The raven addressed, answers with its customary word, Nevermore a word which finds immediate echo in the melancholy heart of the student, who giving utterance aloud to certain thoughts sested by the occasion, is again startled by the fowl s repetition of Nevermore. The student now guesses the state of the case, but is impelled, as I have before explained, by the human thirst for self-torture, and in part by superstition, to propound such queries to the bird as will bring him, the lover, the most of the luxury of sorrow, through the anticipated answer Never-more. With the indulgence, to the extreme, of this self-torture, the narration, in what I have termed its first or obvious phase, has a natural termination, and so far there has been no overstepping of the limits of the real.