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 frescos 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 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 ravenwinged 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 lightheartedness 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 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 appelation —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 topography 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 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 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 Amplitude Blessed Kingdom dei; St.
Austin's great work, the City of God; and Tertullian de Carne Christi, in which the
paradoxical sentence Mortus East Of the son

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