from "The Fall of the House of Usher"
by Edgar Allan Poe
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 th
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 revelle
upon opium-the bitter lapse into every-day life-the hideous dropping off of the veil.
Source: Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Fall of the House of Usher." The Fall of the House of Usher. Project Gutenberg,
June 1997. Web. 12 May 2011.