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

torture into aught of the sublime. What was it--I paused to

think--what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of

the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I

grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I

pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory

conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations

The Fall of the House of Usher