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 inorganisation. 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 grey
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'Indagine, and of De la Chambre; the _Journey into the Blue
Distance_ of Tieck; and the _City of the Sun_ of Campanella. One
favourite 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 AEgipans,
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 Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae_.

I could not help thinking of