The Fall of the House of Usher Short story by Edgar Allan Poe
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EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (General) North American (US West Coast - California, Portland)Transcript
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The fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe 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 the view of the Menai 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 mir house and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacants eye, like windows, upon a few rank sedges and upon a few white trunks of decay trees with an utter depression of soul which I can't compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after dream of the reveler upon opium. The bitter lap of everyday life. The hideous dropping off of the veil, there was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed dre of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture to a 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 reigned my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tam that lay an unruffled lush stray by the dwelling and gazed down. But with the shudder even more thrilling than before upon the remodeled than inverted images of the gray sedge and the ghastly tree stems and the vacant eyelike windows.