Poe, Edgar Allen - The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe

by Volume 01-05 (lit)

  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.

  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-tunéd 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 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 * 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.

  * Watson, Dr. Percival, Spallanzani, and especially the Bishop

  of Landaff. - See "Chemical Essays," vol v.

  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 Œgipans, 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