always were_ of the
mind. Through the gray 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 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 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 Halcyon
(*1),--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 gray
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 pupilless, and I shrank involuntarily from their glassy stare
to he 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 t