conditions, an idea of existence, so little correspondent with the
ways and modes of this world--which we are apt to think the only
world, that the best choice I can make of word or phrase is but
an adumbration of what I would convey. I begin indeed to fear that
I have undertaken an impossibility, undertaken to tell what I
cannot tell because no speech at my command will fit the forms in
my mind. Already I have set down statements I would gladly change
did I know how to substitute a truer utterance; but as often as I
try to fit the reality with nearer words, I find myself in danger
of losing the things themselves, and feel like one in process of
awaking from a dream, with the thing that seemed familiar gradually
yet swiftly changing through a succession of forms until its very
nature is no longer recognisable.

I bethought me that a bird capable of addressing a man must have
the right of a man to a civil answer; perhaps, as a bird, even a
greater claim.

A tendency to croak caused a certain roughness in his speech, but
his voice was not disagreeable, and what he said, although conveying
little enlightenment, did not sound rude.

"I did not come through any door," I rejoined.

"I saw you come through it!--saw you with my own ancient eyes!"
asserted the raven, positively but not disrespectfully.

"I never saw any door!" I persisted.

"Of course not!" he returned; "all the doors you had yet seen--and