BLAGDAROSS - from "A Dreamer�s Tales" by Lord Dunsany

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany ( 1878 � 1957)

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany ( 1878 � 1957), was an Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist; his work, mostly in the fantasy genre, was published under the name Lord Dunsany. More than ninety books of his work were published in his lifetime,and both original work and compilations have continued to appear. Dunsany's �uvre includes many hundreds of published short stories, as well as plays, novels and essays. He achieved great fame and success with his early short stories and plays, and during the 1910s was considered one of the greatest living writers of the English-speaking world; he is today best known for his 1924 fantasy novel The King of Elfland's Daughter.

Born and raised in London, to the second-oldest title (created 1439) in the Irish peerage, Dunsany lived much of his life at what may be Ireland's longest-inhabited house, Dunsany Castle near Tara, worked with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, received an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin, was chess and pistol-shooting champion of Ireland, and travelled and hunted extensively. He died in Dublin after an attack of appendicitis. 

On a waste place strewn with bricks in the outskirts of a town twilight was falling. A star or two appeared over the smoke, and distant windows lit mysterious lights. The stillness deepened and the loneliness. Then all the outcast things that are silent by day found voices.

An old cork spoke first. He said: �I grew in Andalusian woods, but never listened to the idle songs of Spain. I only grew strong in the sunlight waiting for my destiny. One day the merchants came and took us all away and carried us all along the shore of the sea, piled high on the backs of donkeys, and in a town by the sea they made me into the shape that I am now. One day they sent me northward to Provence, and there I fulfilled my destiny. For they set me as a guard over the bubbling wine, and I faithfully stood sentinel for twenty years. For the first few years in the bottle that I guarded the wine slept, dreaming of Provence; but as the years went on he grew stronger and stronger, until at last whenever a man went by the wine would put out all his might against me, saying: �Let me go free; let me go free!� And every year his strength increased, and he grew more clamorous when men went by, but never availed to hurl me from my post. But when I had powerfully held him for twenty years they brought him to the banquet and took me from my post, and the wine arose rejoicing and leapt through the veins of men and exalted their souls within them till they stood up in their places and sang Proven�al songs. But me they cast away, me that had been sentinel for twenty years, and was still as strong and staunch as when first I went on guard. Now I am an outcast in a cold northern city, who once have known the Andalusian skies and guarded long ago Proven�al suns that swam in the heart of the rejoicing wine.�

An unstruck match that somebody had dropped spoke next. �I am a child of the sun,� he said, �and an enemy of cities; there is more in my heart than you know of. I am a brother of Etna and Stromboli; I have fires lurking in me that will one day rise up beautiful and strong. We will not go into servitude on any hearth nor work machines for our food, but we will take our own food where we find it on that day when we are strong. There are wonderful children in my heart whose faces shall be more lively than the rainbow; they shall make a compact with the North wind, and he shall lead them forth; all shall be black behind them and black above them, and there shall be nothing beautiful in the world but them; they shall seize upon the earth and it shall be theirs, and nothing shall stop them but our old enemy the sea.�

Then an old broken kettle spoke, and said: �I am the friend of cities. I sit among the slaves upon the hearth, the little flames that have been fed with coal. When the slaves dance behind the iron bars I sit in the middle of the dance and sing and make our masters glad. And I make songs about the comfort of the cat, and about the malice that is towards her in the heart of the dog, and about the crawling of the baby, and about the ease that is in the lord of the house when we brew the good brown tea; and sometimes when the house is very warm and slaves and masters are glad, I rebuke the hostile winds that prowl about the world.�

And then there spoke the piece of an old cord. �I was made in a place of doom, and doomed men made my fibres, working without hope. Therefore there came a grimness into my heart, so that I never let anything go free when once I was set to bind it. Many a thing have I bound relentlessly for months and for years; for I used to come coiling into warehouses where the great boxes lay all open to the air, and one of them would be suddenly closed up, and my fearful strength would be set on him like a curse, and if his timbers groaned when first I seized them, or if they creaked aloud in the lonely night, thinking of woodlands out of which they came, then I only gripped them tighter still, for the poor useless hate is in my soul of those that made me in the place of doom. Yet, for all the things that my prison-clutch has held, the last work that I did was to set something free. I lay idle one night in the gloom on the warehouse floor. Nothing stirred there, and even the spider slept. Towards midnight a great flock of echoes suddenly leapt up from the wooden planks and circled round the roof. A man was coming towards me all alone. And as he came his soul was reproaching him, and I saw that there was a great trouble between the man and his soul, for his soul would not let him be, but went on reproaching him.

