Berenice
Edgar Allan Poe
Berenice
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 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 u
nfrequently 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 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 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
aquiescence 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 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;
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 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 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 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 Halcyon1,
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 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, 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 t
hese 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 s
eriously 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 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, '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 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.
<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.
