Berenice

MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide

horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch --- as distinct too,

yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that

from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? --- from the covenant of peace, a

simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is

sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies

which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.

My baptismal name is Egaeus; that of my family I will not mention. Yet there are no

towers in the land more time-honored than my gloomy, gray, hereditary halls. Our line

has been called a race of visionaries; and in many striking particulars --- in the character

of the family mansion --- in the frescoes of the chief saloon --- in the tapestries of the

dormitories --- in the chiselling of some buttresses in the armory --- but more especially

in the gallery of antique paintings --- in the fashion of the library chamber --- and, lastly,

in the very peculiar nature of the library's contents --- there is more than sufficient

evidence to warrant the belief.

The recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber, and with its

volumes --- of which letter I will say no more. Here died my mother. Herein was I born.

But it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before --- that the soul has no previous

existence. You deny it? --- let us not argue the matter. Convinced myself, I seek not to

convince. There is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms --- of spiritual and meaning

eyes --- of sounds, musical yet sad --- a remembrance which will not be excluded; a

memory like a shadow --- vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady; and like a shadow, too, in

the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the sunlight of my reason shall exist.

In that chamber was I born. Thus awaking from the long night of what seemed, but was

not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairy land --- into a palace of imagination -

-- into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition --- it is not singular that I

gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye --- that I loitered away my boyhood in

books, and dissipated my youth in reverie; but it is singular that as years rolled away, and

the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers --- it is wonderful what

stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life --- wonderful how total an inversion took

place in the character of my commonest thought. The realities of the world affected me as

visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn,

not the material of my every-day existence, but in very deed that existence utterly and

solely in itself.

* * * * * * *

Berenice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my paternal halls. Yet

differently we grew --- I, ill of health, and buried in gloom --- she, agile, graceful, and

overflowing with energy; hers the ramble on the hill-side --- mine the studies of the

cloister; I, living within my own heart, and addicted, body and soul, to the most intense

and painful meditation --- she, roaming carelessly through life, with no thought of the

shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the raven-winged hours. Berenice! --- I call

upon her name --- Berenice! --- and from the gray ruins of memory a thousand

tumultuous recollections are startled at the sound! Ah, vividly is her image before me

now, as in the early days of her light-heartedness and joy! Oh, gorgeous yet fantastic

beauty! Oh, sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim! Oh, Naiad among its fountains! And

then --- then all is mystery and terror, and a tale which should not be told. Disease --- a

fatal disease, feel like the simoon upon her frame; and, even while I gazed upon her, the

spirit of change swept over her, pervading her mind, her habits, and her character, and, in

a manner the most subtle and terrible, disturbing even the identity of her person! Alas!

the destroyer came and went! --- and the victim --- where is she? I knew her not --- or

knew her no longer as Berenice.

Among the numerous train of maladies superinduced by that fatal and primary one

which effected a revolution of so horrible a kind in the moral and physical being of my

cousin, may be mentioned as the most distressing and obstinate in its nature, a species of

epilepsy not unfrequently terminating in trance itself --- trance very nearly resembling

positive dissolution, and from which her manner of recovery was in most instances,

startlingly abrupt. In the meantime my own disease --- for I have been told that I should

call it by no other appellation --- my own disease, then, grew rapidly upon me, and

assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form --- hourly and

momently gaining vigor --- and at length obtaining over me the most incomprehensible

ascendancy. This monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of

those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive. It is more than

probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to

convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous

intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak

technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most

ordinary objects of the universe.

To muse for long unwearied hours, with my attention riveted to some frivolous device

on the margin, or in the typography of a book; to become absorbed, for the better part of a

summer's day, in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry or upon the floor; to

lose myself, for an entire night, in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of

a fire; to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower; to repeat, monotonously,

some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any

idea whatever to the mind; to lose all sense of motion or physical existence, by means of

absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in: such were a few of the

most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental

faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to anything

like analysis or explanation.

