MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch, --as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? --from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
My baptismal name is Egaeus; that of my family I will not mention. Yet there are no towers in the land more time-honored than my gloomy, gray, 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 frescos 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 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 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 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 appelation --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 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 topography 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 quiescence 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 be at first 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; credible 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 fall 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, feeli
ความทุกข์ยากความหลากหลายนับได้ Multiform wretchedness ของดินได้ Overreaching ฟ้ากว้างเป็นรุ้ง โทนมันจะเป็นเป็นโทนที่ ซุ้มประตู - เป็นความแตกต่างเกินไป ยังเป็นจึงผสมผสานกัน Overreaching ฟ้ากว้างเป็นรุ้ง วิธีจะให้ความงามผมมีได้มาชนิดของ unloveliness -จากพันธสัญญาของความได้เปรียบของความเสียใจ แต่เป็น ในจริยธรรม ความชั่วร้ายเป็นเวรดี ดังนั้น ในความเป็นจริง ของความสุข ความเสียใจที่เกิด หน่วยความจำความสุขที่ผ่านมาคือ ความปวดร้าวของวันนี้ หรือ agonies ซึ่งมีจุดกำเนิดของ ecstasies ซึ่งอาจมีฉันชื่อ baptismal เป็น Egaeus ที่ครอบครัวผมจะไม่พูด ยัง มีอาคารไม่ในแผ่นดิน time-honored ยิ่งกว่าฉันมืดมน สีเทา รัชทายาทแห่งห้องโถง เรามีการเรียกการแข่งขัน visionaries และในหลายโดดเด่นอย่าง - ในลักษณะของแฟมิลี่แมนชั่น - ในปูนปั้นต่าง ๆ นา ๆ ของเก๋งหัวหน้า - ใน tapestries ของนี่ - ใน chiselling บาง buttresses armory — แต่มากขึ้นโดยเฉพาะอย่างยิ่ง ในเก็บภาพวาดโบราณ - แฟชั่นของหอห้องสมุด - และ สุดท้าย ในลักษณะแปลกประหลาดมากของเนื้อหาของไลบรารี มีหลักฐานเพียงพอเพื่อรับประกันความเชื่อมากกว่าการRecollections ปีแรกสุดของฉันเชื่อมต่อ กับที่หอการค้า และไดรฟ์ ข้อมูลของ - ที่หลังผมจะบอกว่า ไม่มี นี่ตายแม่ นี้ฉันเกิด แต่ของแค่พูดว่า ฉันไม่สากลก่อน - ว่า วิญญาณมีอยู่ก่อนหน้านี้ไม่ คุณปฏิเสธหรือไม่ -ให้เราทะเลาะเรื่องไม่ ผมมั่นใจตัวเอง ค้นหาไม่การโน้มน้าวใจ มี อย่างไรก็ตาม การรำลึกทางอากาศรูปแบบ - จิตวิญญาณ และความหมายตา - เสียง ดนตรี ยังเศร้า - การรำลึกที่จะไม่ถูกแยกออก หน่วยความจำเช่นมีเงา คลุม ตัวแปร ไม่จำกัด unsteady และเหมือนเงา เกินไป เป็นไปได้ทำของฉันการกำจัดของมันในขณะที่แสงแดดของเหตุผลของฉันจะอยู่ในในห้องที่ ฉันเกิด จึง awaking จากคืนยาวอะไรดูเหมือน แต่ไม่ nonentity ครั้งในภูมิภาคมากของนางฟ้าดิน - เป็นวังของจินตนาการ - เป็นสรรพป่าคิดสงฆ์และ erudition - ไม่เอกพจน์ที่ฉันจ้องรอบตัว ด้วยการซัก และ startled ตา - ที่ฉัน loitered ไป boyhood ของฉันในหนังสือ และ dissipated ของฉันเยาวชนในสบาย แต่เป็นเอกพจน์ที่เป็นปีเก็บสะสม และเที่ยงของข้าพเจ้ายังอยู่ในแมนชั่นของบรรพบุรุษของฉัน - กล้าหาญเป็นยอดเยี่ยมซบอะไรตกเมื่อสปริงของชีวิต - มหัศจรรย์วิธีรวมกลับการเกิดขึ้นของคิด commonest ของฉัน ความเป็นจริงของโลกได้รับผลกระทบฉันเป็นวิสัยทัศน์ และ ตามวิสัยทัศน์เท่านั้น ในขณะที่ แนวคิดเกี่ยวกับป่าของดินแดนแห่งความฝันกลาย เป็น ในเปิด - ไม่วัสดุของการดำรงอยู่ของฉันทุกวัน-แต่ในมากรัฐบาลที่ดำรงอยู่แต่เพียงผู้เดียว และเชื่อในตัวเองBerenice และมีลูกพี่ลูกน้อง และเราเติบโตมาด้วยกันในห้องโถงที่ปู่ของฉัน แต่แตกต่างกันเราโต - ฉันป่วยสุขภาพ และฝังในหยี - เธอ และคล่องตัว สง่างาม ล้นกับพลังงาน เธอ ramble ด้านฮิลล์ - เหมืองศึกษาของวิหารคด - ฉันอยู่ภายในตัวเอง และติดร่างกายจิต ใจการที่รุนแรง และเจ็บปวดมากที่สุดฝึกสมาธิ - เธอข้ามลวก ๆ ตลอดชีวิตไม่คิดเงาในเส้นทางของเธอ หรือบินเงียบของเวลาที่ปีกนก Berenice -ฉันโทรตามเธอชื่อ - Berenice - และ จากซากปรักหักพังสีเทาหน่วยความจำที่พัน tumultuous recollections เป็น startled ที่เสียง Ah ภายนอกอย่างชัดเจนคือภาพของเธอก่อนฉันวันนี้ ในยุคของ light-heartedness และความสุขของเธอ โอ้ สวย แต่สวยงาม โอ้ sylph ท่ามกลางพุ่มของ Arnheim -โอ้ อย่างไร naiad ระหว่างน้ำพุของ - แล้ว - แล้วทั้งหมดเป็นความลึกลับ และความหวาดกลัว และเรื่องที่ไม่ควรจะบอก โรค - ร้ายแรงโรค - ตกเช่น simoom หมายตามกรอบของเธอ และ แม้ในขณะที่ฉันจ้องเมื่อเธอ จิตวิญญาณของการเปลี่ยนแปลง กวาด เธอ pervading ใจของเธอ นิสัยของเธอ และ อักขระของเธอ และ ในลักษณะฉลาดที่สุด และน่า กลัว รบกวนแม้แต่ตัวตนของเธอ อนิจจา เรือพิฆาตมา และ ไป และ เหยื่อ - ที่มีเธอ ฉันรู้เธอไม่ - หรือรู้ว่าเธอไม่เป็น BereniceAmong 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 appelation --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 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 topography 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 quiescence 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 be at first 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; credible 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 fall 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, feeli
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