The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher - Noyemi

By Edgar Allan Poe

other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular
perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of
Von Weber.  From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy
brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vagueness at which
I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not
why;--from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before
me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portion
which should lie within the compass of merely written words.  By
the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he
arrested and overawed attention.  If ever mortal painted an idea,
that mortal was 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 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 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 splendour.

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 the 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 rhymed 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, thus:


                            I.


               In the greenest of our valleys,

                 By good angels tenanted,

               Once a fair and stately palace--

                 Radiant palace--reared its head.

               In the monarch Thought's dominion--

                 It stood there!

               Never seraph spread a pinion

                 Over fabric half so fair.


                           II.


               Banners yellow, glorious, golden,

                 On its roof did float and flow;

               (This--all this--was in the olden

                 Time long ago) 

               And every gentle air that dallied,

                 In that sweet day,

               Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,

                 A winged odour went away.


                           III.


               Wanderers in that happy valley

                 Through two luminous windows saw

               Spirits moving musically

-4-

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