The Fatal Bride

I am now an old man, and, what is perhaps less excusable, an old bachelor too; and yet, sir, I am not a bachelor of malice prepense -- I am no profane railer against wedlock. I would not, for my grandmother's enamel bonbonniere, which catches my eye this moment, nor for my honoured uncle's silver-mounted and inlaid steel barrels -- both of them family relics dear in their own several ways -- that your fair readers should set me down as guilty of premeditated and deliberate celibacy. No such thing. I have more than once narrowly escaped -- I should say missed -- the fate-matrimonial, and that by pure accident -- by no cowardice or perfidy of mine. No; my tendencies were all conjugal -- my blessedness, however, has been single; and so far am I from thanking my stars, or taking merit to myself for this state of things, that, sooth to say, even the seventy-and-five winters and summers that have bleached and baked me in succession, still find me, now and then, sighing over the tender recollections and bitter disappointments, which are now for me, the sad and only relics of the romance of early days.

But though I have had my passages of love, as well as those of the sterner passions, in my day; and though I sometimes take a whim to rummage among old trinkets, lockets, and likenesses, each of them to me a little history in itself, yet I would not have you suppose me a superannuated sentimentalist either. No, sir. I have my tender, and, jesting aside, my melancholy retrospections; but I have also my pleasant, and, even at this time of day, my exciting recollections, too. I would be almost ashamed to tell you how often it comes to pass, that, my solitary pint of old port finished, I find myself sunk in my comfortable, ancient, leathern chair, gazing between my knees into the clear red embers, between which and me are rising and floating, like mystic shapes from an enchanted cauldron, the forms and faces long lost to life, which have mingled in the mazes of early adventure; and some of whom have left upon my time-chilled heart, traces that eternity itself, mayhap, will fail to obliterate.