No More Learning

This year, in my case, reader,
was the one which we have now reached; though it stood, I confess, as a
parenthesis between years of a gloomier character. It was a year of
brilliant water (to speak after the manner of jewellers), set as it were,
and insulated, in the gloom and cloudy melancholy of opium. Strange as
it may sound, I had a little before this time descended suddenly, and
without any considerable effort, from 320 grains of opium (_i. e_. eight
{16} thousand drops of laudanum) per day, to forty grains, or one-eighth
part. Instantaneously, and as if by magic, the cloud of profoundest
melancholy which rested upon my brain, like some black vapours that I
have seen roll away from the summits of mountains, drew off in one day
([Greek text]); passed off with its murky banners as simultaneously as a
ship that has been stranded, and is floated off by a spring tide--

That moveth altogether, if it move at all.

Now, then, I was again happy; I now took only 1000 drops of laudanum per
day; and what was that? A latter spring had come to close up the season
of youth; my brain performed its functions as healthily as ever before; I
read Kant again, and again I understood him, or fancied that I did. Again
my feelings of pleasure expanded themselves to all around me; and if any
man from Oxford or Cambridge, or from neither, had been announced to me
in my unpretending cottage, I should have welcomed him with as sumptuous
a reception as so poor a man could offer. Whatever else was wanting to a
wise man's happiness, of laudanum I would have given him as much as he
wished, and in a golden cup. And, by the way, now that I speak of giving
laudanum away, I remember about this time a little incident, which I
mention because, trifling as it was, the reader will soon meet it again
in my dreams, which it influenced more fearfully than could be imagined.
One day a Malay knocked at my door. What business a Malay could have to
transact amongst English mountains I cannot conjecture; but possibly he
was on his road to a seaport about forty miles distant.

The servant who opened the door to him was a young girl, born and bred
amongst the mountains, who had never seen an Asiatic dress of any sort;
his turban therefore confounded her not a little; and as it turned out
that his attainments in English were exactly of the same extent as hers
in the Malay, there seemed to be an impassable gulf fixed between all
communication of ideas, if either party had happened to possess any. In
this dilemma, the girl, recollecting the reputed learning of her master
(and doubtless giving me credit for a knowledge of all the languages of
the earth besides perhaps a few of the lunar ones), came and gave me to
understand that there was a sort of demon below, whom she clearly
imagined that my art could exorcise from the house. I did not
immediately go down, but when I did, the group which presented itself,
arranged as it was by accident, though not very elaborate, took hold of
my fancy and my eye in a way that none of the statuesque attitudes
exhibited in the ballets at the Opera-house, though so ostentatiously
complex, had ever done. In a cottage kitchen, but panelled on the wall
with dark wood that from age and rubbing resembled oak, and looking more
like a rustic hall of entrance than a kitchen, stood the Malay--his
turban and loose trousers of dingy white relieved upon the dark
panelling. He had placed himself nearer to the girl than she seemed to
relish, though her native spirit of mountain intrepidity contended with
the feeling of simple awe which her countenance expressed as she gazed
upon the tiger-cat before her. And a more striking picture there could
not be imagined than the beautiful English face of the girl, and its
exquisite fairness, together with her erect and independent attitude,
contrasted with the sallow and bilious skin of the Malay, enamelled or
veneered with mahogany by marine air, his small, fierce, restless eyes,
thin lips, slavish gestures and adorations. Half-hidden by the ferocious-
looking Malay was a little child from a neighbouring cottage who had
crept in after him, and was now in the act of reverting its head and
gazing upwards at the turban and the fiery eyes beneath it, whilst with
one hand he caught at the dress of the young woman for protection. My
knowledge of the Oriental tongues is not remarkably extensive, being
indeed confined to two words--the Arabic word for barley and the Turkish
for opium (madjoon), which I have learned from _Anastasius_; and as I had
neither a Malay dictionary nor even Adelung's _Mithridates_, which might
have helped me to a few words, I addressed him in some lines from the
Iliad, considering that, of such languages as I possessed, Greek, in
point of longitude, came geographically nearest to an Oriental one. He
worshipped me in a most devout manner, and replied in what I suppose was
Malay. In this way I saved my reputation with my neighbours, for the
Malay had no means of betraying the secret. He lay down upon the floor
for about an hour, and then pursued his journey. On his departure I
presented him with a piece of opium. To him, as an Orientalist, I
concluded that opium must be familiar; and the expression of his face
convinced me that it was. Nevertheless, I was struck with some little
consternation when I saw him suddenly raise his hand to his mouth, and,
to use the schoolboy phrase, bolt the whole, divided into three pieces,
at one mouthful. The quantity was enough to kill three dragoons and
their horses, and I felt some alarm for the poor creature; but what could
be done? I had given him the opium in compassion for his solitary life,
on recollecting that if he had travelled on foot from London it must be
nearly three weeks since he could have exchanged a thought with any human
being. I could not think of violating the laws of hospitality by having
him seized and drenched with an emetic, and thus frightening him into a
notion that we were going to sacrifice him to some English idol. No:
there was clearly no help for it. He took his leave, and for some days I
felt anxious, but as I never heard of any Malay being found dead, I
became convinced that he was used {17} to opium; and that I must have
done him the service I designed by giving him one night of respite from
the pains of wandering.

