During the whole of a dull, dark and soudless 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 lenght found myself, as the shade of the evening drew on, within view of
the melancholy of the 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-
pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with wich 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 undreemed drearness of
thought wich 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?
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 lenght found myself, as the shade of the evening drew on, within view of
the melancholy of the 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-
pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with wich 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 undreemed drearness of
thought wich 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?