Chapter 210

AND OTHER STORIES 197 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 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 gray ruins of memory a thousand tumultuous recollections are