�Then the man saw me and said, �This at least will not fail me.� When I heard him say this about me, I determined that whatever he might require of me it should be done to the uttermost. And as I made this determination in my unaltering heart, he picked me up and stood on an empty box that I should have bound on the morrow, and tied one end of me to a dark rafter; and the knot was carelessly tied, because his soul was reproaching him all the while continually and giving him no ease. Then he made the other end of me into a noose, but when the man�s soul saw this it stopped reproaching the man, and cried out to him hurriedly, and besought him to be at peace with it and to do nothing sudden; but the man went on with his work, and put the noose down over his face and underneath his chin, and the soul screamed horribly.

�Then the man kicked the box away with his foot, and the moment he did this I knew that my strength was not great enough to hold him; but I remembered that he had said I would not fail him, and I put all my grim vigour into my fibres and held him by sheer will. Then the soul shouted to me to give way, but I said:

��No; you vexed the man.�

�Then it screamed to me to leave go of the rafter, and already I was slipping, for I only held on to it by a careless knot, but I gripped with my prison grip and said:

��You vexed the man.�

�And very swiftly it said other things to me, but I answered not; and at last the soul that vexed the man that had trusted me flew away and left him at peace. I was never able to bind things any more, for every one of my fibres was worn and wrenched, and even my relentless heart was weakened by the struggle. Very soon afterwards I was thrown out here. I have done my work.�

So they spoke among themselves, but all the while there loomed above them the form of an old rocking-horse complaining bitterly. He said: �I am Blagdaross. Woe is me that I should lie now an outcast among these worthy but little people. Alas! for the days that are gathered, and alas for the Great One that was a master and a soul to me, whose spirit is now shrunken and can never know me again, and no more ride abroad on knightly quests. I was Bucephalus when he was Alexander, and carried him victorious as far as Ind. I encountered dragons with him when he was St. George, I was the horse of Roland fighting for Christendom, and was often Rosinante. I fought in tourneys and went errant upon quests, and met Ulysses and the heroes and the fairies. Or late in the evening, just before the lamps in the nursery were put out, he would suddenly mount me, and we would gallop through Africa. There we would pass by night through tropic forests, and come upon dark rivers sweeping by, all gleaming with the eyes of crocodiles, where the hippopotamus floated down with the stream, and mysterious craft loomed suddenly out of the dark and furtively passed away. And when we had passed through the forest lit by the fireflies we would come to the open plains, and gallop onwards with scarlet flamingoes flying along beside us through the lands of dusky kings, with golden crowns upon their heads and sceptres in their hands, who came running out of their palaces to see us pass. Then I would wheel suddenly, and the dust flew up from my four hoofs as I turned and we galloped home again, and my master was put to bed. And again he would ride abroad on another day till we came to magical fortresses guarded by wizardry and overthrew the dragons at the gate, and ever came back with a princess fairer than the sea.

�But my master began to grow larger in his body and smaller in his soul, and then he rode more seldom upon quests. At last he saw gold and never came again, and I was cast out here among these little people.�

But while the rocking-horse was speaking two boys stole away, unnoticed by their parents, from a house on the edge of the waste place, and were coming across it looking for adventures. One of them carried a broom, and when he saw the rocking-horse he said nothing, but broke off the handle from the broom and thrust it between his braces and his shirt on the left side. Then he mounted the rocking-horse, and drawing forth the broomstick, which was sharp and spiky at the end, said, �Saladin is in this desert with all his paynims, and I am C�ur de Lion.� After a while the other boy said: �Now let me kill Saladin too.� But Blagdaross in his wooden heart, that exulted with thoughts of battle, said: �I am Blagdaross yet !�

THE MONKEY AND THE CROCODILE - Eastern Stories and Legends by Marie L. Shedlock

Bodhisattva

Once upon a time, while Brahmadatta was king of Benares, the Bodhisattva came to life at the foot of Himalaya as a Monkey. He grew strong and sturdy, big of frame, well-to-do, and lived by a curve of the river Ganges in a forest haunt.

Now at that time there was a Crocodile dwelling in the Ganges. The Crocodile�s mate saw the great frame of the monkey, and she conceived a longing for his heart to eat. 

So she said to her lord: 

- �Sir, I desire to eat the heart of that great king of the monkeys !�

- �Good wife,� said the Crocodile, �I live in the water and he lives on dry land: how can we catch him ?�

- �By hook or by crook,� she replied, �caught he must be. If I don�t get him, I shall die.�

- �All right,� answered the Crocodile, consoling her, �don�t trouble yourself. I have a plan; I will give you his heart to eat.�

So when the Bodhisatta was sitting on the bank of the Ganges, after taking a drink of water, the Crocodile drew near, and said:

- �Sir Monkey, why do you live on bad fruits in this old familiar place ? On the other side of the Ganges there is no end to the mango trees, and labuja trees, with fruit sweet as honey ! Is it not better to cross over and have all kinds of wild fruit to eat ?�

- �Lord Crocodile,� the Monkey made answer, �deep and wide is the Ganges: how shall I get across ?�

- �If you will go, I will mount you on my back, and carry you over.�

The Monkey trusted him, and agreed. 

- �Come here, then,� said the other, �up on my back with you !� and up the Monkey climbed. 

But when the Crocodile had swum a little way, he plunged the Monkey under the water.

- �Good friend, you are letting me sink !� cried the Monkey. �What is that for ?�

Said the Crocodile:

- �You think I am carrying you out of pure good nature ? Not a bit of it ! My wife has a longing for your heart, and I want to give it to her to eat !�

- �Friend,� said the Monkey, �it is nice of you to tell me. Why, if our heart were inside us when we go jumping among the tree-tops, it would be all knocked to pieces !�

- �Well, where do you keep it ?� asked the other.

The Bodhisatta pointed out a fig tree, with clusters of ripe fruit, standing not far off. 

- �See,� said he, �there are our hearts hanging on yon fig tree.�

- �If you will show me your heart,� said the Crocodile, �then I won�t kill you.�

- �Take me to the tree, then, and I will point it out to you hanging upon it.�

The Crocodile brought him to the place. The Monkey leapt off his back, and climbing up the fig tree sat upon it. 

- �O silly Crocodile !� said he, �you thought that there were creatures that kept their hearts in a tree top ! You are a fool, and I have outwitted you ! You may keep your fruit to yourself. Your body is great, but you have no sense.� 

And then to explain this idea he uttered the following stanzas:

- �Rose-apple, jack-fruit, mangoes too across the water there I see;

Enough of them, I want them not; my fig is good enough for me !

�Great is your body, verily, but how much smaller is your wit ! Now go your ways, Sir Crocodile, for I have had the best of it.�

The Crocodile, feeling as sad and miserable as if he had lost a thousand pieces of money, went back sorrowing to the place where he lived.

OLD AGE by Anton Chekhov

ZELKOV, an architect with the rank of civil councillor, arrived in his native town, to which he had been invited to restore the church in the cemetery. He had been born in the town, had been at school, had grown up and married in it. But when he got out of the train he scarcely recognized it. Everything was changed. . . . Eighteen years ago when he had moved to Petersburg the street-boys used to catch marmots, for instance, on the spot where now the station was standing; now when one drove into the chief street, a hotel of four storeys stood facing one; in old days there was an ugly grey fence just there; but nothing�neither fences nor houses�had changed as much as the people. From his enquiries of the hotel waiter Uzelkov learned that more than half of the people he remembered were dead, reduced to poverty, forgotten.

�And do you remember Uzelkov?� he asked the old waiter about himself. �Uzelkov the architect who divorced his wife? He used to have a house in Svirebeyevsky Street . . . you must remember.�

�I don�t remember, sir.�

�How is it you don�t remember? The case made a lot of noise, even the cabmen all knew about it. Think, now! Shapkin the attorney managed my divorce for me, the rascal . . . the notorious cardsharper, the fellow who got a thrashing at the club. . . .�

�Ivan Nikolaitch?�

�Yes, yes. . . . Well, is he alive? Is he dead?�

�Alive, sir, thank God. He is a notary now and has an office. He is very well off. He has two houses in Kirpitchny Street. . . . His daughter was married the other day.�

Uzelkov paced up and down the room, thought a bit, and in his boredom made up his mind to go and see Shapkin at his office. When he walked out of the hotel and sauntered slowly towards Kirpitchny Street it was midday. He found Shapkin at his office and scarcely recognized him. From the once well-made, adroit attorney with a mobile, insolent, and always drunken face Shapkin had changed into a modest, grey-headed, decrepit old man.

�You don�t recognize me, you have forgotten me,� began Uzelkov. �I am your old client, Uzelkov.� 

 �Uzelkov, what Uzelkov? Ah!� Shapkin remembered, recognized, and was struck all of a heap. There followed a shower of exclamations, questions, recollections.

�This is a surprise! This is unexpected!� cackled Shapkin. �What can I offer you? Do you care for champagne? Perhaps you would like oysters? My dear fellow, I have had so much from you in my time that I can�t offer you anything equal to the occasion. . . .�

�Please don�t put yourself out . . .� said Uzelkov. �I have no time to spare. I must go at once to the cemetery and examine the church; I have undertaken the restoration of it.�

�That�s capital! We�ll have a snack and a drink and drive together. I have capital horses. I�ll take you there and introduce you to the church-warden; I will arrange it all. . . . But why is it, my angel, you seem to be afraid of me and hold me at arm�s length? Sit a little nearer! There is no need for you to be afraid of me nowadays. He-he! . . . At one time, it is true, I was a cunning blade, a dog of a fellow . . . no one dared approach me; but now I am stiller than water and humbler than the grass. I have grown old, I am a family man, I have children. It�s time I was dead.�

The friends had lunch, had a drink, and with a pair of horses drove out of the town to the cemetery.

�Yes, those were times!� Shapkin recalled as he sat in the sledge. �When you remember them you simply can�t believe in them. Do you remember how you divorced your wife? It�s nearly twenty years ago, and I dare say you have forgotten it all; but I remember it as though I�d divorced you yesterday. Good Lord, what a lot of worry I had over it! I was a sharp fellow, tricky and cunning, a desperate character. . . . Sometimes I was burning to tackle some ticklish business, especially if the fee were a good one, as, for instance, in your case. What did you pay me then? Five or six thousand! That was worth taking trouble for, wasn�t it? You went off to Petersburg and left the whole thing in my hands to do the best I could, and, though Sofya Mihailovna, your wife, came only of a merchant family, she was proud and dignified. To bribe her to take the guilt on herself was difficult, awfully difficult! I would go to negotiate with her, and as soon as she saw me she called to her maid: �Masha, didn�t I tell you not to admit that scoundrel?� Well, I tried one thing and another. . . . I wrote her letters and contrived to meet her accidentally�it was no use! I had to act through a third person. I had a lot of trouble with her for a long time, and she only gave in when you agreed to give her ten thousand. . . . She couldn�t resist ten thousand, she couldn�t hold out. . . . She cried, she spat in my face, but she consented, she took the guilt on herself!�

�I thought it was fifteen thousand she had from me, not ten,� said Uzelkov. 

 �Yes, yes . . . fifteen�I made a mistake,� said Shapkin in confusion. �It�s all over and done with, though, it�s no use concealing it. I gave her ten and the other five I collared for myself. I deceived you both. . . . It�s all over and done with, it�s no use to be ashamed. And indeed, judge for yourself, Boris Petrovitch, weren�t you the very person for me to get money out of? . . . You were a wealthy man and had everything you wanted. . . . Your marriage was an idle whim, and so was your divorce. You were making a lot of money. . . . I remember you made a scoop of twenty thousand over one contract. Whom should I have fleeced if not you? And I must own I envied you. If you grabbed anything they took off their caps to you, while they would thrash me for a rouble and slap me in the face at the club. . . . But there, why recall it? It is high time to forget it.�

�Tell me, please, how did Sofya Mihailovna get on afterwards?�

�With her ten thousand? Very badly. God knows what it was�she lost her head, perhaps, or maybe her pride and her conscience tormented her at having sold her honour, or perhaps she loved you; but, do you know, she took to drink. . . . As soon as she got her money she was off driving about with officers. It was drunkenness, dissipation, debauchery. . . . When she went to a restaurant with officers she was not content with port or anything light, she must have strong brandy, fiery stuff to stupefy her.�

�Yes, she was eccentric. . . . I had a lot to put up with from her . . . sometimes she would take offence at something and begin being hysterical. . . . And what happened afterwards?� 

 �One week passed and then another. . . . I was sitting at home, writing something. All at once the door opened and she walked in . . . drunk. �Take back your cursed money,� she said, and flung a roll of notes in my face. . . . So she could not keep it up. I picked up the notes and counted them. It was five hundred short of the ten thousand, so she had only managed to get through five hundred.�

�Where did you put the money?�

�It�s all ancient history . . . there�s no reason to conceal it now. . . . In my pocket, of course. Why do you look at me like that? Wait a bit for what will come later. . . . It�s a regular novel, a pathological study. A couple of months later I was going home one night in a nasty drunken condition. . . . I lighted a candle, and lo and behold! Sofya Mihailovna was sitting on my sofa, and she was drunk, too, and in a frantic state�as wild as though she had run out of Bedlam. �Give me back my money,� she said, �I have changed my mind; if I must go to ruin I won�t do it by halves, I�ll have my fling! Be quick, you scoundrel, give me my money!� A disgraceful scene!�

�And you . . . gave it her?�

�I gave her, I remember, ten roubles.�

�Oh! How could you?� cried Uzelkov, frowning. �If you couldn�t or wouldn�t have given it her, you might have written to me. . . . And I didn�t know! I didn�t know!�

�My dear fellow, what use would it have been for me to write, considering that she wrote to you herself when she was lying in the hospital afterwards?�

�Yes, but I was so taken up then with my second marriage. I was in such a whirl that I had no thoughts to spare for letters. . . . But you were an outsider, you had no antipathy for Sofya. . . why didn�t you give her a helping hand? . . .� 

 �You can�t judge by the standards of to-day, Boris Petrovitch; that�s how we look at it now, but at the time we thought very differently. . . . Now maybe I�d give her a thousand roubles, but then even that ten-rouble note I did not give her for nothing. It was a bad business! . . . We must forget it. . . . But here we are. . . .�

The sledge stopped at the cemetery gates. Uzelkov and Shapkin got out of the sledge, went in at the gate, and walked up a long, broad avenue. The bare cherry-trees and acacias, the grey crosses and tombstones, were silvered with hoar-frost, every little grain of snow reflected the bright, sunny day. There was the smell there always is in cemeteries, the smell of incense and freshly dug earth. . . .

�Our cemetery is a pretty one,� said Uzelkov, �quite a garden!�

�Yes, but it is a pity thieves steal the tombstones. . . . And over there, beyond that iron monument on the right, Sofya Mihailovna is buried. Would you like to see?�

The friends turned to the right and walked through the deep snow to the iron monument.

�Here it is,� said Shapkin, pointing to a little slab of white marble. �A lieutenant put the stone on her grave.�

Uzelkov slowly took off his cap and exposed his bald head to the sun. Shapkin, looking at him, took off his cap too, and another bald patch gleamed in the sunlight. There was the stillness of the tomb all around as though the air, too, were dead. The friends looked at the grave, pondered, and said nothing.

�She sleeps in peace,� said Shapkin, breaking the silence. �It�s nothing to her now that she took the blame on herself and drank brandy. You must own, Boris Petrovitch . . . .� 

 �Own what?� Uzelkov asked gloomily.

�Why. . . . However hateful the past, it was better than this.�

And Shapkin pointed to his grey head.

�I used not to think of the hour of death. . . . I fancied I could have given death points and won the game if we had had an encounter; but now. . . . But what�s the good of talking!�

Uzelkov was overcome with melancholy. He suddenly had a passionate longing to weep, as once he had longed for love, and he felt those tears would have tasted sweet and refreshing. A moisture came into his eyes and there was a lump in his throat, but . . . Shapkin was standing beside him and Uzelkov was ashamed to show weakness before a witness. He turned back abruptly and went into the church.

Only two hours later, after talking to the churchwarden and looking over the church, he seized a moment when Shapkin was in conversation with the priest and hastened away to weep. . . . He stole up to the grave secretly, furtively, looking round him every minute. The little white slab looked at him pensively, mournfully, and innocently as though a little girl lay under it instead of a dissolute, divorced wife.

�To weep, to weep!� thought Uzelkov.

But the moment for tears had been missed; though the old man b Alinked his eyes, though he worked up his feelings, the tears did not flow nor the lump come in his throat. After standing for ten minutes, with a gesture of despair, Uzelkov went to look for Shapkin. 

BERENICE - a Tale - by EDGAR A. POE.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809 � 1849) was an American writer, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story. Poe is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction.

He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

BERENICE

Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon like the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch, as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon like the rainbow! How is it that from Beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness ? from the covenant of Peace a simile of sorrow ? But thus is it. And as, in ethics, Evil is a consequence of Good, so, in fact, out of Joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been. I have a tale to tell in its own essence rife with horror I would suppress it were it not a record more of feelings than of facts.

My baptismal name is Eg�us that of my family I will not mention. Yet there are no towers in the land more time-honored than my gloomy, grey, hereditary halls. Our line has been called a race of visionaries: and in many striking particulars in the character of the family mansion, in the frescos of the chief saloon, in the tapestries of the dormitories, in the chiseling of some buttresses in the armory, but more especially in the gallery of antique paintings, in the fashion of the library chamber and, lastly, in the very peculiar nature of the library's contents, there is more than sufficient evidence to warrant the belief.

The recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber, and with its volumes of which latter I will say no more. Here died my mother. Herein was I born. But it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before that the soul has no previous existence. You deny it. Let us not argue the matter. Convinced myself I seek not to convince. There is, however, a remembrance of �rial forms of spiritual and meaning eyes of sounds musical yet sad a remembrance which will not be excluded: a memory like a shadow, vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady and like a shadow too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it, while the sunlight of my reason shall exist.

In that chamber was I born. Thus awaking, as it were, from the long night of what seemed, but was not, nonentity at once into the very regions of fairy land into a palace of imagination into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition it is not singular that I gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye that I loitered away my boyhood in books, and dissipated my youth in reverie but it is singular that as years rolled away, and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers it is wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life wonderful how total an inversion took place in the character of my common thoughts. The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, not the material of my everyday existence, but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.

                                                               * * *

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.

To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention rivetted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the floor to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind to lose all sense of motion or physical existence in a state of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to any thing like analysis or explanation.

Yet let me not be misapprehended. The undue, intense, and morbid attention thus excited by objects in their own nature frivolous, must not be confounded in character with that ruminating propensity common to all mankind, and more especially indulged in by persons of ardent imagination. By no means. It was not even, as might be at first supposed, an extreme condition, or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily and essentially distinct and different. In the one instance the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested by an object usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day-dream often replete with luxury, he finds the incitamentum or first cause of his musings utterly vanished and forgotten. In my case the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance. Few deductions, if any�were made; and those few pertinaciously returning in, so to speak, upon the original object as a centre. The meditations were never pleasurable; and, at the termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease. In a word, the powers of mind more particularly exercised were, with me, as I have said before, the attentive, and are, with the day-dreamer, the speculative.

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 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 - 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.

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, I sat, and sat, as I thought alone, in the inner apartment of the library. But uplifting my eyes 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 grey draperies which fell around her figure that caused it to loom up in so unnatural a degree ? I could not tell. Perhaps she had grown taller since her malady. She spoke, however, no word, and I not for worlds could I have uttered a syllable. An icy chill ran through my frame; a sense of insufferable anxiety oppressed me; a consuming curiosity pervaded my soul; and, sinking back upon the chair, I remained for some time breathless, and motionless, and with my eyes rivetted upon her person. Alas! its emaciation was excessive, and not one vestige of the former being lurked in any single line of the contour. My burning glances at length fell upon her face.

The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the once golden hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with ringlets now black as the raven's ring, and jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the reigning melancholy of the countenance. The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless, and I shrunk involuntarily from their glassy stare to the contemplation of the thin and shrunken lips. They parted: and, in a smile of peculiar meaning, the teeth of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view. Would to God that I had never beheld them, or that, having done so, I had died !

*  *  *

                                                          

The shutting of a door disturbed me, and, looking up, I found my cousin had departed from the chamber. But from the disordered chamber of my brain, had not, alas! departed, and would not be driven away, the white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth. Not a speck upon their surface not a shade on their enamel, not a line in their configuration, not an indenture in their edges but what that brief period of her smile had sufficed to brand in upon my memory. I saw them now even more unequivocally than I beheld them then. The teeth ! the teeth ! they were here, and there, and every where, and visibly, and palpably before me, long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the very moment of their first terrible development. Then came the full fury of my monomania, and I struggled in vain against its strange and irresistible influence. In the multiplied objects of the external world I had no thoughts but for the teeth. All other matters and all different interests became absorbed in their single contemplation. They...they alone were present to the mental eye, and they, in their sole individuality, became the essence of my mental life. I held them in every light, I turned them in every attitude. I surveyed their characteristics I dwelt upon their peculiarities I pondered upon their conformation I mused upon the alteration in their nature and shuddered as I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive and sentient power, and even when unassisted by the lips, a capability of moral expression. Of Mad'selle Sall� it has been said, "que tous ses pas etaient des sentiments," and of Berenice I more seriously believed que tous ses dents etaient des id�es.

And the evening closed in upon me thus and then the darkness came, and tarried, and went and the day again dawned and the mists of a second night were now gathering around and still I sat motionless in that solitary room, and still I sat buried in meditation, and still the phantasma of the teeth maintained its terrible ascendancy as, with the most vivid and hideous distinctness, it floated about amid the changing lights and shadows of the chamber. At length there broke forcibly in upon my dreams a wild cry as of horror and dismay; and thereunto, after a pause, succeeded the sound of troubled voices intermingled with many low moanings of sorrow, or of pain. I arose hurriedly from my seat, and, throwing open one of the doors of the library, there stood out in the antechamber a servant maiden, all in tears, and she told me that Berenice was no more. Seized with an epileptic fit she had fallen dead in the early morning, and now, at the closing in of the night, the grave was ready for its tenant, and all the preparations for the burial were completed.

With a heart full of grief, yet reluctantly, and oppressed with awe, I made my way to the bed-chamber of the departed. The room was large, and very dark, and at every step within its gloomy precincts I encountered the paraphernalia of the grave. The coffin, so a menial told me, lay surrounded by the curtains of yonder bed, and in that coffin, he whisperingly assured me, was all that remained of Berenice. Who was it asked me would I not look upon the corpse? I had seen the lips of no one move, yet the question had been demanded, and the echo of the syllables still lingered in the room. It was impossible to refuse; and with a sense of suffocation I dragged myself to the side of the bed. Gently I uplifted the sable draperies of the curtains.

As I let them fall they descended upon my shoulders, and shutting me thus out from the living, enclosed me in the strictest communion with the deceased.

The very atmosphere was redolent of death. The peculiar smell of the coffin sickened me; and I fancied a deleterious odor was already exhaling from the body. I would have given worlds to escape to fly from the pernicious influence of mortality to breathe once again the pure air of the eternal heavens. But I had no longer the power to move my knees tottered beneath me and I remained rooted to the spot, and gazing upon the frightful length of the rigid body as it lay outstretched in the dark coffin without a lid.

God of heaven ! is it possible ? Is it my brain that reels or was it indeed the finger of the enshrouded dead that stirred in the white cerement that bound it ? Frozen with unutterable awe I slowly raised my eyes to the countenance of the corpse. There had been a band around the jaws, but, I know not how, it was broken asunder. The livid lips were wreathed into a species of smile, and, through the enveloping gloom, once again there glared upon me in too palpable reality, the white and glistening, and ghastly teeth of Berenice. I sprang convulsively from the bed, and, uttering no word, rushed forth a maniac from that apartment of triple horror, and mystery, and death.

