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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 fall 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
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