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 grey 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 her 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 very 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, startingly 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, aggravated in its symptoms by the immoderate use of opium, assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form--hourly and momentarily gaining vigor--and at length obtaining over me the most singular and incomprehensible ascendancy. This monomania--if I must so term it--consisted in a morbid irritability of the nerves immediately affecting those properties of the mind, in metaphysical science termed the _attentive_. It is more than probable that I am not understood--but I fear that it is indeed 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, as it were, buried themselves in the contemplation of even the most common objects of the universe.