University of Virginia Library

THE FALL
OF
THE HOUSE OF USHER.

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 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 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 lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but
with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled
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 recognisable 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—that
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 wood-work which has rotted for long 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
sombre 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 trellissed 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 moulded
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 lustre
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 re-stated—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 sulphureous lustre 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 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 canvass, 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 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 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[1] 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 moulded 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 Gironne; 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 Vigiliae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae
Maguntinae.

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 influences 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, harkened—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 recognised
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—an 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 life-like 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 harkened, 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 sore 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—

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 strug
gles 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 pannels 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.”