One dull, dark & soundless day in the winter of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone through a singularly dreary tract of country, & at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Desire. I don't know 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 the terrible. I looked upon the scene before me -- upon the mere house, & the simple landscape features of the domain -- upon the bleak walls -- upon the vacant eye-like windows -- upon a few rank sedges -- & 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 reveller upon sexual addiction -- the bitter lapse into everyday life -- the hideous dropping of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart -- an unredeemed dreariness of thought, which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom & eros/ion I now proposed to sojourn for some weeks. Its proprietor, Robert le Poirier, had been one of my boon companions, nay, the first love of my youth; but many years had lapsed since our last meeting. News had reached me in a distant part of the country -- an obscure paragraph buried in a widely circulated journal -- which, in its wildly disturbing nature, had admitted of no other than a visit to the vacated site of Desire. Although in our youth we had been even intimate, I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had always been excessive & habitual.