraveled. No fields
bordered it, no dwelling anywhere. Not so much as the barking of a dog suggested human
habitation. The black bodies of the trees formed a straight wall on both sides, terminating
on the horizon in a point, like a diagram in a lesson in perspective. Overhead, as he looked
up through this rift in the wood, shone great garden stars looking unfamiliar and grouped
in strange constellations. He was sure they were arranged in some order which had a
secret and malign significance. The wood on either side was full of singular noises, among
which--once, twice, and again--he distinctly heard whispers in an unknown tongue.
His neck was in pain and lifting his hand to it found it horribly swollen. He knew that
it had a circle of black where the rope had bruised it. His eyes felt congested; he could no
longer close them. His tongue was swollen with thirst; he relieved its fever by thrusting it
forward from between his teeth into the cold air. How softly the turf had carpeted the
untraveled avenue--he could no longer feel the roadway beneath his feet!
Doubtless, despite his suffering, he had fallen asleep while walking, for now he sees
another scene--perhaps he has merely recovered from a delirium. He stands at the gate
of his own home. All is as he left it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine.
He must have traveled the entire night. As he pushes open the gate and passes up the wide
white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet,
steps down from the veranda to meet him. At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting,
with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. Ah, how beautiful
she is! He springs forward with extended arms. As he is about to clasp her he feels a
stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with
a sound like the shock of a cannon--then all is darkness and silence!
Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to
side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.

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5.
The Yellow Wallpaper
By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure
ancestral halls for the summer.
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house,
and reach the height of romantic felicity--but that would be asking too
much of fate!
Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.
Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long
untenanted?
John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an
intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of
things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.
John is a physician, and PERHAPS--(I would not say it to a living
soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my
mind)--PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster.
You see he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do?
If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends
and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but
temporary nervous depression--a slight hysterical tendency--what is one
to do?
My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says
the same thing.
So I take phosphates or phosphites--whichever it is, and tonics, and
journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to "work"
until I am well again.
Personally, I disagree with their ideas.

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Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change,

would do me good.
But what is one to do?
I did write for a while in spite of them; but it DOES exhaust me a good
deal--having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.
I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more
society and stimulus--but John says the very worst thing I can do is to
think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.
So I will let it alone and talk about the house.
The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the
road, quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of English
places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates
that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and
people.
There is a DELICIOUS garden! I never saw such a garden--large and shady,
full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors
with seats under them.
There were greenhouses, too, but they are all broken now.
There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about the heirs and
coheirs; anyhow, the place has been empty for years.
That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don't care--there is
something strange about the house--I can feel it.
I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt
was a DRAUGHT, and shut the window.
I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I'm sure I never used to
be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.
But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I
take pains to control myself--before him, at least, and that makes me
very tired.
I don't like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the
piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned
chintz hangings! but John would not hear of it.
He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near

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room for him if he took another.

He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special
direction.
I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all
care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more.
He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect
rest and all the air I could get. "Your exercise depends on your
strength, my dear," said he, "and your food somewhat on your appetite;
but air you can absorb all the time." So we took the nursery at the top
of the house.
It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look
all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then
playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for
little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.
The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is
stripped off--the paper--in great patches all around the head of my bed,
about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of
the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic
sin.
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough
to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the
lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit
suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard
of contradictions.
The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow,
strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.
It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in
others.
No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to
live in this room long.
There comes John, and I must put this away,--he hates to have me write a
word.
We have been here two weeks, and I haven't felt like writing before,

64

since that first day.

I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and
there is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please, save lack of
strength.
John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious.
I am glad my case is not serious!
But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing.
John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no REASON
to suffer, and that satisfies him.
Of course it is only nervousness. It does weigh on me so not to do my
duty in any way!
I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and
here I am a comparative burden already!
Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am
able,--to dress and entertain, and order things.
It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby!
And yet I CANNOT be with him, it makes me so nervous.
I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about
this wall-paper!
At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I
was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a
nervous patient than to give way to such fancies.
He said that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy
bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of
the stairs, and so on.
"You know the place is doing you good," he said, "and really, dear, I
don't care to renovate the house just for a three months' rental."
"Then do let us go downstairs," I said, "there are such pretty rooms
there."
Then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose,
and said he would go down to the cellar, if I wished, and have it

65

whitewashed into the bargain.

But he is right enough about the beds and windows and things.
It is an airy and comfortable room as any one need wish, and, of course,
I would not be so silly as to make him uncomfortable just for a whim.
I'm really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid
paper.
Out of one window I can see the garden, those mysterious deepshaded
arbors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees.
Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf
belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs
down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these
numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to
fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of
story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner
of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to
check the tendency. So I try.
I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it
would relieve the press of ideas and rest me.
But I find I get pretty tired when I try.
It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about
my work. When I get really well, John says we will ask Cousin Henry and
Julia down for a long visit; but he says he would as soon put fireworks
in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now.
I wish I could get well faster.
But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it KNEW
what a vicious influence it had!
There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and
two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.
I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the
everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd,
unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths
didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little
higher than the other.
I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all

66

know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and
get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture
than most children could find in a toy store.
I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to
have, and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend.
I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I could
always hop into that chair and be safe.
The furniture in this room is no worse than inharmonious, however, for
we had to bring it all from downstairs. I suppose when this was used
as a playroom they had to take the nursery things out, and no wonder! I
never saw such ravages as the children have made here.
The wall-paper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticketh
closer than a brother--they must have had perseverance as well as
hatred.
Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster
itself is dug out here and there, and this great heavy bed which is all
we found in the room, looks as if it had been through the wars.
But I don't mind it a bit--only the paper.
There comes John's sister. Such a dear girl as she is, and so careful of
me! I must not let her find me writing.
She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better
profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me
sick!
But I can write when she is out, and see her a long way off from these
windows.
There is one that commands the road, a lovely shaded winding road, and
one that just looks off over the country. A lovely country, too, full of
great elms and velvet meadows.
This wall-paper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a
particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights,
and not clearly then.
But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so--I
can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to
skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.

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There's sister on the stairs!

