Like the guest of Roderick Usher, as we
enter the house we fall immediately beneath the overmastering
sway of its irredeemable, insufferable gloom. The melancholy
building, Usher's wild musical improvisations, his vague but
awful paintings, his mystical reading and his eerie verses with
the last haunting stanza:
"And travellers now within that valley
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid, ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever
And laugh--but smile no more,"
are all in harmony with the fate that broods over the family of
Usher. Poe's gift for avoiding all impressions alien to his
effect lends to his tales extraordinary unity of tone and colour.
He leads up to his crisis with a gradual crescendo of emotion.
The climax, hideous and terrifying, relieves the intensity of our
feelings, and once it is past Poe rapidly hastens to the only
possible conclusion. The dreary house with its vacant, eye-like
windows reflected at the outset in the dark, unruffled tarn,
disappears for ever beneath its surface.
In _The Masque of the Red Death_ the imagery changes from moment
to moment, each scene standing out clear in colour and sharp in
outline; but from first to last the perspective of the whole is
kept steadily in view.
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