Berenice E-book

                                 1835

                               BERENICE

                          by Edgar Allan Poe








Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)



                                 BERENICE
-
    Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicae visitarem,
    curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas.- Ebn Zaiat.
-
  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 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 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 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 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 "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 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 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
trellissed 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,- *001 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 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, 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 Mad'selle 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 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 my existence, written
all over with dim, and hideous, and unintelligible recollections. I
strived to decypher 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.
-
-
                               THE END