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[41] I 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 Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiæ Maguntinæ_.