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28 a hospital where he died on the morning of the 7th of October. The mystery surrounding the circumstances of his death has never been unraveled. Poe challenges attention in literature because of three notable contributions—critical essays, short stories, and poems. As the critical essays are not represented in this volume, they may be dismissed with the brief statement that in spite of personal bias and jealousies, Poe's criticism is independent and suggestive, and his judgments have in the main proved to be those of posterity. His poetic contribution is discussed in another place in this book. Of his short stories, or &quot;tales,&quot; as he called them, it may be said that these are among the best examples of this form of literature in the English language. In range of subject matter Poe was narrow, but on the constructive side of story writing he yields to few writers.]

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 poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eyelike windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium: the bitter lapse into everyday life, the hideous dropping off of