Landor's Cottage

Landor's Cottage by Edgar Allan Poe

A wandering traveler, lost among the river counties of New York on a hazy summer afternoon, stumbles from a maze of glades onto an unmistakable carriage road cut through light woods. The road itself is unlike any he has seen: wheel-tracks barely visible on grass as fine and green as velvet, stones placed rather than thrown along its edges, wildflowers massed in the interspaces — every curve showing the hand of an artist with a scrupulous eye for form, balancing the neat and graceful against the picturesque. Following the road's serpentine turns, the narrator hears water, and as evening mist dissolves under a low sun breaking through a purplish chasm in the hills, a valley and a dwelling are suddenly revealed to him, piece by piece, like a "vanishing picture." He pauses on the brow of the slope to survey the little vale below in detail: some four hundred yards long and fifty to two hundred wide, narrowest at its northern end beneath a ninety-foot granite ledge, softening and widening southward. Two openings breach its encircling heights — a rocky, cleft-like ravine to the northwest through which a rivulet enters, and a gentler gap at the south. He catalogs the trees ringing the amphitheatre: hickories, black walnuts, chestnuts, and oak on the northern crags, giving way southward to elm, sassafras, locust, linden, redbud, catalpa, and maple, with wild shrubbery and the occasional silver willow or white poplar further down. Three trees stand alone in the valley floor itself: a shapely elm guarding the southern gate, a large hickory leaning out over the ravine at the northwest entrance, and, most magnificent of all, a triple-stemmed tulip tree (Liriodendron Tulipiferum) of the magnolia family, its three trunks rising some hundred twenty feet, its blossoms likened to a million resplendent tulips. The rivulet from the northwest ravine winds past the hickory and tulip tree, bends south, and feeds a small, irregularly oval lake with a pebbled white bottom so clear it seems bottomless, its surface mirroring sky and shore so perfectly that the two are hard to distinguish. Trout crowd the water like suspended flying-fish, and a birch canoe rests reflected upon it. A tiny flowering island near the lake's north shore, just large enough for a small fowl-house, is linked to shore by a single-plank tulip-wood bridge with a slight arch. The rivulet resumes from the lake's southern end and eventually plunges over a hundred-foot precipice toward the Hudson. Sheep, three tame deer, and brilliantly plumed ducks roam the turf, watched over by a vigilant mastiff; geraniums are planted in buried pots to look wild; ivy and grapevines cloak the eastern, western, and northern cliffs; and a stone wall along the lower boundary keeps the deer enclosed, the only entrance being a gate in a rocky pass. At the valley's heart, on a peninsula nearly encircled by the brook's loop, stands the cottage itself — small, simple, yet composed with painterly precision. The narrator details its modest dimensions and additions: a main building some twenty-four by sixteen feet, a smaller west wing, and a still smaller rear compartment; steep concave roofs forming piazza covers; a tall chimney of black-and-red Dutch brick; lozenge-paned windows and door; an external stair to a loft storeroom; granite-slab paths through the turf; a dead pear tree wreathed in bignonia blossoms and hung with birdcages holding a mocking bird, an oriole, a bobolink, and canaries; jasmine, honeysuckle, and a sprawling grapevine climbing the roofs; and weathered gray Dutch shingles set off by flowering pots and the overshadowing tulip tree. Approaching, the narrator is greeted by the mastiff, now friendly, and raps at the half-open door. A young woman of about twenty-eight — slender, graceful, with an expression of intense romance or unworldliness in her deep-set gray eyes and light chestnut hair — appears; someone within calls her "Annie, darling." She admits him courteously into a vestibule, from which he glimpses a small study with a bow window, then passes into the parlor, where he meets its owner, Mr. Landor, civil and cordial. The narrator, more absorbed in the house's arrangement than in his host, describes the parlor in detail: its ingrain carpet, white muslin curtains, delicate French wallpaper, three unframed lithographs by Julien, simple cream-and-green furniture matching the exterior's design sensibility, and abundant fresh flowers throughout. He closes by noting that his purpose has been only to give, in detail, a picture of Mr. Landor's residence as he found it.

By Edgar Allan Poe · First published 1849 · Genre: Descriptive Prose, Romanticism, Literary Fiction · 5,597 words

First lines

During a pedestrian trip last summer, through one or two of the river counties of New York, I found myself, as the day declined, somewhat embarrassed about the road I was pursuing. The land undulated very remarkably; and my path, for the last hour, had wound about and about so confusedly, in its effort to keep in the valleys, that I no longer knew in what direction lay the sweet village of B -- -- , where I had determined to stop for the night. The sun had scarcely shone -- strictly speaking -- during the day, which nevertheless, had been unpleasantly warm. A smoky mist, resembling that of the Indian summer, enveloped all things, and of course, added to my uncertainty. Not that I cared much about the matter. If I did not hit upon the village before sunset, or even before dark, it was more than possible that a little Dutch farmhouse, or something of that kind, would soon make its appearance -- although, in fact, the neighborhood (perhaps on account of being more picturesque than fertile) was very sparsely inhabited. At all events, with my knapsack for a pillow, and my hound as a sentry, a bivouac in the open air was just the thing which would have amused me. I sauntered on, therefore, quite at ease -- Ponto taking charge of my gun -- until at length, just as I had begun to consider whether the numerous little glades that led hither and thither, were intended to be paths at all, I was conducted by one of them into an unquestionable carriage track. There could be no mistaking it. The traces of light wheels were evident; and although the tall shrubberies and overgrown undergrowth met overhead, there was no obstruction whatever below, even to the passage of a Virginian mountain wagon -- the most aspiring vehicle, I take it, of its kind. The road, however, except in being open through the wood -- if wood be not too weighty a name for such an assemblage of light trees -- and except in the particulars of evident wheel-tracks -- bore no resemblance to any road I had before seen. The tracks of which I speak were but faintly perceptible -- having been impressed upon the firm, yet pleasantly moist surface of -- what looked more like green Genoese velvet than anything else. It was grass, clearly -- but grass such as we seldom see out of England -- so short, so thick, so even, and so vivid in color. Not a single impediment lay in the wheel-route -- not even a chip or dead twig. The stones that once obstructed the way had been carefully placed -- not thrown -- along the sides of the lane, so as to define its boundaries at bottom with a kind of half-precise, half-negligent, and wholly picturesque definition. Clumps of wild flowers grew everywhere, luxuriantly, in the interspaces.

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Gothic Fiction · Short Story · Mystery · Supernatural · Horror · Atmosphere · Setting · Isolation · Solitude · Nature · Psychological Insight · Symbolism

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