And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating, "'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door- Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;- This it is, and nothing more.

I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock.

I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.

This apartment, which you no doubt profanely suppose to be the shop of Will Wimble the undertaker --a man whom we know not, and whose plebeian appellation has never before this night thwarted our royal ears --this apartment, I say, is the Dais-Chamber of our Palace, devoted to the councils of our kingdom, and to other sacred and lofty purposes.

A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.

Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world_it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic _ a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation_our classic [American] literature is a literature of horror for boys