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For the Southern Literary Messenger
BERENICE
— A TALE.
BY EDGAR A. POE.
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 [column 2:] side [[hillside]] — 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, startlingly abrupt. In the meantime 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, 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 immediatly 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
riveted 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. [page
334:]
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, Cœlius [[Cælius]] Secundus Curio "de
amplitudine beati regni Dei" — St. Austin's great work the "City of
God" — and
Tertullian
[[Tertullian's]] "de Carne Christi," in which the unintelligible
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 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 fall 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 [column
2:] 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,* I sat, and sat, as I thought alone, in
the inner apartment of the
library. But uplifting my eyes 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 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
wing, 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 [page 335:] 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 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 etoient des sentiments," and of Berenice I more
seriously
believed que touts ses dents etoient des ideés.
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 [column 2:] 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 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 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 words of the poet Ebn
Zaiat. "Dicebant mihi sodales si sepulchrum amicæ visit arem
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
congeal 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 — [page
336:] of a
disfigured body discovered upon its margin — a 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 — 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. |
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