Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/50

 30 comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all."

If Poe, the conscious artist, speaks in Usher's room, surely Poe, the man, the observer, the lover of beauty without strangeness, speaks in the description of the parlor of Landor's Cottage:

"Nothing could be more rigorously simple than the furniture of the parlour. On the floor was an ingrain carpet, of excellent texture—a white ground, spotted with small circular green figures. At the windows were curtains of snowy white jaconet muslin; they were tolerably full, and hung decisively, perhaps rather formally, in sharp parallel plaits to the floor. The walls were papered with a French paper of great delicacy—a silver ground, with a faint green cord running zigzag throughout. Its expanse was relieved merely by three of Julien's exquisite lithographs a trois crayons, fastened to the wall without frames. One of these drawings was a scene of Oriental luxury, or rather voluptuousness; another was a 'carnival piece' spirited beyond compare; the third was a Greek female head; a face so divinely beautiful, and yet of an expression so provokingly indeterminate, never before arrested my attention.

"The more substantial furniture consisted of a round table, a few chairs (including a large rocking-chair) and a sofa, or rather 'settee'; its material was plain maple painted a creamy white, slightly inter-