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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.”
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. 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 improvisation 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.
16. 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 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.
17. 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.
18. 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.
In 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 winged 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.
V.
But 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 travellers now within that valley
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh--but smile no more.
19. 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 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.
20. 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 and 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 Inquisitorum_, 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 _Vigilæ Mortuorum secundum Chorum
Ecclesiæ Maguntinæ_.
21. I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of
its probable influence on 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.
22. 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.
23. 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.
24. 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.
25. 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.
26. I had taken but a 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,--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.
27. “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.
28. 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.
29. “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.”
30. 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 hearkened, to the words of the tale, I might
well have congratulated myself upon the success of my design.
31. 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:--