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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: long improvised dirges will ring for ever in my ears. Among
other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular
perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of
Von Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy
brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vagueness at which
I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not
why;--from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before
me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portion
which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By
the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he
arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea,
 The Fall of the House of Usher |