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-pleasureable, 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.