Poe, Edgar Allen - The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe

by Volume 01-05 (lit)

  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, fell 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 mean time

  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 day dream _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 day-dreamer, 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; credible 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 chang
es 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 {*1}, - 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.

  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 writhing 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 phrenzied 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 thus - 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 ante-chamber 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