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 of poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible.