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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.
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