|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: the exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It
was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself
upon the guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the
fantastic character of the performances. But the fervid
facility of his impromptus could not be so accounted for.
They must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in the
words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompanied
himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that
intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I have
previously alluded as observable only in particular moments of
the highest artificial excitement. The words of one of these
 The Fall of the House of Usher |