【英文原著类】Fall of the House of Usher(厄西亚房子的倒塌).pdf

The Fall of the House of Usher
The Fall of the House of
Usher
Edgar Allen Poe

1
The Fall of the House of Usher
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 view of the melancholy 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-pleasureable, 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 mere house, and the
simple landscape features of the domain--upon the bleak walls--upon the
vacant eye-like windows--upon a few rank sedges--and upon a few white
trunks of decayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can
compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of
the reveller upon opium--the bitter lapse into everyday life--the hideous
dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the
heart--an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the
imagination could torture into aught 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 binations 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 sce