In the short story "The Fall of the House of Usher," by Edgar Allan Poe, the house itself is described in many words, which sets the gothic scene. The painting by Arthur Rackham in the book perfectly illustrates what I imagined the house would look like. At a quick glance the house gives me a scary and uneasy feeling, just as the narrator states, when he says, "I know not how it was-but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit." The colors are so foggy and faded, even the white walls of the house seem tainted with the burden of darkness upon them. The dark colors of the sky seem to fade and disappear and yet the whole painting has a dark cloud over it, or so it seems. Black is a depressing and gothic color as it is, but this painting puts it into a whole new light, which makes you image your there in front of the house.
             Perspective is another aspect that gives me a feeling of caution. The trees just jump out at you, they're the first things you see. They seem not only to be trees, but to house spirits which twist the hollows of the trees and deform them. Perhaps the narrator says it best, "...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 afterdream of the reveler upon opium...." Even though the house is farther off in the background it still catches your eye, perhaps because of the dreary white color of it. The perspective also makes me feel as if I am actually in it.
             On the same note, the whole picture is the almost exact image of everything described in the first scene. "During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung over 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 th...