How silent! to the beating of my heart
I listen'd, and nought else around me heard.
How stirless! even a waving gossamer--
The mazy motes that rise and fall in air--
Had been as signs of life; when, suddenly,
As bursts the thunder-peal upon the calm,
Whence I had come the clank of feet was heard--
A noise remote, which near'd and near'd, and near'd--
Even to the threshold of that room it came,
Where, with raised hands, spell-bound, I listening stood;
And the door opening stealthily, I beheld
The embodied figure of the phantom head,
Garb'd in the quaint robes of the portraiture--
A veritable fiend, a life in death!