these rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more
forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or
mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the
first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the
tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses, which
were entitled «The Haunted Palace,» ran very nearly, if not
accurately, thus:
I.
In the greenest of our valleys,
By good angels tenanted,
Once fair and stately palace —
Radiant palace —reared its head.
In the monarch Thought’s dominion —
It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair.
II.
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow;
(This —all this —was in the olden
Time long ago)
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A winged odour went away.
III.
Wanderers in that happy valley
Through two luminous windows saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute’s well-tuned law,
Round about a throne, where sitting
(Porphyrogene!)
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.
IV.
And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.
V.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch’s high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)
And, round about his home, the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.
VI.
And travellers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh —but smile no more.
I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad led us
into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of
Usher’s which I mention not so much on account of its novelty, (for
other men have thought thus,) as on account of the pertinacity with
which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of
the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy,
the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under
certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words
to express the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his
persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously
hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The
conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in
the method of collocation of these stones —in the order of their
arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread
them, and of the decayed trees which stood around —above all, in
the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its
reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its evidence —the
evidence of the sentience —was to be seen, he said, (and I here
started as he spoke,) in the gradual yet certain condensation of an
atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was
discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible
influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family,
and which made him what I now saw him —what he was. Such opinions
need no comment, and I will make none.
Our books —the books which, for years, had formed no small
portion of the mental existence of the invalid —were, as might be
supposed, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We
pored together over such works as the Ververt et Chartreuse of
Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of
Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg;
the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D’Indagine, and of De la
Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck; and the City
of the Sun of Campanella. One favourite volume was a small octavo
edition of the Directorium Inquisitorum, by the Dominican Eymeric de
Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old
African Satyrs and AEgipans, over which Usher would sit dreaming for
hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an
exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic —the manual of a
forgotten church —the Vigilae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae
Maguntinae.
I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of
its probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when, one evening,
having informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he
stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight,
(previously to its final interment,) in one of the numerous vaults
within the main walls of the building. The worldly reason, however,
assigned for this singular proceeding, was one which I did not feel at
liberty to dispute. The brother had been led to his resolution (so
he told me) by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of
the deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part
of her medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the
burial-ground of the family. I will not deny that when I called to
mind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met upon the
stair case, on the day of my arrival at the house, I had no desire
to oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no means
an unnatural, precaution.
At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the
arrangements for the temporary entombment. The body having been
encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we
placed it (and which had been so long unopened that our torches,
half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little
opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without
means of admission for light; lying, at great depth, immediately
beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping
apartment. It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for
the worst purposes of a donjon-keep, and, in later days, as a place of
deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a
portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through
which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. The door, of
massive iron, had been, also, similarly protected. Its immense
weight caused an unusually sharp grating sound, as it moved upon its
hinges.
Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this
region of horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of
the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking
similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my
attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out
some few words from which I learned that the deceased and himself
had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible
nature had always existed between them. Our glances, however, rested
not long upon the dead —for we could not regard her unawed. The
disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had
left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character,
the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that
suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in
death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and, having secured the
door of iron, made our way, with toll, into the scarcely less gloomy
apartments of the upper portion of the house.
And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable
change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His
ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were
neglected or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with
hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance
had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue —but the luminousness of
his eye had utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his
tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme
terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times,
indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was labouring
with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the
necessary courage. At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all
into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness, for I beheld him
gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the
profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was
no wonder that his condition terrified-that it infected me. I felt
creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences
of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.
It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the
seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within
the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings.
Sleep came not near my couch —while the hours waned and waned away. I
struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me.
I endeavoured to believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was due
to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room
—of the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by
the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the
walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my
efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremour gradually pervaded my
frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of
utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a
struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly
within the intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened —I know not
why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me —to certain low
and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm,
at long intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intense
sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on my
clothes with haste (for I felt that I should sleep no more during
the night), and endeavoured to arouse myself from the pitiable
condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and fro
through the apartment.
I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light step on an
adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognised it
as that of Usher. In an instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle
touch, at my door,
