"edgar allen poe - fall of the house of usher (txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Poe Edgar Allan)

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 sulphureous lustre over all. His
long improvised dirges will ring for ever 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 vagueness 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 endeavour 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
canvas, 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 splendour.

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