The works of Edgar Allan Poe; newly collected and edited, with a memoir, critical introductions, and notes, by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry; the illustrations by Albert Edward Sterner.

TALES OF CONSCIENCE

tient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge
of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge. To indulge
for a moment in any attempt at thought is to be
inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear,
and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. If there be
no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden
effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss,
we plunge, and are destroyed.
Examine these and similar actions as we will, we
shall find them resulting solely from the spirit of the
Perverse. We perpetrate them merely because we
feel that we should not. Beyond or behind this, there
is no intelligible principle; and we might, indeed,
deem this perverseness a direct instigation of the
Arch-Fiend, were it not occasionally known to operate
in furtherance of good.
I have said thus much, that in some measure I may
answer your question; that I may explain to you why
I am here; that I may assign to you something that
shall have at least the faint aspect of a cause for my
wearing these fetters, and for my tenanting this cell
of the condemned. Had I not been thus prolix, you
might either have misunderstood me altogether, or,
with the rabble, have fancied me mad. As it is, you
* will easily perceive that I am one of the many
uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse.
It is impossible that any deed could have been
wrought with a more thorough deliberation. For
weeks, for months, I pondered upon the means of the
murder. I rejected a thousand schemes, because their
accomplishment involved a chance of detection. At
length, in reading some Frendh memoirs, I found an
account of a nearly fatal illness that occurred to
Madame Pilau, through the agency of a candle acci38