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Life's imitation.

Immortal emancipation.

The painter's stroke shackles time with a deep vignette to net,

the features of the subject subjected to the portrait's shade and shadow.

Hanging through the night, a canvas captures all the light,

and perhaps for that it seems to stir,

or at a glance at least to lure the viewer into focus.

In this story, love is framed forever out of reach.

Its bittersweet remains reminding within the Oval Portrait.

The Oval Portrait by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1842.

The chateau into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance,

rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the open air,

was one of those piles of co-mingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among the appanines, not less, in fact, than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe. To all appearance,

it had been temporarily and very lately abandoned. We established ourselves in one of the smallest and least sumptuously furnished apartments.

It lay in a remote turret of the building.

Its decorations were rich, yet tattered and antique.

Its walls were hung with tapestry and bedecked with manifold and multiform armorial trophies,

together with an unusually great number of very spirited modern paintings, in frames of rich,

golden, arabesque. In these paintings, which depended from the walls not only in their main surfaces, but in very many nooks which the bizarre architecture of the chateau rendered necessary, in these paintings, my incipient delirium, perhaps, had caused me to take deep interest so that I bade Pedro to close the heavy shutters of the room,

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