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.1 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 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.2 1 Karl Maria, Baron von Weber (1786-1826), the celebrated German composer. 2 Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) born in Zurich as Heinrich 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 Fuessly, an artist of great power, and professor of painting at the Royal Academy in London. 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," 1 ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus: 1 These verses were first published in the Baltimore Museum for April, 1839. They rank among the best of Poe's poems, and fit their prose setting so well that, as Mr. Stedman has remarked, it might almost seem that the tale was written to set off the poem. Some critics have seen in the verses a symbolical description of the ravages wrought by drink in the poet's own char acter. Round about a throne, where sitting, In state his glory well befitting, 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.2 V. But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed. VI. And travellers now within that valley Through the red-litten 3 windows see To a discordant melody; While, like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door, A hideous throng rush out forever, 1 That is, born in the purple, of royal birth. 2 "When (like committed linnets) I With shriller throat shall sing And glories of my King." LOVELACE, To Althea from Prison. 3 Note the archaic, and so poetic, form of the participle. 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 1 Watson, Dr. Percival, Spallanzani, and especially the Bishop of Llandaff. See Chemical Essays, vol. v. [Of the authors mentioned by Poe, Richard Watson (1737-1816) was the celebrated Bishop of Llandaff, the liberal statesman, the opponent of Tom Paine, who early in life was made professor of chemistry at Cambridge, although he knew nothing of the subject, and succeeded in writing very popularly about the science; Dr. James Gates Percival (1795-1856) was an American poet and scientist of great versatility; and Lazaro Spallanzani (17291799) was a noted traveler, collector, teacher, and writer on many scientific subjects.] 2 That is, the mineral kingdom. |