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, 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.