I love this quotation from the Fall of the House of Usher. You can hear it spoken by Orson Welles on the remastered edition of the Alan Parsons Project album Tales of Mystery and Imagination.
Shadows of shadows passing.
It is now 1831, and as always, I am absorbed with a delicate thought.
It is how poetry has indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential,
since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception.
Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry.
Music, without the idea, is simply music.
Without music, or an intriguing idea, color becomes pallor;
Man becomes carcass;
Home becomes catacomb;
The dead are, but for a moment, motionless.