Well, the Fourth of July is over! The people are gone and I am tired
out. John thought it might do me good to see a little company, so we
just had mother and Nellie and the children down for a week.
Of course I didn't do a thing. Jennie sees to everything now.
But it tired me all the same.
John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in
the fall.
But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands
once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!
Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far.
I don't feel as if it was worth while to turn my hand over for anything,
and I'm getting dreadfully fretful and querulous.
I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.
Of course I don't when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am
alone.
And I am alone a good deal just now. John is kept in town very often by
serious cases, and Jennie is good and lets me alone when I want her to.
So I walk a little in the garden or down that lovely lane, sit on the
porch under the roses, and lie down up here a good deal.
I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wall-paper. Perhaps
BECAUSE of the wall-paper.
It dwells in my mind so!
I lie here on this great immovable bed--it is nailed down, I
believe--and follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as
gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we'll say, at the bottom, down in the
corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the
thousandth time that I WILL follow that pointless pattern to some sort
of a conclusion.
I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was
not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or

68

symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of.

It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise.
Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and
flourishes--a kind of "debased Romanesque" with delirium tremens--go
waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.
But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling
outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of
wallowing seaweeds in full chase.
The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I
exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its going in that
direction.
They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds
wonderfully to the confusion.
There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when
the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can
almost fancy radiation after all,--the interminable grotesques seem to
form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal
distraction.
It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap I guess.
I don't know why I should write this.
I don't want to.
I don't feel able.
And I know John would think it absurd. But I MUST say what I feel and
think in some way--it is such a relief!
But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.
Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and lie down ever so much.
John says I musn't lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and
lots of tonics and things, to say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat.
Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried
to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell
him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and
Julia.

69

But he said I wasn't able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there;
and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying
before I had finished.
It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this
nervous weakness I suppose.
And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs
and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my
head.
He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I
must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well.
He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will
and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.
There's one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to
occupy this nursery with the horrid wall-paper.
If we had not used it, that blessed child would have! What a fortunate
escape! Why, I wouldn't have a child of mine, an impressionable little
thing, live in such a room for worlds.
I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here
after all, I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see.
Of course I never mention it to them any more--I am too wise,--but I
keep watch of it all the same.
There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.
Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.
It is always the same shape, only very numerous.
And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that
pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder--I begin to think--I wish John
would take me away from here!
It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise,
and because he loves me so.
But I tried it last night.
It was moonlight. The moon shines in all around just as the sun does.

70

I hate to see it sometimes, it creeps so slowly, and always comes in by

one window or another.
John was asleep and I hated to waken him, so I kept still and watched
the moonlight on that undulating wall-paper till I felt creepy.
The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she
wanted to get out.
I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper DID move, and when
I came back John was awake.
"What is it, little girl?" he said. "Don't go walking about like
that--you'll get cold."
I though it was a good time to talk, so I told him that I really was not
gaining here, and that I wished he would take me away.
"Why darling!" said he, "our lease will be up in three weeks, and I
can't see how to leave before.
"The repairs are not done at home, and I cannot possibly leave town just
now. Of course if you were in any danger, I could and would, but you
really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor,
dear, and I know. You are gaining flesh and color, your appetite is
better, I feel really much easier about you."
"I don't weigh a bit more," said I, "nor as much; and my appetite may be
better in the evening when you are here, but it is worse in the morning
when you are away!"
"Bless her little heart!" said he with a big hug, "she shall be as sick
as she pleases! But now let's improve the shining hours by going to
sleep, and talk about it in the morning!"
"And you won't go away?" I asked gloomily.
"Why, how can I, dear? It is only three weeks more and then we will
take a nice little trip of a few days while Jennie is getting the house
ready. Really dear you are better!"
"Better in body perhaps--" I began, and stopped short, for he sat up
straight and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I
could not say another word.
"My darling," said he, "I beg of you, for my sake and for our child's

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sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant
let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so
fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish
fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?"
So of course I said no more on that score, and we went to sleep before
long. He thought I was asleep first, but I wasn't, and lay there for
hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern
really did move together or separately.
On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a
defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.
The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating
enough, but the pattern is torturing.
You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in
following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you
in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad
dream.
The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus.
If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of
toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions--why, that is
something like it.
That is, sometimes!
There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems
to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes.
When the sun shoots in through the east window--I always watch for that
first long, straight ray--it changes so quickly that I never can quite
believe it.
That is why I watch it always.
By moonlight--the moon shines in all night when there is a moon--I
wouldn't know it was the same paper.
At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamplight, and
worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean,
and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.
I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind,
that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman.

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By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps

her so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour.
I lie down ever so much now. John says it is good for me, and to sleep
all I can.
Indeed he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each
meal.
It is a very bad habit I am convinced, for you see I don't sleep.
And that cultivates deceit, for I don't tell them I'm awake--O no!
The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John.
He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennie has an inexplicable look.
It strikes me occasionally, just as a scientific hypothesis,--that
perhaps it is the paper!
I have watched John when he did not know I was looking, and come into
the room suddenly on the most innocent excuses, and I've caught him
several times LOOKING AT THE PAPER! And Jennie too. I caught Jennie with
her hand on it once.
She didn't know I was in the room, and when I asked her in a quiet, a
very quiet voice, with the most restrained manner possible, what she
was doing with the paper--she turned around as if she had been caught
stealing, and looked quite angry--asked me why I should frighten her so!
Then she said that the paper stained everything it touched, that she had
found yellow smooches on all my clothes and John's, and she wished we
would be more careful!
Did not that sound innocent? But I know she was studying that pattern,
and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself!
Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have
something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat
better, and am more quiet than I was.
John is so pleased to see me improve! He laughed a little the other day,
and said I seemed to be flourishing in spite of my wall-paper.
I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was

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BECAUSE of the wall-paper--he would make fun of me. He might even want
to take me away.
I don't want to leave now until I have found it out. There is a week
more, and I think that will be enough.
I'm feeling ever so much better! I don't sleep much at night, for it
is so interesting to watch developments; but I sleep a good deal in the
daytime.
In the daytime it is tiresome and perplexing.
There are always new shoots on the fungus, and new shades of yellow
all over it. I cannot keep count of them, though I have tried
conscientiously.
It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all
the yellow things I ever saw--not beautiful ones like buttercups, but
old foul, bad yellow things.
But there is something else about that paper--the smell! I noticed it
the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was
not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows
are open or not, the smell is here.
It creeps all over the house.
I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in
the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs.
It gets into my hair.
Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise
it--there is that smell!
Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it,
to find what it smelled like.
It is not bad--at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most
enduring odor I ever met.
In this damp weather it is awful, I wake up in the night and find it
hanging over me.
It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the
house--to reach the smell.

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But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like
is the COLOR of the paper! A yellow smell.
There is a very funny mark on this wall, low down, near the mopboard.
A streak that runs round the room. It goes behind every piece of
furniture, except the bed, a long, straight, even SMOOCH, as if it had
been rubbed over and over.
I wonder how it was done and who did it, and what they did it for. Round
and round and round--round and round and round--it makes me dizzy!
I really have discovered something at last.
Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally
found out.
The front pattern DOES move--and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!
Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes
only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all
over.
Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady
spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.
And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb
through that pattern--it strangles so; I think that is why it has so
many heads.
They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them
upside down, and makes their eyes white!
If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.
I think that woman gets out in the daytime!
And I'll tell you why--privately--I've seen her!
I can see her out of every one of my windows!
It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women
do not creep by daylight.
I see her on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a

75

carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines.

I don't blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught
creeping by daylight!
I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can't do it at night,
for I know John would suspect something at once.
And John is so queer now, that I don't want to irritate him. I wish he
would take another room! Besides, I don't want anybody to get that woman
out at night but myself.
I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once.
But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at one time.
And though I always see her, she MAY be able to creep faster than I can
turn!
I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as
fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind.
If only that top pattern could be gotten off from the under one! I mean
to try it, little by little.
I have found out another funny thing, but I shan't tell it this time! It
does not do to trust people too much.
There are only two more days to get this paper off, and I believe John
is beginning to notice. I don't like the look in his eyes.
And I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me. She
had a very good report to give.
She said I slept a good deal in the daytime.
John knows I don't sleep very well at night, for all I'm so quiet!
He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving
and kind.
As if I couldn't see through him!
Still, I don't wonder he acts so, sleeping under this paper for three
months.
It only interests me, but I feel sure John and Jennie are secretly

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affected by it.
Hurrah! This is the last day, but it is enough. John is to stay in town
over night, and won't be out until this evening.
Jennie wanted to sleep with me--the sly thing! but I told her I should
undoubtedly rest better for a night all alone.
That was clever, for really I wasn't alone a bit! As soon as it was
moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I
got up and ran to help her.
I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we
had peeled off yards of that paper.
A strip about as high as my head and half around the room.
And then when the sun came and that awful pattern began to laugh at me,
I declared I would finish it to-day!
We go away to-morrow, and they are moving all my furniture down again to
leave things as they were before.
Jennie looked at the wall in amazement, but I told her merrily that I
did it out of pure spite at the vicious thing.
She laughed and said she wouldn't mind doing it herself, but I must not
get tired.
How she betrayed herself that time!
But I am here, and no person touches this paper but me--not ALIVE!
She tried to get me out of the room--it was too patent! But I said it
was so quiet and empty and clean now that I believed I would lie down
again and sleep all I could; and not to wake me even for dinner--I would
call when I woke.
So now she is gone, and the servants are gone, and the things are gone,
and there is nothing left but that great bedstead nailed down, with the
canvas mattress we found on it.
We shall sleep downstairs to-night, and take the boat home to-morrow.
I quite enjoy the room, now it is bare again.

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How those children did tear about here!

This bedstead is fairly gnawed!
But I must get to work.
I have locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path.
I don't want to go out, and I don't want to have anybody come in, till
John comes.
I want to astonish him.
I've got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman
does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!
But I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on!
This bed will NOT move!
I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I
bit off a little piece at one corner--but it hurt my teeth.
Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor.
It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled
heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with
derision!
I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the
window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to
try.
Besides I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step
like that is improper and might be misconstrued.
I don't like to LOOK out of the windows even--there are so many of those
creeping women, and they creep so fast.
I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?
But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope--you don't get ME
out in the road there!
I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes
night, and that is hard!
It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I

78

please!
I don't want to go outside. I won't, even if Jennie asks me to.
For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green
instead of yellow.
But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in
that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.
Why there's John at the door!
It is no use, young man, you can't open it!
How he does call and pound!
Now he's crying for an axe.
It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door!
"John dear!" said I in the gentlest voice, "the key is down by the front
steps, under a plantain leaf!"
That silenced him for a few moments.
Then he said--very quietly indeed, "Open the door, my darling!"
"I can't," said I. "The key is down by the front door under a plantain
leaf!"
And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and
said it so often that he had to go and see, and he got it of course, and
came in. He stopped short by the door.
"What is the matter?" he cried. "For God's sake, what are you doing!"
I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.
"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've
pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"
Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my
path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

