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--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 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. What was
it--I paused to think--what was it that so unnerved me in the
contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble;
nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I
pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion
that while, beyond doubt, there _are_ combinations of very simple
natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the
analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth.
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