The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2 eBook

Nothing could be more rigorously simple than the furniture of the parlor.  On the floor was an ingrain carpet, of excellent texture —­ a white ground, spotted with small circular green figures.  At the windows were curtains of snowy white jaconet muslin:  they were tolerably full, and hung decisively, perhaps rather formally in sharp, parallel plaits to the floor —­ just to the floor.  The walls were prepared with a French paper of great delicacy, a silver ground, with a faint green cord running zig-zag throughout.  Its expanse was relieved merely by three of Julien’s exquisite lithographs a trois crayons, fastened to the wall without frames.  One of these drawings was a scene of Oriental luxury, or rather voluptuousness; another was a “carnival piece,” spirited beyond compare; the third was a Greek female head —­ a face so divinely beautiful, and yet of an expression so provokingly indeterminate, never before arrested my attention.

The more substantial furniture consisted of a round table, a few chairs (including a large rocking-chair), and a sofa, or rather “settee;” its material was plain maple painted a creamy white, slightly interstriped with green; the seat of cane.  The chairs and table were “to match,” but the forms of all had evidently been designed by the same brain which planned “the grounds;” it is impossible to conceive anything more graceful.

On the table were a few books, a large, square, crystal bottle of some novel perfume, a plain ground —­ glass astral (not solar) lamp with an Italian shade, and a large vase of resplendently-blooming flowers.  Flowers, indeed, of gorgeous colours and delicate odour formed the sole mere decoration of the apartment.  The fire-place was nearly filled with a vase of brilliant geranium.  On a triangular shelf in each angle of the room stood also a similar vase, varied only as to its lovely contents.  One or two smaller bouquets adorned the mantel, and late violets clustered about the open windows.

It is not the purpose of this work to do more than give in detail, a picture of Mr. Landor’s residence —­ as I found it.  How he made it what it was —­ and why —­ with some particulars of Mr. Landor himself —­ may, possibly form the subject of another article.

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WILLIAM WILSON

What say of it? what say of CONSCIENCE grim,
That spectre in my path?

Chamberlayne’s Pharronida.

LET me call myself, for the present, William Wilson.  The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation.  This has been already too much an object for the scorn —­ for the horror —­ for the detestation of my race.  To the uttermost regions of the globe have not the indignant winds bruited its unparalleled infamy?  Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned! —­ to the earth art thou not forever dead? to its honors, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations? —­ and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven?