| 374 | 375 | 376 | 377 | 378 |
| 1 | 100 | 200 | 300 | 400 |
|
mind. Through the gray of the early morning--among the trellised shadows
of the forest at noonday--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, earthy, 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 called to
mind that she had loved me long, and, in an evil moment, I spoke to her
of marriage.
And at length the period of our nuptials was approaching, when, upon
an afternoon in the winter of the year--one of those unseasonably
warm, calm, and misty days which are the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon
(*1),--I sat, (and sat, as I thought, alone,) in the inner apartment of
the library. But, uplifting my eyes, I saw that Berenice stood before
me.
Was it my own excited imagination--or the misty influence of the
atmosphere--or the uncertain twilight of the chamber--or the gray
draperies which fell around her figure--that caused in it so vacillating
and indistinct an outline? I could not tell. She spoke no word; and
I--not for worlds could I have uttered a syllable. An icy chill ran
376
Page
Quick Jump
|