I've been spending a portion of my Thursday evenings, while Max takes gymnastics class, walking through historic Oak Hill cemetery. It's a lovely, gloomy place with craggy hillsides littered with monuments, plenty of gnarled and twisted trees which snatch up the fading daylight. Ah...
And then there's this:
While the Usher family of Poe's story entombed the dead in catacombs below the house, it's simply delightful to walk past a crumbling, in-earth vault inscribed with the name "Usher".
"The Fall of The House of Usher" is one of Poe's masterpieces. You can click on the text below to read the full story, should you wish. Have a wonderful Monday.
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-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 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.
