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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.
