was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled ‘The Haunted Palace,’ ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus:—

I

In the greenest of our valleys,     By good angels tenanted, Once a fair and stately palace—     Radiant palace—reared its head. In the monarch Thought’s dominion—     It stood there! Never seraph spread a pinion     Over fabric half so fair.

II

Banners yellow, glorious, golden,     On its roof did float and flow (This—all this—was in the olden     Time long ago); And every gentle air that dallied,     In that sweet day, Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,     A winged odour went away.

III

Wanderers in that happy valley     Through two luminous windows saw Spirits moving musically     To a lute’s well-tunéd law, Round about a throne, where sitting     (Porphyrogene!) In state his glory well befitting,     The ruler of the realm was seen.

IV

And all with pearl and ruby glowing     Was the fair palace door, Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing     And sparkling evermore, A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty     Was but to sing, In voices of surpassing beauty,     The wit and wisdom of their king.

V

But evil things, in robes of sorrow,     Assailed the monarch’s high estate. (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow     Shall dawn upon him, desolate!) And, round about his home, the glory     That blushed and bloomed Is but a dim- remembered story     Of the old time entombed.

VI

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 for ever,     And laugh—but smile no more.

I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad led us into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher’s, which I mention not so much on account of its novelty (for other men have thought thus), as on account of the pertinacity with which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganisation. I lack words to express the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the grey 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. Its evidence—the evidence of the sentience—was to be seen, he said (and I here started as he spoke), in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies