Short Fiction, Edgar Allan Poe [best autobiographies to read TXT] 📗

In the next instant, confessing the power of the wine, he threw himself at full-length upon an ottoman.

A quick step was now heard upon the staircase, and a loud knock at the door rapidly succeeded. I was hastening to anticipate a second disturbance, when a page of Mentoni’s household burst into the room, and faltered out, in a voice choking with emotion, the incoherent words, “My mistress!⁠—my mistress!⁠—Poisoned!⁠—poisoned! Oh, beautiful⁠—oh, beautiful Aphrodite!”

Bewildered, I flew to the ottoman, and endeavored to arouse the sleeper to a sense of the startling intelligence. But his limbs were rigid⁠—his lips were livid⁠—his lately beaming eyes were riveted in death. I staggered back towards the table⁠—my hand fell upon a cracked and blackened goblet⁠—and a consciousness of the entire and terrible truth flashed suddenly over my soul.

Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicæ visitarem, curas meas aliquar tulum fore levatas.

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 today, 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 everyday 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 startled at the sound! Ah, vividly is her image before me now, as in the early days of her lightheartedness 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 meantime 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