Yet let me not be misapprehended. The undue, earnest, and morbid attention thus excited

by objects in their own nature frivolous, must not be confounded in character with that

ruminating propensity common to all mankind, and more especially indulged in by

persons of ardent imagination. It was not even, as might be at first supposed, an extreme

condition, or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily and essentially distinct and

different. In the one instance, the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested by an object

usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of

deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a daydream

often replete with luxury, he finds the incitamentum, or first cause of his musings, entirely

vanished and forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although

assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal

importance. Few deductions, if any, were made; and those few pertinaciously returning in

upon the original object as a centre. The meditations were never pleasurable; and, at the

termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained that

supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease. In a

word, the powers of mind more particularly exercised were, with me, as I have said

before, the attentive, and are, with the daydreamer, the speculative.

My books, at this epoch, if they did not actually serve to irritate the disorder, partook,

it will be perceived, largely, in their imaginative and inconsequential nature, of the

characteristic qualities of the disorder itself. I well remember, among others, the treatise

of the noble Italian, Coelius Secundus Curio, "De Amplitudine Beati Regni Dei;" St.

Austin's great work, the "City of God;" and Tertullian's "De Carne Christi," in which the

paradoxical sentence "Mortuus est Dei filius; credibile est quia ineptum est: et sepultus

resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est," occupied my undivided time, for many

weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation.

Thus it will appear that, shaken from its balance only by trivial things, my reason bore

resemblance to that ocean-crag spoken of by Ptolemy Hephestion, which steadily

resisting the attacks of human violence, and the fiercer fury of the waters and the winds,

trembled only to the touch of the flower called Asphodel. And although, to a careless

thinker, it might appear a matter beyond doubt, that the alteration produced by her

unhappy malady, in the moral condition of Berenice, would afford me many objects for

the exercise of that intense and abnormal meditation whose nature I have been at some

trouble in explaining, yet such was not in any degree the case. In the lucid intervals of my

infirmity, her calamity, indeed, gave me pain, and, taking deeply to heart that total wreck

of her fair and gentle life, I did not fall to ponder, frequently and bitterly, upon the

wonder-working means by which so strange a revolution had been so suddenly brought to

pass. But these reflections partook not of the idiosyncrasy of my disease, and were such

as would have occurred, under similar circumstances, to the ordinary mass of mankind.

True to its own character, my disorder revelled in the less important but more startling

changes wrought in the physical frame of Berenice --- in the singular and most appalling

distortion of her personal identity.

During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never loved her.

In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me, had never been of the heart,

and my passions always were of the mind. Through the gray of the early morning ---

among the trellised shadows of the forest at noonday --- and in the silence of my library

at night --- she had flitted by my eyes, and I had seen her --- not as the living and

breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice of a dream; not as a being of the earth, earthy, but

as the abstraction of such a being; not as a thing to admire, but to analyze; not as an

object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation. And

now --- now I shuddered in her presence, and grew pale at her approach; yet, bitterly

lamenting her fallen and desolate condition, I called to mind that she had loved me long,

and, in an evil moment, I spoke to her of marriage.

And at length the period of our nuptials was approaching, when, upon an afternoon in

the winter of the year --- one of those unseasonably warm, calm, and misty days which

are the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon*, --- I sat, (and sat, as I thought, alone) in the inner

apartment of the library. But, uplifting my eyes, I saw that Berenice stood before me.

* For as Jove, during the winter season, gives twice seven days of warmth, men have called this clement

and temperate time the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon --- Simonides.

Was it my own excited imagination --- or the misty influence of the atmosphere --- or

the uncertain twilight of the chamber --- or the gray draperies which fell around her

figure --- that caused in it so vacillating and indistinct an outline? I could not tell. She

spoke no word; and I --- not for worlds could I have uttered a syllable. An icy chill ran

through my frame; a sense of insufferable anxiety oppressed me; a consuming curiosity

pervaded my soul; and sinking back upon the chair, I remained for some time breathless

and motionless, with my eyes riveted upon her person. Alas! its emaciation was

excessive, and not one vestige of the former being lurked in any single line of the

contour. My burning glances at length fell upon the face.

The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the once jetty hair fell

partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets, now of

a vivid yellow, and jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the reigning

melancholy of the countenance. The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless, and seemingly

pupilless, and I shrank involuntarily from their glassy stare to he contemplation of the

thin and shrunken lips. They parted; and in a smile of peculiar meaning, the teeth of the

changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view. Would to God that I had

never beheld them, or that, having done so, I had died!

