Edgar Allan Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher

0. The Fall of the House of Usher (continued)

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 the 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 odour went away.