I found myself again sitting in the library, and again sitting there alone. It seemed that I had newly awakened from a confused and exciting dream. I knew that it was now midnight, and I was well aware that since the setting of the sun Berenice had been interred. But of that dreary period which had intervened I had no positive, at least no definite comprehension. Yet its memory was rife with horror, horror more horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity. It was a fearful page in the record of my existence, written all over with dim, and hideous, and unintelligible recollections. I strived to decypher them, but in vain, while ever and anon, like the spirit of a departed sound, the shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice seemed to be ringing in my ears. I had done a deed, what was it ? And the echoes of the chamber answered me "what was it ?"

On the table beside me burned a lamp, and near it lay a little box of ebony. It was a box of no remarkable character, and I had seen it frequently before, it being the property of the family physician; but how came it there upon my table, and why did I shudder in regarding it ? These were things in no manner to be accounted for, and my eyes at length dropped to the open pages of a book, and to a sentence underscored therein. The words were the singular, but simple words of the poet Ebn Zaiat. "Dicebant mihi sodales si sepulchrum amic� visitarem curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas." Why then, as I perused them, did the hairs of my head erect themselves on end, and the blood of my body congeal within my veins ?

There came a light tap at the library door, and, pale as the tenant of a tomb, a menial entered upon tiptoe. His looks were wild with terror, and he spoke to me in a voice tremulous, husky, and very low. What said he ? some broken sentences I heard. He told of a wild cry heard in the silence of the night of the gathering together of the household of a search in the direction of the sound and then his tones grew thrillingly distinct as he whispered me of a violated grave of a disfigured body discovered upon its margin a body enshrouded, yet still breathing, still palpitating, still alive !

He pointed to my garments they were muddy and clotted with gore. I spoke not, and he took me gently by the hand but it was indented with the impress of human nails. He directed my attention to some object against the wall, I looked at it for some minutes it was a spade. With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the ebony box that lay upon it. But I could not force it open, and in my tremor it slipped from out my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces, and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with many white and glistening substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.

SONGS UNSUNG (1883) - by LEWIS MORRIS - Poems

Sir Lewis Morris (1833 � 1907) was a Welsh academic and politician. He was also a popular poet of the Anglo-Welsh school.

SONGS UNSUNG. 

Above the abysmal undivided deep

A train of glory streaming from afar;

And in the van, that wake the worlds from sleep,

One on whose forehead shines the Morning Star.

------

Long-rolling surges of a falling sea,

Smiting the sheer cliffs of an unknown shore;

And by a fanged rock, swaying helplessly

A mast with broken cordage - nothing more.

------

Three peaks, one loftier, all in virgin white,

Poised high in cloudland when the day is done,

And on the mid-bridge, far above the night,

The rose-red of the long-departed sun.

------

A wild girl reeling, helpless, like to fall,

Down and the busy street at dawn in midsummer;

And one who had clean forgot their past and all,

From a lit litter of palmcase looks to her.

------

A young man, only clothed with youth's best bloom,

In the form of an angel, not in the eye;

Hard by, and fell worm creeping from a tomb,

And one, wide-eyed, who cries, "The Enemy!"

------

A lake of molten fire that swell and surge

And fall in the thunders on the burning verge;

And one of the queen rapt, with illumined face,

Who will defy the Goddess of the place.

------

Eros under a red-cupped tree, asleep,

And floating round him, like cherubim,

Fair rosy laughter-dimpled loves, who peep

Upon the languid loosened limbs of him.

------

A darkling gateway, thronged with entering ghosts,

And a grave janitor, who seems to say:

"Woe, woe to the youth, to life, which idly boasts;

I'm the End, and I'm the appointed Way. "

------

A young faun playing music on a reed,

Deep in a leafy dell in Arcady:

Three girl-nymphs fair, in mind thinking take heed

Of the strange youth's mysterious melody.

------

A flare of lamplight in a shameful place

Full of wild revel and unchecked offense,

And in the middle, one fresh scarce-sullied face,

Within her eyes, and a dreadful innocence.

------

A quire of seraphs, chanting row on row,

With lute and viol and high trumpet notes;

And, above all, their soft young eyes aglow-

Child angels, making a laugh from full clear throats.

------

Someone, on a cliff at dawn, in agony;

Below, and scaly horror on the sea,

Lashing the leaden surge. Fast-bound, and maid

Waits on the verge, alone, but unafraid.

------

A poisonous, dead, sad sea-marsh, fringed with pines,

Thin-set with mouldering churches, old as Time;

Beyond, on high, just touched with wintry rime,

The long chain of the autumn Apennines.

------

A god-like Presence, beautiful as dawn,

Watching, on an untrodden summit white,

The Earth's last day grows full and fade in the night;

Then, with a sigh, the Presence is withdrawn.

------

A sheer rock-island, frowning on the sea

Where no ship sails, nor ever life may be:

Thousands of leagues around, from pole to field,

The unbounded lonely ocean-currents roll.

