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. {1}
"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 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 restated --
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. {2}
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. {3}
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 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.
