Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really
knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and
habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been
noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament,
displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art,
and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent, yet
unobtrusive, charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the
intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily
recognizable beauties, of musical science. I had learned, too, the
very remarkable fact that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored
as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other
words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and
had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain.
It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought
the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the
accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the
possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries,
might have exercised upon the other--it was this deficiency, perhaps,
of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from
sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so
identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the
quaint and equivocal appellation of the _House of Usher_--an
appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who
used it, both the family and the family mansion.
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