* * * * * * *

The shutting of a door disturbed me, and, looking up, I found that my cousin had

departed from the chamber. But from the disordered chamber of my brain, had not, alas!

departed, and would not be driven away, the white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth. Not

a speck on their surface --- not a shade on their enamel --- not an indenture in their edges

--- but what that period of her smile had sufficed to brand in upon my memory. I saw

them now even more unequivocally than I beheld them then. The teeth! --- the teeth! ---

they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long,

narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writing about them, as in the very

moment of their first terrible development. Then came the full fury of my monomania,

and I struggled in vain against its strange and irresistible influence. In the multiplied

objects of the external world I had no thoughts but for the teeth. For these I longed with a

frenzied desire. All other matters and all different interests became absorbed in their

single contemplation. They --- they alone were present to the mental eye, and they, in

their sole individuality, became the essence of my mental life. I held them in every light.

I turned them in every attitude. I surveyed their characteristics. I dwelt upon their

peculiarities. I pondered upon their conformation. I mused upon the alteration in their

nature. I shuddered as I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive and sentient power,

and even when unassisted by the lips, a capability of moral expression. Of Mademoiselle

Salle it has been well said, "Que tous ses pas etaient des sentiments," and of Berenice I

more seriously believed que toutes ses dents etaient des idees. Des idees! --- ah here was

the idiotic thought that destroyed me! Des idees! --- ah therefore it was that I coveted

them so madly! I felt that their possession could alone ever restore me to peace, in giving

me back to reason.

And the evening closed in upon me this --- and then the darkness came, and tarried,

and went --- and the day again dawned --- and the mists of a second night were now

gathering around --- and still I sat motionless in that solitary room --- and still I sat buried

in meditation --- and still the phantasma of the teeth maintained its terrible ascendancy,

as, with the most vivid hideous distinctness, it floated about amid the changing lights and

shadows of the chamber. At length there broke in upon my dreams a cry as of horror and

dismay; and thereunto, after a pause, succeeded the sound of troubled voices,

intermingled with many low moanings of sorrow or of pain. I arose from my seat, and

throwing open one of the doors of the library, saw standing out in the antechamber a

servant maiden, all in tears, who told me that Berenice was --- no more! She had been

seized with epilepsy in the early morning, and now, at the closing in of the night, the

grave was ready for its tenant, and all the preparations for the burial were completed.

* * * * * * *

I found myself sitting in the library, and again sitting there alone. It seemed that I had

newly awakened from a confused and exciting dream. I knew that it was now midnight,

and I was well aware, that since the setting of the sun, Berenice had been interred. But of

that dreary period which intervened I had no positive, at least no definite comprehension.

Yet its memory was replete with horror --- horror more horrible from being vague, and

terror more terrible from ambiguity. It was a fearful page in the record my existence,

written all over with dim, and hideous, and unintelligible recollections. I strived to

decipher them, but in vain; while ever and anon, like the spirit of a departed sound, the

shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice seemed to be ringing in my ears. I had done a

deed --- what was it? I asked myself the question aloud, and the whispering echoes of the

chamber answered me, --- "what was it?"

On the table beside me burned a lamp, and near it lay a little box. It was of no

remarkable character, and I had seen it frequently before, for it was the property of the

family physician; but how came it there, upon my table, and why did I shudder in

regarding it? These things were in no manner to be accounted for, and my eyes at length

dropped to the open pages of a book, and to a sentence underscored therein. The words

were the singular but simple ones of the poet Ebn Zaiat: --- "Dicebant mihi sodales si

sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas." Why then, as I

perused them, did the hairs of my head erect themselves on end, and the blood of my

body become congealed within my veins?

There came a light tap at the library door --- and, pale as the tenant of a tomb, a menial

entered upon tiptoe. His looks were wild with terror, and he spoke to me in a voice

tremulous, husky, and very low. What said he? --- some broken sentences I heard. He

told of a wild cry disturbing the silence of the night --- of the gathering together of the

household --- of a search in the direction of the sound; and then his tones grew thrillingly

distinct as he whispered me of a violated grave --- of a disfigured body enshrouded, yet

still breathing --- still palpitating --- still alive!

He pointed to garments; --- they were muddy and clotted with gore. I spoke not, and he

took me gently by the hand: it was indented with the impress of human nails. He directed

my attention to some object against the wall. I looked at it for some minutes: it was a

spade. With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay upon it. But I

could not force it open; and in my tremor, it slipped from my hands, and fell heavily, and

burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of

dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances

that were scattered to and fro about the floor.