The Fall of the House of Usher

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The Fall Of The House Of Usher
By
Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall Of The House Of Usher
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-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—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 every-
day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking,

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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. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different
arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would
be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful
impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous
brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and
gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the
remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems,
and the vacant and eye-like windows.
Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of
some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon
companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A
letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country—a letter
from him—which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other
than a personal reply. The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer
spoke of acute bodily illness—of a mental disorder which oppressed him—and
of an earnest desire to see me, as his best and indeed his only personal friend,
with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation
of his malady. It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said—
it was the apparent heart that went with his request—which allowed me no
room for hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered
a very singular summons.
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

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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.
I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment—that of
looking down within the tarn—had been to deepen the first singular
impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase
of my superstition—for why should I not so term it?—served mainly to
accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law
of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this
reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its
image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy—a fancy so
ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the
sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as
really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an
atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity—an
atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked
up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn—a pestilent
and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.
Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more
narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that
of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute
fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from
the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No
portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild
inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling
condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of
the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some
neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air.
Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token
of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered
a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in
front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in
the sullen waters of the tarn.
Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in

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waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. A valet,
of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and
intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master. Much that I
encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague
sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me—
while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon
blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which
rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been
accustomed from my infancy—while I hesitated not to acknowledge how
familiar was all this—I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies
which ordinary images were stirring up. On one of the staircases, I met the
physician of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled
expression of low cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation
and passed on. The valet now threw open a door and ushered me into the
presence of his master.
The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows
were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken
floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of
encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to
render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye,
however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the
recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls.
The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many
books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any
vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of
stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.
Upon my entrance, Usher rose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full
length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first
thought, of an overdone cordiality—of the constrained effort of
the ennuyé man of the world. A glance, however, at his countenance convinced
me of his perfect sincerity. We sat down; and for some moments, while he
spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely,
man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick
Usher! It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of
the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the
character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of
complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips
somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of
a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar
formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a
want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity;—

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these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple,
made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the
mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the
expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to
whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous
lustre of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair,
too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer
texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort,
connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.
In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence—an
inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile
struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy—an excessive nervous agitation.
For something of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter,
than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced
from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament. His action was
alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous
indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species
of energetic concision—that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding
enunciation—that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural
utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable
eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement.
It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest desire to see
me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He entered, at some
length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady. It was, he said, a
constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a
remedy—a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would
undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations.
Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although,
perhaps, the terms and the general manner of the narration had their weight.
He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid
food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the
odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint
light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments,
which did not inspire him with horror.
To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. “I shall
perish,” said he, “I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not
otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves,
but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial,
incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have,
indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect—in terror. In this

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unnerved, in this pitiable, condition I feel that the period will sooner or later
arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the
grim phantasm, FEAR.”
I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints,
another singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain
superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and
whence, for many years, he had never ventured forth—in regard to an
influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here
to be re-stated—an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and
substance of his family mansion had, by dint of long sufferance, he said,
obtained over his spirit—an effect which the physique of the gray walls and
turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length,
brought about upon the morale of his existence.
He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar
gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more
palpable origin—to the severe and long-continued illness—indeed to the
evidently approaching dissolution—of a tenderly beloved sister, his sole
companion for long years, his last and only relative on earth. “Her decease,”
he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, “would leave him (him the
hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers.” While he
spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed slowly through a
remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence,
disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with
dread; and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation
of stupor oppressed me as my eyes followed her retreating steps. When a door,
at length, closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the
countenance of the brother; but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could
only perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the
emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears.
The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians.
A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although
transient affections of a partially cataleptical character were the unusual
diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the pressure of her
malady, and had not betaken herself finally to bed; but on the closing in of the
evening of my arrival at the house, she succumbed (as her brother told me at
night with inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the destroyer;
and I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person would thus
probably be the last I should obtain—that the lady, at least while living, would
be seen by me no more.
For several days ensuing, her name was unmentioned by either Usher or

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myself; and during this period I was busied in earnest endeavors to alleviate
the melancholy of my friend. We painted and read together, or I listened, as if
in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a
closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the
recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt
at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality,
poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe in one
unceasing radiation of gloom.
I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent
alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any attempt to
convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, 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 vagueness 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 canvas, 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

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the fantastic character of the 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:—
I.
In the greenest of our valleys,
By good angels tenanted,
Once a 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 odor went away.
III.

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Wanderers in that happy valley
Through two luminous windows saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute’s well-tunèd 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

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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’Indaginé,
and of De la Chambre; the “Journey into the Blue Distance” of Tieck; and the
“City of the Sun” of Campanella. One favorite volume was a small octavo
edition of the “Directorium Inquisitorium,” by the Dominican Eymeric de
Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African
Satyrs and Œgipans, 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 Vigiliæ

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