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6.
Regret
by Kate Chopin
This story was first published in 1897 when it appeared in Chopin's short story collection
A Night in Acadia.
MAMZELLE AURLIE possessed a good strong figure, ruddy cheeks, hair that was
changing from brown to gray, and a determined eye. She wore a man's hat about the farm,
and an old blue army overcoat when it was cold, and sometimes top-boots.
Mamzelle Aurlie had never thought of marrying. She had never been in love. At the
age of twenty she had received a proposal, which she had promptly declined, and at the
age of fifty she had not yet lived to regret it.
So she was quite alone in the world, except for her dog Ponto, and the negroes who
lived in her cabins and worked her crops, and the fowls, a few cows, a couple of mules,
her gun (with which she shot chicken-hawks), and her religion.
One morning Mamzelle Aurlie stood upon her gallery, contemplating, with arms
akimbo, a small band of very small children who, to all intents and purposes, might have
fallen from the clouds, so unexpected and bewildering was their coming, and so
unwelcome. They were the children of her nearest neighbor, Odile, who was not such a
near neighbor, after all.
The young woman had appeared but five minutes before, accompanied by these four
children. In her arms she carried little Lodie; she dragged Ti Nomme by an unwilling
hand; while Marcline and Marclette followed with irresolute steps.
Her face was red and disfigured from tears and excitement. She had been summoned
to a neighboring parish by the dangerous illness of her mother; her husband was away in
Texas -- it seemed to her a million miles away; and Valsin was waiting with the mule-cart
to drive her to the station.
"It's no question, Mamzelle Aurlie; you jus' got to keep those youngsters fo' me tell I
come back. Dieu sait, I wouldn' botha you with 'em if it was any otha way to do! Make 'em
mine you, Mamzelle Aurlie; don' spare 'em. Me, there, I'm half crazy between the chil'ren,
an' Lon not home, an' maybe not even to fine po' maman alive encore!" -- a harrowing
possibility which drove Odile to take a final hasty and convulsive leave of her disconsolate
family.
She left them crowded into the narrow strip of shade on the porch of the long, low
house; the white sunlight was beating in on the white old boards; some chickens were
scratching in the grass at the foot of the steps, and one had boldly mounted, and was
stepping heavily, solemnly, and aimlessly across the gallery. There was a pleasant odor of
pinks in the air, and the sound of negroes' laughter was coming across the flowering
cotton-field.
Mamzelle Aurlie stood contemplating the children. She looked with a critical eye
upon Marcline, who had been left staggering beneath the weight of the chubby Lodie. She
surveyed with the same calculating air Marclette mingling her silent tears with the audible
grief and rebellion of Ti Nomme. During those few contemplative moments she was

80

collecting herself, determining upon a line of action which should be identical with a line
of duty. She began by feeding them.
If Mamzelle Aurlie's responsibilities might have begun and ended there, they could
easily have been dismissed; for her larder was amply provided against an emergency of
this nature. But little children are not little pigs: they require and demand attentions
which were wholly unexpected by Mamzelle Aurlie, and which she was ill prepared to give.
She was, indeed, very inapt in her management of Odile's children during the first
few days. How could she know that Marclette always wept when spoken to in a loud and
commanding tone of voice? It was a peculiarity of Marclette's. She became acquainted
with Ti Nomme's passion for flowers only when he had plucked all the choicest gardenias
and pinks for the apparent purpose of critically studying their botanical construction.
"'T ain't enough to tell 'im, Mamzelle Aurlie," Marcline instructed her; "you got to tie
'im in a chair. It's w'at maman all time do w'en he's bad: she tie 'im in a chair." The chair
in which Mamzelle Aurlie tied Ti Nomme was roomy and comfortable, and he seized the
opportunity to take a nap in it, the afternoon being warm.
At night, when she ordered them one and all to bed as she would have shooed the
chickens into the hen-house, they stayed uncomprehending before her. What about the
little white nightgowns that had to be taken from the pillow-slip in which they were
brought over, and shaken by some strong hand till they snapped like ox-whips? What
about the tub of water which had to be brought and set in the middle of the floor, in which
the little tired, dusty, sun-browned feet had every one to be washed sweet and clean? And
it made Marcline and Marclette laugh merrily -- the idea that Mamzelle Aurlie should for
a moment have believed that Ti Nomme could fall asleep without being told the story of
Croque-mitaine or Loup-garou, or both; or that lodie could fall asleep at all without being
rocked and sung to.
"I tell you, Aunt Ruby," Mamzelle Aurlie informed her cook in confidence; "me, I'd
rather manage a dozen plantation' than fo' chil'ren. It's terrassent! Bont! don't talk to me
about chil'ren!"
"T ain' ispected sich as you would know airy thing 'bout 'em, Mamzelle Aurlie. I see
dat plainly yistiddy w'en I spy dat li'le chile playin' wid yo' baskit o' keys. You don' know
dat makes chillun grow up hard-headed, to play wid keys? Des like it make 'em teeth hard
to look in a lookin'-glass. Them's the things you got to know in the raisin' an' manigement
o' chillun."
Mamzelle Aurlie certainly did not pretend or aspire to such subtle and far-reaching
knowledge on the subject as Aunt Ruby possessed, who had "raised five an' buried six" in
her day. She was glad enough to learn a few little mother-tricks to serve the moment's
need.
Ti Nomme's sticky fingers compelled her to unearth white aprons that she had not
worn for years, and she had to accustom herself to his moist kisses -- the expressions of
an affectionate and exuberant nature. She got down her sewing-basket, which she seldom
used, from the top shelf of the armoire, and placed it within the ready and easy reach
which torn slips and buttonless waists demanded. It took her some days to become
accustomed to the laughing, the crying, the chattering that echoed through the house and
around it all day long. And it was not the first or the second night that she could sleep
comfortably with little Lodie's hot, plump body pressed close against her, and the little
one's warm breath beating her cheek like the fanning of a bird's wing.

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But at the end of two weeks Mamzelle Aurlie had grown quite used to these things,
and she no longer complained.
It was also at the end of two weeks that Mamzelle Aurlie, one evening, looking away
toward the crib where the cattle were being fed, saw Valsin's blue cart turning the bend of
the road. Odile sat beside the mulatto, upright and alert. As they drew near, the young
woman's beaming face indicated that her home-coming was a happy one.
But this coming, unannounced and unexpected, threw Mamzelle Aurlie into a flutter
that was almost agitation. The children had to be gathered. Where was Ti Nomme?
Yonder in the shed, putting an edge on his knife at the grindstone. And Marcline and
Marclette? Cutting and fashioning doll-rags in the corner of the gallery. As for Lodie, she
was safe enough in Mamzelle Aurlie's arms; and she had screamed with delight at sight of
the familiar blue cart which was bringing her mother back to her.
THE excitement was all over, and they were gone. How still it was when they were
gone! Mamzelle Aurlie stood upon the gallery, looking and listening. She could no longer
see the cart; the red sunset and the blue-gray twilight had together flung a purple mist
across the fields and road that hid it from her view. She could no longer hear the wheezing
and creaking of its wheels. But she could still faintly hear the shrill, glad voices of the
children.
She turned into the house. There was much work awaiting her, for the children had
left a sad disorder behind them; but she did not at once set about the task of righting it.
Mamzelle Aurlie seated herself beside the table. She gave one slow glance through the
room, into which the evening shadows were creeping and deepening around her solitary
figure. She let her head fall down upon her bended arm, and began to cry. Oh, but she
cried! Not softly, as women often do. She cried like a man, with sobs that seemed to tear
her very soul. She did not notice Ponto licking her hand.

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7.
I Stand Here Ironing
by Tillie Olsen (1912-2007)
I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the
iron.
I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter. Im
sure you can help me understand her. Shes a youngster who needs help and whom Im
deeply interested in helping.
Who needs help,Even if I came, what good would it do? You think because I am her
mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for
nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me.
And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start
and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again. Or I will
become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot
be helped.
She was a beautiful baby. The first and only one if our five that was beautiful at birth. You
do not guess how new and uneasy her tenancy in her now-loveiiness. You did not know
her all those years she was thought homely, or see her poring over her baby pictures,
making me tell her over and over how beautiful she had been and would be, I would tell
her and was now, to the seeing eye.
But the seeing eyes were few or
nonexistent. Including mine.
I nursed her. They feel thats important nowadays. I nursed all the children, but with her,
with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, I did like the books then said. Through her
cries battered me to trembling and my breasts ached with swollenness. I waited till the
clock decreed.
Why do I put that first? I do not even know if it matters, or if it explains anything.
She was a beautiful baby. She blew shining bubbles of sound. She loved motion, loved
light, loved color and music and textures. She would lie on the floor in her blue overalls
patting the surface so hard in ecstasy her hands and feet would blur. She was a miracle
to me, but when she was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes with the woman
downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all, for I worked or looked for work and for
Emilys father, who could no longer endure (he wrote in his good-bye note) sharing
want with us.
I was nineteen. It was the pre-relief, pre WPA world of the depression. I would start
running as soon as I got off the streetcar, running up the stairs, the place smelling sour,

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and awake or asleep to startle awake, when she saw me she would break into a clogged
weeping that could not be comforted, a weeping I can hear yet.
After a while I found a job hashing at night so I could be with her days, and it was
better. But I came to where I had to bring her to family and leave her.
It took a long time to raise the money for her fare back. Then she got chicken pox and I
had to wait longer. When she finally came, I hardly knew her, walking quick and nervous
like her father, looking like her father, thin, and dressed a shoddy red that yellowed her
skin and giared at the pockmarks. All the baby loveliness gone.
She was two. Old enough for nursery school they said, and I did not know then what I did
now the fatigue of the long day, and the lacerations of group life in the kinds of nurseries
that are only parking places for children.
Except that it would have made no difference if I had known. It was the only place there
was. It was the only way we could be together, the only way I could hold a job.
And even without knowing, I knew. I knew the teacher that was evil because all these
years it has curdled into my memory, the little boy hunched in the corner, her rasp, why
arent you outside, because Alvin hits you? thats no reason. go out. scaredy. I knew
Emily hated it even if she did not clutch and implore dont go Mommy like the other
children, mornings.
She always had a reason why we should stay home. Momma, you look sick. Momma, I
feel sick. Momma, the teachers arent there today, theyre sick. Momma, we cant go,
there was a fire there last night. Momma, its a holiday today, no school, they told me.
But never a direct protest, never rebellion. I think of our others in their three-four-yearoldness the explosions, the tempers, the denunciations, the demands and I feel
suddenly ill. I put down the iron. What in me demanded that goodness in her? And what
was the cost, the cost of her such goodness?
The old man living in the back once said in his gentle way: You should smile more at
Emily when you look at her. What was in my face when I looked at her? I loved
her. There were all the acts of love.
It was only with the others I remembered what he said, and it was the face of joy, and not
of care or tightness or worry I turned to too late for Emily. She does not smile easily,
let alone almost always as her brothers and sisters do. Her face is closed and sombre, but
when she wants, how fluid. You must have seen it in her pantomimes, you spoke of her
rare gift for comedy on the stage that rouses laughter out of the audience so dear they
applaud and applaud and do not want to let her go.
Where does it come from, that comedy? There was none of it in her when she came back
to me that second time, after I had had to send her away again. She had a new daddy now
to learn to love, and I think perhaps it was a better time.

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Except when we left her alone nights, telling ourselves she was old enough.
Cant you go some other time, Mommy, like tomorrow? she would ask, Will it be just a
little while youll be gone? Do you promise?
The time we came back, the front door open, the clock on the floor in the hall. She rigid
awake. It wasnt just a little while. I didnt cry. Three times I called you, just three times,
and then I ran downstairs to open the door so you could come faster. The clock talked
loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.
She said the clock talked loud again that night I went to the hospital to have Susan. She
was delirious with the fever that comes before red measles, but she was fully conscious all
the week I was gone and the week after we were home when she could not come near the
new baby or me.
She did not get well. She stayed skeleton thin, not wanting to eat, and night after night
she had nightmares. She would call for me, and I would rouse from exhaustion to sleepily
call back: Youre all right, darling, go to sleep, its just a dream, and if she still called, in
a sterner voice, now go to sleep, Emily, theres nothing to hurt you. Twice, only twice,
when I had to get up for Susan anyhow, I went in to sit with her.
Now when it is too late (as if she would let me hold and comfort her like I do the others) I
get up and go to her at once at her moan or restless stirring. "Are you awake, Emily? Can
I get you something?" And the answer is always the same: "No, I'm all right, go back to
sleep, Mother."
They persuaded ma at the clinic to send her away to a convalescent home in the country
where "she can have the kind of food and care you can't manage for her, and you'll be free
to concentrate on the new baby." They still send children to that place. I see pictures on
the society page of sleek young women planning affairs to raise money for it, or dancing
at the affairs, or decorating Easter eggs or filling Christmas stockings for the children.
They never have a picture of the children so I do not know if the girls still wear those
gigantic red bows and the ravaged looks on every other Sunday when parents can come
to visit "unless otherwise notified" - as we were notified the first six weeks.
Oh it is a handsome place, green lawns and tall trees and fluted flower beds. High up on
the balconies of each cottage the children stand, the girls in their red bows and white
dresses, the boys in white suits and giant red ties. The parents stand below shrieking up
to be heard and the children shriek down to be heard, and between them the invisible
wall: "Not to Be Contaminated by Parental Germs or Physical Affection."
There was a tiny girl who always stood hand in hand with Emily. Her parents never
came. One visit she was gone. "They mover her to Rose Cottage," Emily shouted in
explanation. "They don't like you to love anybody here."

