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’s “_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 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 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,
      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 _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 the 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
      that, having done so, I had died! The shutting of a door disturbed me, and, looking up, I found
      that my cousin had departed from the chamber. But from the
      disordered chamber of my brain, had not, alas! departed, and
      would not be driven away, the white and ghastly _spectrum_ of the
      teeth. Not a speck on their surface—not a shade on their
      enamel—not an indenture in their edges—but what that period of
      her smile had sufficed to brand in upon my memory. I saw them
      _now_ even more unequivocally than I beheld them _then_. The
      teeth!—the teeth!—they were here, and there, and everywhere, and
      visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively
      white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the very
      moment of their first terrible development. Then came the full
      fury of my _monomania_, and I struggled in vain against its
      strange and irresistible influence. In the multiplied objects of
      the external world I had no thoughts but for the teeth. For these
      I longed with a phrenzied desire. All other matters and all
      different interests became absorbed in their single
      contemplation. They—they alone were present to the mental eye,
      and they, in their sole individuality, became the essence of my
      mental life. I held them in every light. I turned them in every
      attitude. I surveyed their characteristics. I dwelt upon their
      peculiarities. I pondered upon their conformation. I mused upon
      the alteration in their nature. I shuddered as I assigned to them
      in imagination a sensitive and sentient power, and even when
      unassisted by the lips, a capability of moral expression.