The Fall of the House of Usher

and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death.

I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.

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.

capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse

There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.

glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable

DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year,

Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win.

and which had been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation

when, one evening, having informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more,