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She wrote once a week, the labored writing of a seven-year-old. "I am fine. How is the
baby. If I write my letter nicely I will have a star. Love." There was never a star. We
wrote every other day, letters she could never hold or keep but only hear read - once. "We
simply do not have room for children to keep any personal possessions," they patiently
explained when we pieced one Sunday's shrieking together to plead how much it would
mean to Emily, who loved to keep things, to be allowed to keep her letters and cards.
Each visit she looked frailer. "She isn't eating," they told us.
(They had runny eggs for breakfast or mush with lumps, Emily said later, I'd hold it in my
mouth and not swallow. Nothing ever tasted good, just when they had chicken.)
It took us eight months to get her released home, and the fact that she gained back so little
of her seven lost pounds convinced the social worker.
I used to try to hold and love her after she came back, but her body would stay stiff, and
after a while she'd push away. She ate little. Food sickened her, and I think much of life
too. Oh she had physical lightness and brightness, twinkling by on skates, bouncing like
a ball up and down up and down over the jump rope, skimming over the hill; but these
were momentary.
She fretted about her appearance, thin and dark and foreign-looking at a time when every
little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a chubby blond replica of
Shirley Temple. The doorbell sometimes rang for her, but no one seemed to come and
play in the house or be a best friend. Maybe because we moved so much.
There was a boy she loved painfully through two school semesters. Months later she told
me how she had taken pennies from my purse to buy him candy. "Licorice was his favorite
and I bought him some every day, but he still liked Jennifer better'n me. Why,
Mommy? The kind of question for which there is no answer.
School was a worry to her. She was not glib or quick in a world where glibness and
quickness were easily confused with ability to learn. To her overworked and exasperated
teachers she was an overconscientious "slow learner" who kept trying to catch up and was
absent entirely too often.
I let her be absent, though sometimes the illness was imaginary. How different from my
now-strictness about attendance with the others. I wasn't working. We had a new baby,
I was home anyhow. Sometimes, after Susan grew old enough, I would keep her home
from school, too, to have them all together.
Mostly Emily had asthma, and her breathing, harsh and labored, would fill the house with
a curiously tranquil sound. I would bring the two old dresser mirrors and her boxes of
collections to her bed. She would select beads and single earrings, bottle tops and shells,
dried flowers and pebbles, old postcards and scraps, all sorts of oddments; then she and
Susan would play Kingdom, setting up landscapes and furniture, peopling them with
action.

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Those were the only times of peaceful companionship between her and Susan. I have
edged away from it, that poisonous feeling between them, that terrible balancing of hurts
and needs I had to do between the two, and did so badly, those earlier years.
Oh there are conflicts between the others too, each one human, needing, demanding,
hurting, taking - but only between Emily and Susan, no, Emily toward Susan that was
corroding resentment. It seems so obvious on the surface, yet it was not obvious. Susan,
the second child, Susan, golden and curly-haired and chubby, quick and articulate and
assured, everything in appearance and manner Emily was not; Susan, not able to resist
Emily's precious things, losing or sometimes clumsily breaking them; Susan telling jokes
and riddles to company for applause while Emily sat silent (to say to me later: that was
my riddle, Mother, I told it to Susan); Susan, who for all the five years' difference in age
was just a year behind Emily in developing physically.
I am glad for that slow physical development that widened the difference between her and
her contemporaries, though she suffered over it. She was too vulnerable for that terrible
world of youthful competition, of preening and parading, of constant measuring of
yourself against every other, of envy, "If I had that copper hair," "If I had that skin" She
tormented herself enough about not looking like the others, there was enough of the
unsureness, the having to be conscious of words before you speak, the constant caring what are they thinking of me? without having it all magnified by the merciless physical
drives.
Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him. It is rare there is such a cry now. That
time of motherhood is almost behind me when the ear is not one's own but must always
be racked and listening for the child cry, the child call. We sit for a while and I hold him,
looking out over the city spread in charcoal with its soft aisles of light. "Shoogily," he
breathes and curls closer. I carry him back to bed, asleep. Shoogily. A funny word, a
family word, inherited from Emily, invented by her to say: comfort.
In this and other ways she leaves her seal, I would say aloud. And startle at my saying
it. What do I mean? What did I start to gather together, to try and make coherent? I was
at the terrible, growing years. War years. I do not remember them well. I was working,
there were four smaller ones now, there was not time for her. She had to help be a mother,
and housekeeper, and shopper. She had to set her seal. Mornings of crisis and near
hysteria trying to get lunches packed, hair combed, coats and shoes found, everyone to
school or Child Care on time, the baby ready for transportation. And always the paper
scribbled on by a smaller one, the book looked at by Susan then mislaid, the homework
not done. Running out to that huge school where she was one, she was lost, she was a
drop; suffering over the unpreparedness, stammering and unsure in her classes.
There was so little time left at night after the kids were bedded down. She would struggle
over books, always eating (it was in those years she developed her enormous appetite that
is legendary in our family) and I would be ironing, or preparing food for the next day, or
writing V-mail to Bill, or tending the baby. Sometimes, to make me laugh, or out of her
despair, she would imitate happenings at school.

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I think I said once: "Why don't you do something like this in the school amateur
show?" One morning she phoned me at work, hardly understandable through the
weeping: "Mother, I did it. I won, I won; they gave me first prize; they clapped and
clapped and wouldn't let me go."
Now suddenly she was Somebody, and as imprisoned in her difference as she had been in
anonymity.
She began to be asked to perform at other high schools, even colleges, than at city and
statewide affairs. The first one we went to, I only recognized her that first moment when
thin, shy, she almost drowned herself into the curtains. Then: Was this Emily? The
control, the command, the convulsing and deadly clowning, the spell, then the roaring,
the stamping audience, unwilling to let this rare and precious laughter out of their lives.
Afterwards: You ought to do something about her with a gift like that - but without money
or knowing how, what does one do? We have left it all to her, and the gift has often eddied
inside, clogged and clotted, as been used and growing.
She is coming. She runs up the stairs two at a time with her light graceful step, and I know
she is happy tonight. Whatever it was that occasioned your call did not happen today.
"Aren't you ever going to finish ironing, Mother? Whistler painted his mother in a
rocker. I'd have to paint mine standing over an ironing board." This is one of her
communicative nights and she tells me everything and nothing as she fixes herself a plate
of food out of the icebox.
She is so lovely. Why did you want to come up at all? Why were you concerned? She will
find her way.
She starts up the stairs to bed. "Don't get me up with the rest in the morning." "But I
thought you were having midterms." "Oh, those," she comes back in, kisses me, and says
quite lightly, "in a couple of years when we'll all be atom-dead they won't matter a bit."
She has said it before. She believes it. But because I have been dredging the past, and all
that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me, I cannot endure it
tonight.
I will never total it all. I will never come to say: She was a child seldom smiled at. Her
father left me before she was a year old. I had to work her first six years when there was
work, or I sent her home and to his relatives. There were tears she had care she hated. She
was dark and thin and foreign-looking in a world where the prestige went to blondness
and curly hair and dimples, she was slow where glibness was prized. She was a child of
anxious, not proud, love. We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy
growth. I was a young mother, I was a distracted mother. There were other children
pushing up, demanding. Her younger sister seemed all that she was not. There were
years she did not want me to touch her. She kept too much in herself, her life was such

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she had to keep too much in herself. My wisdom came too late. She has much to her and
probably little will come of it. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear.
Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom - but in how many does it? There is still
enough left to live by. Only help her to know - help make it so there is cause for her to
know - that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.

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8.
A Pink Carnation for Breakfast
Paul Majkut (from Necessity and Other Tales, Nyx Press, 2014)
Alice Smartley was distraught when she retrieved the pink carnation from her doorstep
on an overcast Saturday late in February. She touched the fleshy, convoluted flower with
her long, pale fingers, and shuttered, uncertain whether it was the nip in the air or
something else that pressed on her. There were a number of reasons for her discomfort,
the greatest among them physical. She was hungry.
The pink carnations, mementos, she presumed, of past romance, had appeared at her
door every Saturday, bleak or bright, for longer than she could date. It bothered her that
she did not know who sent them, but this annoyance was not the only reason that worried
her. For years, she had received them as her due, at first barely noticing them, then
thinking them a quaint affection. Until recently, she had been too preoccupied with
current affairs to put the flowers in a vase with water, but laid them carelessly on a table
to be discovered the next day, withered and limp. Just as usual, she tossed them in the
trash, saying aloud in an absent-minded whisper, How sweet, before preparing herself
for the trysts and conquests of the day, whether gloomy or glorious.
Over the years that the pink carnation had been arriving, it is not surprising that Alice
Smartley aged, although such knowledge is generally not something possessed by women
like Alice, who learn neither from personal trials nor the anguish of others. Like the
flowers she indifferently received and haphazardly discarded, she threw youthful years
aside without a second thought, assuming that more were to come and more were her
due, and that each day of her unreeling life would be as fresh as a newly-cut flower in the
morning. Much later, she was indignant to learn that the glory of cut flowers has a short
life span. By the time that knowledge descended on her like a sudden summer shower,
she was already hungry, and it was hunger that made her think.
Alices stomach growled like the engine of an old car refusing to start. She asked
herself, in an audible whisper, for whispers, signs and moans were the stage directions
she had written for herself, I wonder who could be sending these pink carnations all
these years? A former lover, surely, but who?
It was not romance that irretrievably pushed Alice into asking herself the question. It
was her empty stomach. The slender body that in her youth was supple was sinewy and
stretched by the time she was forty. What had been a face of sharp attraction whose smile
required only a few shapeless words on occasion to whet the liquid desire of aspiring
beaux grew into the taut mask of a second-rate cosmetic artist that crackled with brittle
clichs.
At first, Alice ate little to maintain her slim lines, a picky eater as casual to regular
meals as a boa constrictor. Later, when she found herself without a job, no saleable
talents or skills other than the transitory charms she received from her parents and the
wiles she had acquired through human confrontation, and no lovers who could support
her for more than a few days, even a night, the food that she had before assumed a
birthright to pitch in the trash wasnt on the table.