This incident I have digressed to mention, because this Malay (partly
from the picturesque exhibition he assisted to frame, partly from the
anxiety I connected with his image for some days) fastened afterwards
upon my dreams, and brought other Malays with him, worse than himself,
that ran "a-muck" {18} at me, and led me into a world of troubles. But
to quit this episode, and to return to my intercalary year of happiness.
I have said already, that on a subject so important to us all as
happiness, we should listen with pleasure to any man's experience or
experiments, even though he were but a plough-boy, who cannot be supposed
to have ploughed very deep into such an intractable soil as that of human
pains and pleasures, or to have conducted his researches upon any very
enlightened principles. But I who have taken happiness both in a solid
and liquid shape, both boiled and unboiled, both East India and
Turkey--who have conducted my experiments upon this interesting subject
with a sort of galvanic battery, and have, for the general benefit of the
world, inoculated myself, as it were, with the poison of 8000 drops of
laudanum per day (just for the same reason as a French surgeon inoculated
himself lately with cancer, an English one twenty years ago with plague,
and a third, I know not of what nation, with hydrophobia), I (it will be
admitted) must surely know what happiness is, if anybody does. And
therefore I will here lay down an analysis of happiness; and as the most
interesting mode of communicating it, I will give it, not didactically,
but wrapped up and involved in a picture of one evening, as I spent every
evening during the intercalary year when laudanum, though taken daily,
was to me no more than the elixir of pleasure. This done, I shall quit
the subject of happiness altogether, and pass to a very different
one--_the pains of opium_.

Let there be a cottage standing in a valley, eighteen miles from any
town--no spacious valley, but about two miles long by three-quarters of a
mile in average width; the benefit of which provision is that all the
family resident within its circuit will compose, as it were, one larger
household, personally familiar to your eye, and more or less interesting
to your affections. Let the mountains be real mountains, between 3,000
and 4,000 feet high, and the cottage a real cottage, not (as a witty
author has it) "a cottage with a double coach-house;" let it be, in fact
(for I must abide by the actual scene), a white cottage, embowered with
flowering shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession of flowers upon the
walls and clustering round the windows through all the months of spring,
summer, and autumn--beginning, in fact, with May roses, and ending with
jasmine. Let it, however, _not_ be spring, nor summer, nor autumn, but
winter in his sternest shape. This is a most important point in the
science of happiness. And I am surprised to see people overlook it, and
think it matter of congratulation that winter is going, or, if coming, is
not likely to be a severe one. On the contrary, I put up a petition
annually for as much snow, hail, frost, or storm, of one kind or other,
as the skies can possibly afford us. Surely everybody is aware of the
divine pleasures which attend a winter fireside, candles at four o'clock,
warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains
flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are
raging audibly without,

And at the doors and windows seem to call,
As heav'n and earth they would together mell;
Yet the least entrance find they none at all;
Whence sweeter grows our rest secure in massy hall.

