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Upon my entrance, Usher rose from a sofa on which he had
been lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth
which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone
cordiality--of the constrained effort of the ennuye man of
the world. A glance, however, at his countenance, convinced me
of his perfect sincerity. We sat down; and for some moments,
while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity,
half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered,
in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It was with
difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the
wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet
the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A
cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous
beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a
surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model,
but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a
finely-moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a
want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and
tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the
regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not
easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the
prevailing character of these features, and of the expression
they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to
whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now
miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled and even
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