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Alice expected the needs of her life to fall in place without asking. When they didnt,
she was disturbed. She was not a whore to ask lovers for money. She was accustomed to
men giving her money, insisting that she take their offerings.
Livelihood was given to her without asking and she expected no less.
Who is leaving these pink carnations on my doorstep? Alice whispered on that
overcast February Saturday. Silently, she continued, I really must remember. Im so
hungry. Im sure this devoted lover will come to my aid now. I really do need him.
Alice had little to go on. Her memory was over-populated with men with no facesor
purposely defaced beyond recognition. In that world, there were only men without faces.
Blurred faces in a busy train station.
These days, flowers came once a week with greater regularity than gentlemen, not one
who had called in months.
In her small, rented room, Alice placed the pink carnation in an empty pickle jar and
placed the jar in the middle of an empty, chrome-dinette table, sat, and looked at it for
clues. She unfolded the card that had been attached to the flower and read the same note
that echoed through the years. To Bloom. Love, the Gardener.
With all the effort that a mind more starved for thought than her body was for food,
Alice Smartley concentrated. She squinted at the flower, as though slit eyes could see
better into the past. Perhaps they could. She sat at the table for hours, exhausted from
hunger, determined to remember.
Yes, there was that timewhen was it?when I was seeing gentlemen who visited
art galleries. My skin was so pale, so white that they began to give me pink carnations
and call me Bloom. Yes, undoubtedly thats it. It must be one of those gentlemen!
Alice rushed over to a small desk under the sole window of her frayed, one-room
apartment furnished with second-hand furniture. In a bottom drawer, she grabbed a pile
of fading love letters, photos, business cards, playbills and other paper memorabilia, and
took them to the table.
When evening arrived, Alice was delirious with yellowed memories and nagging
hunger. She had sorted through the pile and separated two photographs taken at the Les
Beaux Temps Art Gallery.
In the first photograph, she sat in a plush, wingback armchair with two men standing
on either side. The men were smiling and giddy, wine glasses raised in the direction of
the photographer. It was a Polaroid photo and had turned orange through the years. Alice
was as curious to see the photographer as she was about those in the picture. On the back
of the photo in blue, ballpoint lines that grew fuzzy on the paper like bacteria in a Petri
dish, she thought she made out To Bloom. The Gardener. The ink was indelible. Like
most things that cant be erased or forgotten, it was barely legible.
Alices stomach constricted with a quick spasm.
The second photograph had Alice in the same armchair. There was only one man in
the picture. He also extended a wine glass to the camera. The picture was also discolored.
Worse, Alice had years before nonchalantly used it as a doily for a coffee cup. A dark
portion of the ring it left eclipsed the mans face entirely. That must be the photographer
of the other photo, Alice figured. On the back, inscribed in an equally indelible hand
were the same words, To Bloom. The Gardener.
An ordinary person would imagine that Alice had opened the door of memory and
was on the threshold of entering the past. This wasnt so, for no sooner had the
photographs opened the past than they jostled open another cloudy memory. Each of

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these men had called Alice Bloom in the most intimate of times and she had called each
of them my gardener.
I was their pink carnation! They always called me that and I was that! A pink
carnation for my gardeners to pick! Alice cried in delight. She did not question, she did
not wonder, she did not bother to ask where yesterdays pink carnation was at the
moment. She merely seized the moment, even though that moment was a distant past
one. She allowed the empty past to become the plaything of the present. Still, she felt
hunger and that was not very playful.
Alice recalled how pleasant it had been to have her garden watered by so many skilled
craftsmen. In a rush of thought, she remembered the playful, cosmetic rhetoric of such
occasions, when nothing was referred to by its rightful name but only in extended
metaphor. Alice was not a person to blush and she did not when she vividly remembered
the anatomy of bloom and gardener. A flower is a bloom and I am a pink carnation! she
whispered dryly.
Which of my gardeners is still picking flowers for me? she wondered. Her stomach
demanded no less than wonder and quite a bit more. Fatigue set in and Alice fell asleep
at the table. She dreamt of the twisty intimacies of the past in pictorial details of Goyas
Maja, robed and disrobed. She saw hands, arms, chests, legs, and other parts of each
lover, but no faces.
When she woke up, it was mid-day on Sunday. She staggered to the sink in her room
and drank a little water. It exaggerated her hunger.
Who is he? she whispered through dehydrated lips.
Months before, when Alice decided that she needed to know the identity of the
gardener who brought her a flower every week, she determined to rise early on Saturday
and catch the delivery man, perhaps the gardener himself.
Early mornings had never been Alices habit and habits are the hunger that serves a
guppys fry to their mother. Alice simply did not know how to get out of bed to welcome
the sun.
There was a great deal that Alice wanted these days that she couldnt have, unlike the
days when she had so much that she didnt want.
Ill go to the church kitchen down the street. They must still be serving meals for the
homeless, Alice said to herself. She couldnt whisper.
She stumbled out of her room. At the front door of the building, she saw a neighbor
unloading shopping bags from the trunk of her car. Her child, buckled in a safety seat,
screamed. The woman was frazzled, strands of dishwater hair falling over her face, a bag
in one arm, calling out to the child.
One persons misfortune is anothers good fortune. Alice looked back at the half-open
door in the hallway behind her. She saw two large, paper bags of groceries.
It didnt take long for someone as hungry as Alice to know what to do, especially when
clear advice was loudly offered by her stomach. Alice staggered back to the bags as fast
as her weak, skinny legs allowed. She gathered a box of childrens cereal, a carton of milk,
and a package of sliced baloney in her arms.
In her room, she feasted until she threw up in the sink. Then ate again. Then slept
and dreamt of the gardeners tools and her flowerbed.
By Wednesday, she had eaten the cereal and baloney. By Thursday, she had finished
everything she had taken from the distracted mother. By mid-morning Saturday, when

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she woke, she was again starving and feeble. She walked slowly to her door to retrieve the
pink carnation.
This is horrible, simply awful, she was able to whisper to herself. What can be
worse than to have such a devoted lover for so long and not know who he is? What could
be worse? A pink carnation isnt enough!
She opened her door. The doorstep was bare.

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Addendum
The Raven
by Edgar Allan Poe
(published 1845)
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber doorOnly this, and nothing more."
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;- vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow- sorrow for the lost LenoreFor the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name LenoreNameless here for evermore.
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
"'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber doorSome late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;This it is, and nothing more."
Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,

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And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,

That I scarce was sure I heard you"- here I opened wide the door;Darkness there, and nothing more.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!"Merely this, and nothing more.
Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
"Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice:
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery exploreLet my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;'Tis the wind and nothing more!"
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber doorPerched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber doorPerched, and sat, and nothing more.
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore.
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shoreTell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

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Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,

Though its answer little meaning- little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber doorBird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as "Nevermore."
But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered- not a feather then he flutteredTill I scarcely more than muttered, "Other friends have flown beforeOn the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before."
Then the bird said, "Nevermore."
Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden boreTill the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of 'Never- nevermore'."
But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
Then upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yoreWhat this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking "Nevermore."
This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,

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But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!
Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee- by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite- respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchantedOn this home by Horror haunted- tell me truly, I imploreIs there- is there balm in Gilead?- tell me- tell me, I implore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us- by that God we both adoreTell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name LenoreClasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
"Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend," I shrieked, upstarting"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!- quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

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On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted- nevermore!