------

Young maids wandering on a flower-lit lawn,

In springtime of their lives as of the year;

Meanwhile, unnoticed, swift, a thing of fear,

Across the Sun, a deadly shadow drawn.

------

Slow, hopeless, overborne, without a word,

Two issuing, as if from Paradise;

Behind them, stern, and with unpitying eyes,

Their former selves, wielding a two-edged sword.

------

A weary woman tricked with gold and gem,

Wearing some strange barbarian diadem,

Scorn on her lips, and like a hidden fire,

Within her eyes, cruel unslaked desire.

Two aged figures, poor, and blurred with tears;

Their child, a bold proud woman, sweeping by;

A hard cold face, which pities not nor fears,

And all contempt and evil in her eye.

Around and a harpsichord, and a blue-eyed throng

Of long-dead children, rapt in sounds devout,

In some old grange, while on that silent song

The sabbath twilight fades and the stars come out.

The end of things created; Dreadful night,

Advancing swift on sky, earth and sea;

But at the zenith and departing light,

A soaring countless blessed company.

 THE LESSON OF TIME.

Lead thou me, Spirit of the World, and I

Will follow where thou leadest, willingly;

Not with the careless sceptic's idle mood,

Nor blindly seeking some unreal good;

For I have come, long since to that full day

Whose morning mists have fled and curled away

That breathless afternoon-tide when the Sun

Halts, as it were, before his journey done.

Calm as a river broadening through the plain,

Which never plunges down the rocks again,

But, clearly mirrored in its tranquil deep,

Holds tower and spire and forest as in sleep.

How old and worn the metaphor appears,

Old as the tale of passing hopes and fears!

New as the springtide air, which day by day

Breathes on young lives, and speeds them on their way.

The Roman knew it, and the Hellene too;

Assyrian and Egyptian proved it true;

Who found for youth's young glory and its glow

Serener life, and calmer tides run slow.

And them oblivion takes, and those before,

Whose very name and race we know no more,

To whom, oh Spirit of the World and Man,

Thou didst reveal Thyself when Time began,

They felt, as I, what none may understand;

They touched through darkness on a hidden hand;

They marked their hopes, their faiths, their longings fade,

And found a solitude themselves had made;

They came, as I, to hope which conquers doubt,

Though sun and moon and every star go out;

They ceased, while at their side a still voice said,

"Fear not, have courage; blessed are the dead."

They were my brothers�of one blood with me,

As with the unborn myriads who shall be:

I am content to rise and fall as they;

I watch the rising of the Perfect Day.

Lead thou me, Spirit, willing and content

To be, as thou wouldst have me, wholly spent.

I am thine own, I neither strive nor cry:

Stretch forth thy hand, I follow, silently.

ONE DAY.

One day, one day, our lives shall seem

Thin as a brief forgotten dream:

One day, our souls by life opprest,

Shall ask no other boon than rest.

And shall no hope nor longing come,

No memory of our former home,

No yearning for the loved, the dear

Dead lives that are no longer here?

If this be age, and age no more

Recall the hopes, the fears of yore,

The dear dead mother's accents mild,

The lisping of the little child,

Come, Death, and slay us ere the blood

Run slow, and turn our lives from good

For only in such memories we

Consent to linger and to be.

SEASONS.

The cold winds rave on the icy river,

The leafless branches complain and shiver,

The snow clouds sweep on, to a dreary tune,

Can these be the earth and the heavens of June ?

When the blossoming trees gleam in virginal white,

And heaven's gate opens wide in the lucid night,

And there comes no sound on the perfumed air

But the passionate brown bird, carolling fair,

And the lush grass in upland and lowland stands deep,

And the loud landrail lulls the children to sleep,

And the white still road and the thick-leaved wood

Are haunted by fanciful solitude;

And by garden and lane men and maidens walk,

Busied with trivial, loverlike talk;

And the white and the red rose, newly blown,

Open each, with a perfume and grace of its own.

The cold wind sweeps o'er the desolate hill,

The stream is bound fast and the wolds are chill;

And by the dead flats, where the cold blasts moan,

A bent body wearily plods alone.

 LIFE.

Like to a star, or to a fire,

Which ever brighter grown, or higher,

Doth shine forth fixed, or doth aspire;

Or to a glance, or to a sigh;

Or to a low wind whispering by,

Which scarce has risen ere it die;

Or to a bird, whose rapid flight

Eludes the dazed observer's sight,

Or a stray shaft of glancing light,

That breaks upon the gathered gloom

Which veils some monumental tomb;

Or some sweet Spring flowers' fleeting bloom;

Mixed part of reason, part belief,

Of pain and pleasure, joy and grief,

As changeful as the Spring, and brief;

A wave, a shadow, a breath, a strife,

With change on change for ever rife:

This is the thing we know as life.