hin the tomb!--by a cry, at first muffled
and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into
one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman--a
howl--a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as
might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the
dammed in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation.

Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered to
the opposite wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained
motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen
stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already
greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of
the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye
of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder,
and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled
the monster up within the tomb!

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitot qu'on le touche il resonne..

_ De Beranger_.

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 pause