The Greatest Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Эдгар Аллан По

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 sulphurous 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 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 artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor.

      I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his performances. But the fervid facility of his impromptus could not be so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I have previously alluded as observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial excitement. The words of one of these rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled “The Haunted Palace,” ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus: —

       I.

      In the greenest of our valleys,

      By good angels tenanted,

      Once a fair and stately palace —

      Radiant palace — reared its head.

      In the monarch Thought’s dominion —

      It stood there!

      Never seraph spread a pinion

      Over fabric half so fair.

      II.

      Banners yellow, glorious, golden,

      On its roof did float and flow;

      (This — all this — was in the olden

      Time long ago)

      And every gentle air that dallied,

      In that sweet day,

      Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,

      A winged odor went away.

      III.

      Wanderers in that happy valley

      Through two luminous windows saw

      Spirits moving musically

      To a lute’s well-tunéd law,

      Round about a throne, where sitting

      (Porphyrogene!)

      In state his glory well befitting,

      The ruler of the realm was seen.

      IV.

      And all with pearl and ruby glowing

      Was the fair palace door,

      Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,

      And sparkling evermore,

      A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty

      Was but to sing,

      In voices of surpassing beauty,

      The wit and wisdom of their king.

      V.

       But evil things, in robes of sorrow,

      Assailed the monarch’s high estate;

      (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow

      Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)

      And, round about his home, the glory

      That blushed and bloomed

      Is but a dim-remembered story

      Of the old time entombed.

       VI.

      And travellers now within that valley,

      Through the red-litten windows, see

      Vast forms that move fantastically

      To a discordant melody;

      While, like a rapid ghastly river,

      Through the pale door,

      A hideous throng rush out forever,

      And laugh — but smile no more.

      I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad, led us into a train of thought wherein СКАЧАТЬ