During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, I had been passing alone on horseback through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself 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 looked upon the bleak walls, the vacant eye-like windows, and 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. I reined my horse to the brink of a black and lurid tarn, and gazed down at the inverted images of the grey sedge and the ghastly tree-stems. A letter had brought me here. Its writer was the companion of my boyhood, and he spoke of acute bodily illness and of a mental disorder which oppressed him.