s away from his being, and
that quiet sigh, which it has taken him so many years to
breathe, will be brought to a close for good and all."

The prominent characteristic may be the feeling aroused by the object.
It may be horror, as in a description of a haunted house or a
murderer; it may be love, as in the picture of an old home or a
sainted mother. The emotion occasioned is often mentioned or suggested
at once, and the details are afterward given which have called forth
the feeling. Poe uses this in the first paragraph of "The House of
Usher."

"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 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 a reveler upon opium--the bitter lapse into
every-day 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.... It
was, possible, I reflected, that a mere different
arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details
of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to
annihilate, its capacity for sorrowful impression; and,
acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous
brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre
by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a shudder even
more thrilling than before--upon the remodeled and inverte