Chapter 214

AND OTHER STORIES 201 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 reveled 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 her existence, feelings with me had never been of the heart, and my passions 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 novo — 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 these 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, I saw that Berenice stood before me. Was it my own excited imagination — or the misty in