T F H

E A P

P : 1839
S : :// . .

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 Son cœur est un luth suspendu;
Sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne.
—DE BÉRANGER.

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 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 reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse
into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was
an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed
dreariness of thought which 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? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the
shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced
to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion that while, beyond
doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which
have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power
lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I
reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the
scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or
perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and,
acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a
black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by the dwelling, and
gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—
upon the remodeled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the
ghastly tree stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a
sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one
of my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed
since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a
distant part of the country—a letter from him—which, in its wildly
importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply.
The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of
acute bodily illness, of a mental disorder which oppressed him, and
of an earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only
personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my
society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all
this, and much more, was said—it was the apparent heart that went
with his request—which allowed me no room for hesitation; and I
accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular
summons.
Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I
really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always
excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient
family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of
temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of
exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent,
yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the
intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily
recognizable beauties, of musical science. I had learned, too, the
very remarkable fact that the stem of the Usher race, all time-
honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch;
in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent,
and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so
lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in
thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the
accredited character of the people, and while 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 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 mystic vapor,
dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.
Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I
scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal
feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The
discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the
whole exterior, hanging in a fine, tangled web-work from the eaves.
Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion
of the 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 reminded me of the specious totality of old woodwork which has
rotted for years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from
the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive
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 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 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 objects around me—while
the carvings of the ceilings, the somber tapestries of the walls, the
ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial
trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to
such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy—while I
hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this—I still
wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary
images were stirring up. On 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 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 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 more
prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to
reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses 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 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 inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a
series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual
trepidancy, an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this
nature I had indeed 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 vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a
tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in
abeyance) to that species of energetic concision—that abrupt,
weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation—that leaden,
self-balanced, and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may
be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium,
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 afford him.
He entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature
of his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and
one for which he despaired to find a remedy—a mere nervous
affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon
pass off. It displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of
these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although,
perhaps, the terms and the general manner of the narration had their
weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses.
The most insipid food was alone endurable; he could 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, 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 otherwise, 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 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, another 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 be 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.
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. “Her 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 cataleptical
character, were the unusual diagnosis. 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 inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating 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 living, would be seen by me no more.
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 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, 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, in one unceasing radiation of gloom.
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 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 sulphurous
luster over all. 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. 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 these paintings (vivid as their images now are before
me) I would in vain endeavor to deduce 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 splendor.
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, thus:—
IIn 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 wingèd odor went away.
 III
Wanderers in that happy valley
Through two luminous windows saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute’s well-tunèd law,
Round about a throne, where sitting
(Porphyrogene!)
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.
IV
And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.
VBut evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch’s high estate
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!);
And, round about his home, the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.
VI
And travelers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh—but smile no more.
I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad led us
into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of
Usher’s which I mention not so much on account of its novelty (for
other men too have thought thus) as on account of the pertinacity
with which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was
that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered
fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and
trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of
inorganization. I lack words to express the full extent or the earnest
abandon of his persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as I
have previously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his
forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he
imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones—in
the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi
which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood
around—above all, in the long-undisturbed endurance of this
arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its
evidence—the evidence of the sentience—was to be seen, he said
(and I here started as he spoke), in the gradual yet certain
condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and
the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet
importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had molded
the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him
—what he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make
none.
Our books—the books which, for years, had formed no small
portion of the mental existence of the invalid—were, as might be
supposed, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We
pored together over such works as the “Ververt et Chartreuse” of
Gresset; the “Belphegor” of Machiavelli; the “Heaven and Hell” of
Swedenborg; the “Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm” by
Holberg; the “Chiromancy” of Robert Flud, of Jean D’Indaginé, and
of De la Chambre; the “Journey into the Blue Distance” of Tieck; and
the “City of the Sun” of Campanella. One favorite volume was a
small octavo edition of the “Directorium Inquisitorium,” by the
Dominican Eymeric de Cironne; and there were passages in
Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and Ægipans, 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 “Vigiliæ
Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiæ Maguntinæ.”
I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its
probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when, one evening,
having informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he
stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight
(previously to its final interment) in one of the numerous vaults within
the main walls of the building. The worldly reason, however,
assigned for this singular proceeding, was one which I did not feel at
liberty to dispute. 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 men, and of the remote and exposed situation 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 unscrewed 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 terrified—that it infected me. I felt creeping upon
me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influence of his own
fantastic yet impressive superstitions.
It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the
seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within
the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep
came not near my couch, while the hours waned and waned away. I
struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over
me. I endeavored to believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was
due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room
—of the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by
the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the
walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my
efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my
frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of
utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I
uplifted myself upon the pillows, and peering earnestly within the
intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened—I know not why,
except that an instinctive spirit prompted me—to certain low and
indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at
long intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intense
sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on my
clothes with haste (for I felt that I should sleep no more during the
night), and endeavored to arouse myself from the pitiable condition
into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and fro through the
apartment.
I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light step on an
adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognized it as
that of Usher. In an instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle touch,
at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as
usual, cadaverously wan—but, moreover, there was a species of
mad hilarity in his eyes—and evidently restrained hysteria in his
whole demeanor. His air appalled me—but anything was preferable
to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed
his presence as a relief.
“And you have not seen it?” he said abruptly, after having stared
about him for some moments in silence—“you have not then seen it?
—but stay! you shall.” Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded
his lamp, he hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely
open to the storm.
The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our
feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and
one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had
apparently collected its force in our vicinity; for there were frequent
and violent alterations in the direction of the wind; and the exceeding
density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the turrets
of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the lifelike velocity with
which they flew careering from all points against each other, without
passing away into the distance. I say that even their exceeding
density did not prevent our perceiving this—yet we had no glimpse of
the moon or stars—nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning.
But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapor, as well
as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the
unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous
exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion.
“You must not—you shall not behold this!” said I, shudderingly, to
Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to a
seat. “These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical
phenomena not uncommon—or it may be that they have their
ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn. Let us close this
casement—the air is chilling and dangerous to your frame. Here is
one of your favorite romances. I will read and you shall listen; and so
we will pass away this terrible night together.”
The antique volume which I had taken up was the “Mad Trist” of
Sir Launcelot Canning; but I had called it a favorite of Usher’s more
in sad jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth
and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty
and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book
immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the
excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac, might find relief
(for the history of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies) even in
the extremeness of the folly which I should read. Could I have
judged, indeed, by the wild, overstrained air of vivacity with which he
hearkened, or apparently harkened, to the words of the tale, I might
well have congratulated myself upon the success of my design.
I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where
Ethelred, the hero of the “Trist,” having sought in vain for peaceable
admission into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an
entrance by force. Here, it will be remembered, the words of the
narrative run thus:—
“And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who
was now mighty withal, on account of the powerfulness of the wine
which he had drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the
hermit, who, in sooth, was of an obstinate and maliceful turn; but,
feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and fearing the rising of the
tempest, uplifted his mace outright, and, with blows, made quickly
room in the plankings of the door for his gauntleted hand; and now
pulling therewith sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore all
asunder, that the noise of the dry and hollow-sounding wood
alarummed and reverberated throughout the forest.”
At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment
paused; for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my
excited fancy had deceived me)—it appeared to me that, from some
very remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, to my
ears what might have been, in its exact similarity of character, the
echo (but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and
ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It
was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my
attention; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and
the ordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the
sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or
disturbed me. I continued the story:—
“But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door,
was soar enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful
hermit; but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious
demeanor, and of a fiery tongue, which sate in guard before a palace
of gold, with a floor of silver; and upon the wall there hung a shield of
shining brass with this legend enwritten:—
Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath been;
Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win.
And Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head of the
dragon, which fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a
shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had
fain to close his ears with his hands against the dreadful noise of it,
the like whereof was never before heard.”
Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild
amazement—for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this
instance, I did actually hear (although from what direction it
proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant,
but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound
—the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up
for the dragon’s unnatural shriek as described by the romancer.
Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of this second
and most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting
sensations, in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I
still retained sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any
observation, the sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by
no means certain that he had noticed the sounds in question;
although, assuredly, a strange alteration had, during the last few
minutes, taken place in his demeanor. From a position fronting my
own, he had gradually brought round his chair, so as to sit with his
face to the door of the chamber; and thus I could but partially
perceive his features, although I saw that his lips trembled as if he
were murmuring inaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast—
yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of
the eye as I caught a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body,
too, was at variance with this idea—for he rocked from side to side
with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken
notice of all this, I resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot, which thus
proceeded:—
“And now the champion, having escaped from the terrible fury of
the dragon, bethinking himself of the brazen shield, and of the
breaking up of the enchantment which was upon it, removed the
carcass from out of the way before him, and approached valorously
over the silver pavement of the castle to where the shield was upon
the wall; which in sooth tarried not for his full coming, but fell down at
his feet upon the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible ringing
sound.”
No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than—as if a shield
of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of
silver—I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic and clangorous,
yet apparently muffled reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped
to my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was
undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were
bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there
reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder,
there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile
quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried,
and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending
closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words.
“Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—long
—many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it—yet I
dared not—oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!—I dared not—I
dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that
my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble
movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago
—yet I dared not—I dared not speak! And now—to-night—Ethelred
—ha! ha!—the breaking of the hermit’s door, and the death-cry of the
dragon, and the clangor of the shield!—say, rather, the rending of her
coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her
struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh, whither shall
I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me
for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not
distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? Madman!”—
here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables,
as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—“Madman! I tell you that
she now stands without the door!”
As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been
found the potency of a spell—the huge antique panels to which the
speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous
and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then
without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure
of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white
robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of
her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and
reeling to and fro upon the threshold—then, with a low, moaning cry,
fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent
and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a
victim to the terrors he had anticipated.
From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The
storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the
old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I
turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the
vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance
was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone
vividly through that once barely discernible fissure, of which I have
before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag
direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened—
there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind—the entire orb of the
satellite burst at once upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the
mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting
sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank
tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the
“House of Usher.”

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