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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 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
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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
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