in the next I met the glance of her meaning eyes, and then my soul sickened and 
became giddy with the giddiness of one who gazes downward into some dreary and 
unfathomable abyss.

Shall I then say that I longed with an earnest and consuming desire for the 
moment of Morella's decease? I did; but the fragile spirit clung to its tenement of clay 
for many days, for many weeks and irksome months, until my tortured nerves 
obtained the mastery over my mind, and I grew furious through delay, and, with the 
heart of a fiend, cursed the days and the hours and the bitter moments, which 
seemed to lengthen and lengthen as her gentle life declined, like shadows in the 
dying of the day.

But one autumnal evening, when the winds lay still in heaven, Morella called me 
to her bedside. There was a dim mist over all the earth, and a wann glow upon the 
waters, and amid the rich October leaves of the forest, a rainbow from the firmament 
had surely fallen.

"It is a day of days," she said, as I approached; "a day of all days either to live 
or die. It is a fair day f or the sons of earth and life~ah, more fair for the daughters of
heaven and death!"

I kissed her forehead, and she continued: 
"I am dying, yet shall I live."
"Morella! "
"The days have never been when thou couldst love me-but her whom ,in life thou 
didst abhor, in death thou shalt adore."

"Morella! "
"I repeat that I am dying. But within me is a pledge of that affection --ah, how little!-
which thou didst feel for me, Morella. And when my spirit departs shall the child live-thy 
child and mine, Morella's. But thy days shall be days of sorrow-that sorrow which is the 
most lasting of impressions, as the cypress is the most enduring of, trees. For the hours 
of thy happiness are over and joy is not gathered twice in a life, as the roses of 
Paestum twice in a year. Thou shalt no longer, then, play the Teian with time, but, 
being ignorant of the myrtle and the vine, thou shalt bear about with thee thy shroud 
on the earth, as do the Moslemin at Mecca." 

"Morella!" I cried, "Morella! how knowest thou this?" but she turned away 
her face upon the pillow and a slight tremor coming over her limbs, she thus died, and I 
heard her voice no more. 

Yet, as she had f oretold, her child, to which in dying she had given birth, which
breathed not until the mother breathed no more, her child, a daughter, lived. And she 
grew strangely in stature and intellect, and was the perfect resemblance of her who had 
departed, and I loved her with a love more fervent than I had believed it possible to
feel for any denizen of earth.

But, ere long the heaven of this pure affection became darkened, and gloom, and 
horror, and grief swept over it in clouds. I said the child grew strangely in stature and 
intelligence. Strange, indeed, was her rapid increase in bodily size, but terrible, oh! 
terrible were the tumultuous thoughts which crowded upon me while watching the
development of her mental being. Could it be otherwise, when I daily discovered in the 
conceptions of the child the adult powers and faculties of the woman?