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speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long
lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other--it was this
deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating
transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which
had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title
of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the "House
of Usher"--an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the
peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.
I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish
experiment--that of looking down within the tarn--had been to deepen the
first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness
of the rapid increase of my superstition--for why should I not so term
it?--served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have
long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a
basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again
uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there
grew in my mind a strange fancy--a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I
but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed
me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that
about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar
to themselves and their immediate vicinity--an atmosphere which had
no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the
decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn--a pestilent and
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