from "The Fall of the House of Usher"
by Edgar Allan Poe
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless 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
length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy 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 which th
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 revelle
upon opium-the bitter lapse into every-day life-the hideous dropping off of the veil.
Source: Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Fall of the House of Usher." The Fall of the House of Usher. Project Gutenberg,
June 1997. Web. 12 May 2011.
by Edgar Allan Poe
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless 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
length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy 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 which th
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 revelle
upon opium-the bitter lapse into every-day life-the hideous dropping off of the veil.
Source: Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Fall of the House of Usher." The Fall of the House of Usher. Project Gutenberg,
June 1997. Web. 12 May 2011.
