"
Poe's greatest supernatural tale, _The Fall of the House of Usher_, should
be read in connection with this criticism. His initial sentence thus
indicates the atmosphere of the story:--
"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."
Each following stroke of the master's brush adds to the desired effect. The
black and lurid tarn, Roderick Usher with his mental disorder, his sister
Madeline, subject to trances, buried prematurely in a vault directly
underneath the guest's room, the midnight winds blowing from every
direction toward the House of Usher, the chance reading of a sentence from
an old and musty volume, telling of a mysterious noise, the hearing of a
muffled sound and the terrible suggestion of its cause,--all tend to
indicate and heighten the gloom of the final catastrophe.
In one of his great stories, which is not supernatural, _The Pit and the
Pendulum_, he desires to impress the reader with the horrors of medieval
punishment.
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