author’s mind seems struggling desperately and vainly with the awful mystery of Death.
In “Morella,” as in “Ligeia,” the parties are occupied with the same mystic philosophies—engrossed in the same recondite questions of “life and death and spiritual unity,” questions of “that identity which, at death, is, or is not, lost forever.” Each commemorates a psychal attraction which transcends the dissolution of the mortal body and oversweeps the grave; the passionate soul of the departed transfusing itself through the organism of another to manifest its deathless love. Who does not remember as a strain of Æonian melody the story of “Eleanora?” Who does not lapse into a dream as he remembers the “River of Silence” and “The Valley of the many-colored Grass”?
In this story the purport, though less apparent to the general reader, and differently interpreted by a writer in the “North American Review,” is still the same as in the preceding. Read the closing sentences, so eloquent with a tender and mysterious meaning, which record,
