Bleak and windswept, my errant ramblings led me to some time-forgotten vale wherein a desolate mansion stood; its mullioned windows pale against the ebbing day, yet from within illumin’d, as by dancing fiends at play.  Fram’d by gaunt trees, stone pinnacles leaned awry, and, through o’ergrown gardens that flanked a ****-strewn pathway to its rotting door, a sleet-cold wind keened for lost souls in torment ‘cross the desolate and cloud-wracked moor.
With dying Phoebus now a blood-red smear upon the western hills, I so resolved to shelter here out of the coming chill.  Foreboding dragged my every step and cawing rooks mocked overhead as if to say: "Go, stranger, for you'll find no welcome here!"  Along the gravelled path I trod and beat the door with blackthorn rod; it opened slowly - in I walked with beating heart and ne'er a thought for all the world I'd left behind, as rain and sleet and howling wind blew shut the door with crack of doom, and left me peering through the gloom.
Around a table there they sat 'midst putrid food and cobwebbed vats of mouldering wine; their bony mouths gaped vacant as they grinned and laughed through time.  I swayed and swooned as in a trance, my own existence thrown by chance into that hellish company, who revelled, foul, Decay’d Gentry!  And then a fearful thunderclap's reverberations brought me back to sanity, I screamed and fled to where the hillsides cried and bled; with staring eye and hair turn’d white, I ran into the raving night.