from "The Fall of The House of Usher"
[...]
Our books--the books which, for years, had formed no small
portion of the mental existence of the invalid--were, as might be
supposed, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We
pored together over such works as the
Ververt et Chartreuseof Gresset; the
Belphegor of Machiavelli; the
Heaven and Hellof Swedenborg;
The Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimmby Holberg; the
Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D'Indagine,
and of De la Chambre;
The Journey into the Blue Distance of
Tieck; and
The City of the Sun by Campanella. One favourite
volume was a small octavo edition of the
Directorium Inquisitorum,
by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages
in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and OEgipans,
over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight,
however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and
curious book in quarto Gothic--the manual of a forgotten church--
the
Vigiliae Mortuorum Secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae.
I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work,
and of its probable influence upon the hypochondriac [...]
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I wish I could find a huge volume I had my hands on once, probably I borrowed it from a local library, but which one? (I have found myself living in more than few cities, at one time or another. Note: not a fugitive from justice or a "Coast-to-Coast Man".) The book I refer to was called "The Annotated Poe", and if I recall correctly, it had one particular gloss that referred to the question of which of those Usher books were known to be real, which were thought to have existed at some time, and which were titles made-up by E.A. Poe. If I find it, I'll make my report. Hopefully, someone will beat me to it.
Here's one
answer to the question, 'real, maybe real, unreal'. And a second
link to the text, both of which I just now Googled onto. Not incidentally, readers of Edgar Allan Poe biographies will know that he was pretty much at the head of the class in his Latin schoolwork, including the somewhat suddenly cut-off studies at Thomas Jefferson's, then, new University of Virginia.
The quotation is from:
www.literarytraveler.comMost of Poe's classmates remembered him as a good student due to his knack for quickly memorizing his lessons in Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian. Others said that he was "tolerably regular" in attending his classes, which lasted from 7:30 to 9:30, five mornings a week. They also recalled that he was the only student to prepare an optional recitation from Tasso, which made him a favorite with his Modern Language professor, George Blaettermann. At the end of the session in December, Poe stood for the exams with students who had the benefit of two years of study and still received citations of excellence from both his teachers.
