Yet I have often seen her in my spectral illusions, young and beautiful as ever, but always under circumstances which formed a wide contrast between her spectral appearance and all my recollections of the real person.

The spectral face, which I often saw looking in upon me, in my study, when the door was ajar, and visible only in the uncertain lamplight, or peering over me in the moonlight solitude of my bed-chamber, when I was just waking from sleep, was uniformly subject to, and expressive of, some terrible hate, or yet more terrible anguish.
Its first appearance was startling in the extreme.

It was the face of one of the fabled furies: the demon glared in the eye, the nostril was dilated, the pale lip compressed, and the brow bent and darkened; yet above all, and mingled with all, the supremacy of human beauty was manifest, as if the dream of Eastern superstition had been realized, and a fierce and foul spirit had sought out and animated into a fiendish existence some beautiful sleeper of the grave.

The other expression of the countenance of the apparition, that of agony, I accounted for on rational principles.

Some years ago I saw, and was deeply affected by, a series of paintings representing the tortures of a Jew in the Holy Inquisition; and the expression of pain in the countenance of the victim I at once recognized in that of the apparition, rendered yet more distressing by the feminine and beautiful features upon which it rested.
"I am not naturally superstitious; but, shaken and clouded as my mind had been by the use of opium, I could not wholly divest it of fear when these phantoms beset me.