The word that best describes the tone of the excerpt from "The Fall of the HOuse of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe is "discovery". The narrator is describing the view at the same time he is talking about his feelings when seeing it. He does not know what these feelings are, what this "sinking, sickening of the heart" means. So, he asks himself "what was it (...) what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?". He concludes that it is mistery, that it is possible that a different arrangement of the objects in the scene and of the details in the picture can modifiy their sorrowful impression.
