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
      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 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 typography 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
      floor; 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.