e, 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 simoon 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 is
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
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 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 m