Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform.
Overreaching the wide horizon like the rainbow, its hues are as
various as the hues of that arch, as distinct too, yet as intimately
blended. Overreaching the wide horizon like 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 thus is it. And 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_. I have a tale to tell in its own essence rife with
horror--I would suppress it were it not a record more of feelings than
of facts.
My baptismal name is Egæus--that of my family I will not mention. Yet
there are no towers in the land more time-honored 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 frescos of the chief saloon--in the tapestries
of the dormitories--in the chiseling 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 ærial 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, as it were, 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 common thoughts. 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 her 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 very 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, startingly 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,
aggravated in its symptoms by the immoderate use of opium, assumed
finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary
form--hourly and momentarily gaining vigor--and at length obtaining
over me the most singular and incomprehensible ascendancy. This
monomania--if I must so term it--consisted in a morbid irritability of
the nerves immediately affecting those properties of the mind, in
metaphysical science termed the _attentive_. It is more than probable
that I am not understood--but I fear that it is indeed 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, as it were, buried themselves in the contemplation of even the
most common objects of the universe.
To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention rivetted to some
frivolous device upon 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 in a state 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 any thing like
analysis or explanation.
Yet let me not be misapprehended. The undue, intense, 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. By no means. 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 utterly 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, so to speak, 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 unintelligible 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
fearful alteration produced by her unhappy malady, in the _moral_
condition of Berenice, would afford me many objects for the exercise
of that intense and morbid meditation whose nature I have been at some
trouble in explaining, yet such was not by any means 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, and 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 grey of the early morning--among the
trellissed shadows of the forest at noon-day--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--earthly--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 knew 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 Berenice stood before me.
[Footnote 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_.]
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 it to loom up in
so unnatural a degree? I could not tell. Perhaps she had grown taller
since her malady. She spoke, however, 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, and with my eyes rivetted 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 her face.
The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the
once golden hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow
temples with ringlets now black as the raven's ring, and jarring
discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the reigning
melancholy of the countenance. The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless,
and I shrunk 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 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 upon their
surface--not a shade on their enamel--not a line in their
configuration--not an indenture in their edges--but what that brief
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 every where, 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. 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--and
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 Sallé it has been said, "_que tous ses
pas etaient des sentiments_," and of Berenice I more seriously
believed _que tous ses dents etaient des idées_.
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
forcibly in upon my dreams a wild 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
hurriedly from my seat, and, throwing open one of the doors of the
library, there stood out in the antechamber a servant maiden, all in
tears, and she told me that Berenice was--no more. Seized with an
epileptic fit she had fallen dead 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.
With a heart full of grief, yet reluctantly, and oppressed with awe, I
made my way to the bed-chamber of the departed. The room was large,
and very dark, and at every step within its gloomy precincts I
encountered the paraphernalia of the grave. The coffin, so a menial
told me, lay surrounded by the curtains of yonder bed, and in that
coffin, he whisperingly assured me, was all that remained of Berenice.
Who was it asked me would I not look upon the corpse? I had seen the
lips of no one move, yet the question had been demanded, and the echo
of the syllables still lingered in the room. It was impossible to
refuse; and with a sense of suffocation I dragged myself to the side
of the bed. Gently I uplifted the sable draperies of the curtains.
As I let them fall they descended upon my shoulders, and shutting me
thus out from the living, enclosed me in the strictest communion with
the deceased.
The very atmosphere was redolent of death. The peculiar smell of the
coffin sickened me; and I fancied a deleterious odor was already
exhaling from the body. I would have given worlds to escape--to fly
from the pernicious influence of mortality--to breathe once again the
pure air of the eternal heavens. But I had no longer the power to
move--my knees tottered beneath me--and I remained rooted to the spot,
and gazing upon the frightful length of the rigid body as it lay
outstretched in the dark coffin without a lid.
God of heaven!--is it possible? Is it my brain that reels--or was it
indeed the finger of the enshrouded dead that stirred in the white
cerement that bound it? Frozen with unutterable awe I slowly raised my
eyes to the countenance of the corpse. There had been a band around
the jaws, but, I know not how, it was broken asunder. The livid lips
were wreathed into a species of smile, and, through the enveloping
gloom, once again there glared upon me in too palpable reality, the
white and glistening, and ghastly teeth of Berenice. I sprang
convulsively from the bed, and, uttering no word, rushed forth a
maniac from that apartment of triple horror, and mystery, and death.
* * * * *
I found myself again 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 had intervened I had no positive, at least no
definite comprehension. Yet its memory was rife 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 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? And the echoes of the chamber answered me "what was
it?"
On the table beside me burned a lamp, and near it lay a little box of
ebony. It was a box of no remarkable character, and I had seen it
frequently before, it being the property of the family physician; but
how came it _there_ upon my table, and why did I shudder in regarding
it? These were things 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 words of
the poet Ebn Zaiat. "_Dicebant mihi sodales si sepulchrum amicæ
visitarem curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas._"[2] Why then, as I
perused them, did the hairs of my head erect themselves on end, and
the blood of my body congeal within my veins?
[Footnote 2: My companions told me I might find some little
alleviation of my misery, in visiting the grave of my beloved.]
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 heard
in 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 discovered upon its margin--a body
enshrouded, yet still breathing, still palpitating, still alive!
He pointed to my garments--they were muddy and clotted with gore. I
spoke not, and he took me gently by the hand--but 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 ebony box that
lay upon it. But I could not force it open, and in my tremor it
slipped from out 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 many white and glistening
substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.
For the Southern Literary Messenger.