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 the 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 <i are> have their
origin in the ecstasies which <i 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-honoured
than my gloomy, grey, 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 latter 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 <i 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 grey 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 simoom 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
was 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 <i 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 vigour--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 <i 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 <i
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
door; 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 at first be 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 <i 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 <i often replete with
luxury>, he finds the <i incitamentum> or first cause of his
musings entirely vanished and forgotten. In my case the primary
object was <i 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 <i 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 <i attentive>, and are, with the
day-dreamer, the <i 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, <i De Amplitudine Beati Regni Dei>; St Austin's
great work, <i The City of God>; and Tertullian, <i De Carne
Christi>, in which the paradoxical sentence, '<i 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 <i 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 fail 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
<i 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 <i had never been> of the heart, and
my passions <i always were> of the mind. Through the grey 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 analyse--not as an object
of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory
speculation. And <i 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
<1> 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.
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
grey 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 pupil-less, and I shrank
involuntarily from their glassy stare to the contemplation of the
thin and shrunken lips. They parted; and in a smile of peculiar
meaning, <i 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 <i 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 <i
now> even more unequivocally than I beheld them <i 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 <i 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
Mad'selle Salle it has been well said, '<i que tous ses pas
etaient des sentiments>', and of Berenice I more seriously
believed <i que toutes ses dents etaient des idees. Des idees!>-
-ah here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me! <i Des
idees!>--ah <i 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 <i phantasma> of the teeth
maintained its terrible ascendancy as, with the most vivid and
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 of 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, '<i 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 <i 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, '<i 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 <i
alive>!
He pointed to my 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.
