I shall
ever bear about me a memory of halloween costumes 2012 the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House of
Usher. Yet I shouldfail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact
character of thestudies, or of the occupations, in which he
involved me, or led me the way. An
excited and highly distempered ideality threw a
sulphureous lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring
forever in my ears.
Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a
certain singular perversion and amplification of
the wild air of the
last waltz of Von Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate
fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into
vaguenesses at
which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I
shuddered knowing
not why ; -
from these paintings (vivid as their images now are
before me) I would in vain endeavor to educe more
than a small
portion which should lie within the compass of
merely written words.
By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his
designs, he arrested
and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal
was Roderick Usher.
For me at least - in the circumstances then
surrounding me - there arose out of the pure
abstractions which the
hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvass,
an intensity of
intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet
in the
contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too
concrete reveries of
Fuseli.
One of
the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not
so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be
shadowed forth,
although feebly, in words. A small picture presented the interior of
an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel,
with low walls,
smooth, white, and without interruption or
device. Certain accessory
points of the design served well to convey the idea
that this
excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the
surface of the earth.
No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast
extent, and no
torch, or other artificial source of light was
discernible ; yet a
flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed
the whole in a
ghastly and inappropriate splendor.
I have
just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve
which rendered all music intolerable to the
sufferer, with the
exception of certain effects of stringed
instruments. It was,
perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus
confined himself upon the
guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the
fantastic
character of his performances. But the fervid
_facility_ of his
_impromptus_ could not be so accounted for. They must have been, and
were, in the notes, as well as in the words of his
wild fantasias
(for he not unfrequently accompanied himself with
rhymed verbal
improvisations), the result of that intense mental
collectedness and
concentration to which I have previously alluded as
observable only
in particular moments of the highest artificial
excitement. The words
of one of 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:
