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 unintelligible sentence "_Mortuus est Dei filius; credibile 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 fearful alteration produced by her unhappy malady, in the _moral_ condition of Berenice, would afford me many objects for the exercise of that intense and morbid meditation whose nature I have been at some trouble in explaining, yet such was not by any means 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, and 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 grey of the early morning--among the trellissed shadows of the forest at noon-day--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--earthly--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 knew that she had loved me long, and, in an evil moment, I spoke to her of marriage.