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. However, Poe is best known for his works of the macabre, including such infamous titles as The Raven, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Lenore, and The Fall of the House of Usher.

The door to the west wing was in its gable, and quite simple—a single window looked out to the south. The artist has explained: ‘I have tried to make (my) text from pre-fabricated textual elements, and through a kind of ready-made rhetorical style – somewhat flat and rigid – with the hope that by means of a stress on grammatical and rhetorical “rigor” I might erect a hollow structure in the shape of a novel out of sentences of maximum structural integrity’ (quoted in Rodney Graham, 1988, p. In short, the only ingress or egress was through a gate occupying a rocky pass in the road, a few paces below the point at which I stopped to reconnoitre the scene. The whole face of the southern declivity was covered with wild shrubbery alone—an occasional silver willow or white poplar excepted. He presents the work as a pendant to Poe’s original and extends the first story with a lengthy description of an annexe to the house described by Poe.The greatest care had been taken to preserve a due medium between the neat and graceful on the one hand, and the pittoresque, in the true sense of the Italian term, on the other. The chairs and table were "to match," but the forms of all had evidently been designed by the same brain which planned "the grounds;" it is impossible to conceive anything more graceful.

Indeed, this short story only gives a long description of Landor's residence, mostly of the surrounding gardens. These latter did not extend to the floor, but were much longer and narrower than usual—they had single shutters like doors—the panes were of lozenge form, but quite large. At the turn, the stream, sweeping backward, made an almost circular loop, so as to form a peninsula which was very nearly an island, and which included about the sixteenth of an acre. The whole house, with its wings, was constructed of the old-fashioned Dutch shingles - broad, and with un-rounded corners.The general floor of the amphitheatre was grass of the same character as that I had found in the road; if anything, more deliciously soft, thick, velvety, and miraculously green. On this peninsula stood a dwelling–house—and when I say that this house, like the infernal terrace seen by Vathek, "etait d'une architecture inconnue dans les annales de la terre," I mean, merely, that its tout ensemble struck me with the keenest sense of combined novelty and propriety—in a word, of poetry—(for, than in the words just employed, I could scarcely give, of poetry in the abstract, a more rigorous definition)—and I do not mean that merely outre was perceptible in any respect. Not even the monstrosity of color was wanting; for the sunlight came out through the chasm, tinted all orange and purple; while the vivid green of the grass in the valley was reflected more or less upon all objects from the curtain of vapor that still hung overhead, as if loth to take its total departure from a scene so enchantingly beautiful. It is a peculiarity of this material to give houses built of it the appearance of being wider at bottom than at top - after the manner of Egyptian architecture; and in the present instance, this exceedingly picturesque effect was aided by numerous pots of gorgeous flowers that almost encompassed the base of the buildings. Romance, provided my readers fully comprehended what I would here imply by the word—"romance" and "womanliness" seem to me convertible terms: and, after all, what man truly loves in woman, is simply her womanhood.