Am Lit

Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood

I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual

his very ancient family

he very remarkable fact that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain.

the family and the family mansion

Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine, tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones.

man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher

His action was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic concision—that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation—that leaden, self-balanced, and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement.

He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses. The most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.

much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin—to the severe and long-continued illness—indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution—of a tenderly beloved sister, his sole companion for long years, his last and only relative on earth. “Her decease,” he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, “would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers.”

she succumbed (as her brother told me at night with inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the destroyer

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.

The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death.

The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance.

the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described

We have put her living in the tomb!

For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold—then, with a low, moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.

While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened—there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind—the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the “House of Usher.”

Edgar Allan Poe

more.'

lost Lenore

silken sad uncertain rustling

Pallas

Plutonian

Nevermore

Nevermore

grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt

Nevermore

Nevermore

Nevermore

Nevermore

`Doubtless,' said I, `what it utters is its only stock and store, Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore

midnight

December

nevermore

flirt and flutter

dirges

ghost

flown

angels

dying ember

grave

Slaves unworthy to be freed?

For your sisters now in chains

No! true freedom is to share All the chains our brothers wear, And, with heart and hand, to be Earnest to make others free!

They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three.

voice—Yet

various language

To be a brother to the insensible rock,  And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain  Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak  Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.

Yet not to thine eternal resting-place  Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish  Couch more magnificent.

William Cullen Bryant

By those, who in their turn shall follow them.    

So live

The hills

And millions in those solitudes

what if thou withdraw  In silence from the living, and no friend  Take note of thy departure