encircle and enshrine her loveliness, floated a pair of the most

delicately imagined wings. My glance fell from the painting to the

figure of my friend, and the vigorous words of Chapman's Bussy

D'Ambois, quivered instinctively upon my lips:

"He is up

There like a Roman statue! He will stand

Till Death hath made him marble!"

"Come," he said at length, turning towards a table of richly enamelled

and massive silver, upon which were a few goblets fantastically

stained, together with two large Etruscan vases, fashioned in the same

extraordinary model as that in the foreground of the portrait, and

filled with what I supposed to be Johannisberger. "Come," he said,

abruptly, "let us drink! It is early--but let us drink. It is indeed

early," he continued, musingly, as a cherub with a heavy golden hammer

made the apartment ring with the first hour after sunrise: "It is

indeed early--but what matters it? let us drink! Let us pour out an

offering to yon solemn sun which these gaudy lamps and censers are

so eager to subdue!" And, having made me pledge him in a bumper, he

swallowed in rapid succession several goblets of the wine.

To dream," he continued, resuming the tone of his desultory

conversation, as he held up to the rich light of a censer one of the

The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2