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 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 there became manifest an opinion
      of Usher’s which I mention not so much on account of its novelty,
      (for other men * 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.