masonry had fallen; and there appeared
to be a wild inconsistency between its
still perfect adaptation of parts and the
crumbling condition of the individual
stones. In this there was much that re-
minded me of the specious totality of old
wood-work which has rotted for long
years in some neglected vault, with no
disturbance from the breath of the ex-
ternal air. Beyond this indication of ex- 10
tensive decay, however, the fabric gave
little token of instability. Perhaps the
eye of a scrutinizing observer might have
discovered a barely perceptible fissure,
which, extending from the roof of the
building in front, made its way down the
wall in a zigzag direction, until it became
lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.

Noticing these things, I rode over a
short causeway to the house. A servant 20
in waiting took my horse, and I entered
the Gothic archway of the hall. A valet,
of stealthy step, thence conducted me in
silence through many dark and intricate
passages in my progress to the studio of 25
his master. Much that I encountered on
the way contributed, I know not how, to
heighten the vague sentiments of which
I have already spoken. While the ob-
jects around me while the carvings of 30
the ceiling, the somber tapestries of the
walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and
the phantasmagoric armorial trophies
which rattled as I strode, were but mat-
ters to which, or to such as which, I had 35
been accustomed from my infancy, while
I hesitated not to acknowledge how famil-
iar was all this, I still wondered to find
how unfamiliar were the fancies which
ordinary images were stirring up. On 40
one of the staircases I met the physician
of the family. His countenance, I
thought, wore a mingled expression of
low cunning and perplexity. He accosted
me with trepidation and passed on. The 45
valet now threw open a door and ushered
me into the presence of his master.

The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast 50 a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the 55 more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the re

5

cesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.

Upon my entrance, Usher arose 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 5 thought, of an overdone cordiality,- of the constrained effort of the ennuyé 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-molded 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 luster of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.

In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence, an in

5

consistency; and I soon found this to
arise from a series of feeble and futile
struggles to overcome an habitual trepi-
dancy, an excessive nervous agitation.
For something of this nature I had in-
deed been prepared, no less by his letter
than by reminiscences of certain boyish
traits, and by conclusions deduced from
his peculiar physical conformation and
temperament. His action was alternately 10
vivacious and sullen. His voice varied
rapidly from a tremulous indecision
(when the animal spirits seemed utterly
in abeyance) to that species of ener-
getic concision that abrupt, weighty, 15
unhurried, and hollow-sounding enun-
ciation, that leaden, self-balanced, and per-
fectly modulated guttural utterance-
which may be observed in the lost drunk-
ard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, 20
during the periods of his most intense
excitement.

It was thus that he spoke of the object
of my visit, of his earnest desire to see
me, and of the solace he expected me to 25
afford him. He entered at some length
into what he conceived to be the nature
of his malady. It was, he said, a consti-
tutional and a family evil, and one for
which he despaired to find a remedy,- 30
a mere nervous affection, he immediately
added, which would undoubtedly soon pass
off. It displayed itself in a host of un-
natural sensations. Some of these, as he
detailed them, interested and bewildered 35
me; although, perhaps, the terms and the
general manner of the narration had their
weight. He suffered much from a mor-
bid acuteness of the senses; the most in-
sipid food was alone endurable; he could 40
wear only garments of certain texture;
the odors of all flowers were oppressive;
his eyes were tortured by even a faint
light; and there were but peculiar sounds,
and these from stringed instruments, 45
which did not inspire him with horror.

To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. 'I shall perish,' said he, 'I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not other- 50 wise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable 55 agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect, in terror. In this unnerved, in

this pitiable condition, I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.'

I learned moreover at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints, an other singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence for many years he had never ventured forth, in regard to an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to he restated,— an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit; an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had at length brought about upon the morale of his existence.

Her

He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin, to the severe and long-continued illness, indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution, of a tenderly beloved sister, his sole companion for long years, his last and only relative on earth. decease,' he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget,' would leave him (him, the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers.' While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread, and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed her retreating steps. When a door, at length, closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the countenance of the brother; but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears.

The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away

of the person, and frequent although
transient affections of a partially catalep-
tical character, were the unusual diag-
nosis. Hitherto she had steadily borne
up against the pressure of her malady, and
had not betaken herself finally to bed;
but, on the closing-in of the evening of
my arrival at the house, she succumbed
(as her brother told me at night with in-
expressible agitation) to the prostrating 10
power of the destroyer; and I learned that
the glimpse I had obtained of her person
would thus probably be the last I should
obtain, that the lady, at least while liv-
ing, would be seen by me no more.

Roderick Usher. For me at least, in the circumstances then surrounding me, there arose, out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw 5 upon his canvas, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli.

One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth, although feebly, in words. A small picture presented the interior 15 of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light, was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor.

For several days ensuing, her name was unmentioned by either Usher or myself; and during this period I was busied in earnest endeavors to alleviate the melancholy of my friend. We painted and read 20 together; or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, 25 the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, 30 in one unceasing radiation of gloom.

I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer. with the exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his performances. But the fervid facility of his impromptus could not be so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the notes as well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompanied himself. with rimed verbal improvisations), the result of that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I have previously alluded as observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial excitement. The words of one of these rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed with it as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness, on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty. reason upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled 'The Haunted Palace,' ran very nearly, if not accurately,

I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any attempt 35 to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous luster over all. 40 His long, improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. 45 From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses at which I shuddered the more thrillingly because I shuddered knowing not why, from 50 these paintings (vivid as their images now are before me) I would in vain endeavor to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By the utter simplicity, 55 by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was thus:

Mela, about the old African Satyrs and Egipans, over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic,- the manual of a forgotten church, the Vigilia Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiæ Maguntina.

one

I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its probable in- 10 fluence on the hypochondriac, when one evening, having informed me abruptly that lady Madeline was no more, he stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight, (previously to its final inter- 15 ment) in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building. The worldly reason, however, assigned for this singular proceeding was which I did not feel at liberty to dispute. 20 The brother had been led to his resolution (so he told me) by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of the deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical 25 men, and of the remote and exposed sitnation of the burial-ground of the family. I will not deny that when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met upon the staircase, 30 on the day of my arrival at the house, I had no desire to oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no means an unnatural, precaution.

At the request of Usher, I personally 35 aided him in the arrangements for the temporary entombment. The body having been encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it (and which had been so long unopened 40 that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light; lying, at great depth, 45 immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment. It had been used apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep, and in later days 50 as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with 55 copper. The door, of massive iron, had been also similarly protected. Its immense weight caused an unusually sharp

grating sound as it moved upon its hinges.

Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region of horror, we partially turned aside the yet un.. 5 screwed lid of the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them. Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead, for we could not regard her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and having secured the door of iron, made our way, with toil, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of the house.

And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue, but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage. At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition terri