The Fall of the House of Usher


Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitot qu'on le touche il resonne.
DE BERANGER.




During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the
autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the
heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a
singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself,
as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the
melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was--but, with the
first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom
pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was
unrelieved by any of that half-pleasureable, because poetic,
sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest
natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the
scene before me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscape
features of the domain--upon the bleak walls--upon the vacant
eye-like windows--upon a few rank sedges--and upon a few white
trunks of decayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I
can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the
after-dream of the reveller upon opium--the bitter lapse into
everyday life--the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was
an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart--an unredeemed
dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could