_Castle of Indolence_.

All these are items in the description of a winter evening which must
surely be familiar to everybody born in a high latitude. And it is
evident that most of these delicacies, like ice-cream, require a very low
temperature of the atmosphere to produce them; they are fruits which
cannot be ripened without weather stormy or inclement in some way or
other. I am not "_particular_," as people say, whether it be snow, or
black frost, or wind so strong that (as Mr. --- says) "you may lean your
back against it like a post. " I can put up even with rain, provided it
rains cats and dogs; but something of the sort I must have, and if I have
it not, I think myself in a manner ill-used; for why am I called on to
pay so heavily for winter, in coals and candles, and various privations
that will occur even to gentlemen, if I am not to have the article good
of its kind? No, a Canadian winter for my money, or a Russian one, where
every man is but a co-proprietor with the north wind in the fee-simple of
his own ears. Indeed, so great an epicure am I in this matter that I
cannot relish a winter night fully if it be much past St. Thomas's day,
and have degenerated into disgusting tendencies to vernal appearances.
No, it must be divided by a thick wall of dark nights from all return of
light and sunshine. From the latter weeks of October to Christmas Eve,
therefore, is the period during which happiness is in season, which, in
my judgment, enters the room with the tea-tray; for tea, though ridiculed
by those who are naturally of coarse nerves, or are become so from wine-
drinking, and are not susceptible of influence from so refined a
stimulant, will always be the favourite beverage of the intellectual;
and, for my part, I would have joined Dr. Johnson in a _bellum
internecinum_ against Jonas Hanway, or any other impious person, who
should presume to disparage it. But here, to save myself the trouble of
too much verbal description, I will introduce a painter, and give him
directions for the rest of the picture. Painters do not like white
cottages, unless a good deal weather-stained; but as the reader now
understands that it is a winter night, his services will not be required
except for the inside of the house.

Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, and not more than seven
and a half feet high. This, reader, is somewhat ambitiously styled in my
family the drawing-room; but being contrived "a double debt to pay," it
is also, and more justly, termed the library, for it happens that books
are the only article of property in which I am richer than my neighbours.
Of these I have about five thousand, collected gradually since my
eighteenth year. Therefore, painter, put as many as you can into this
room. Make it populous with books, and, furthermore, paint me a good
fire, and furniture plain and modest, befitting the unpretending cottage
of a scholar. And near the fire paint me a tea-table, and (as it is
clear that no creature can come to see one such a stormy night) place
only two cups and saucers on the tea-tray; and, if you know how to paint
such a thing symbolically or otherwise, paint me an eternal
tea-pot--eternal _a parte ante_ and _a parte post_--for I usually drink
tea from eight o'clock at night to four o'clock in the morning. And as
it is very unpleasant to make tea or to pour it out for oneself, paint me
a lovely young woman sitting at the table. Paint her arms like Aurora's
and her smiles like Hebe's. But no, dear M. , not even in jest let me
insinuate that thy power to illuminate my cottage rests upon a tenure so
perishable as mere personal beauty, or that the witchcraft of angelic
smiles lies within the empire of any earthly pencil. Pass then, my good
painter, to something more within its power; and the next article brought
forward should naturally be myself--a picture of the Opium-eater, with
his "little golden receptacle of the pernicious drug" lying beside him on
the table. As to the opium, I have no objection to see a picture of
_that_, though I would rather see the original. You may paint it if you
choose, but I apprise you that no "little" receptacle would, even in
1816, answer _my_ purpose, who was at a distance from the "stately
Pantheon," and all druggists (mortal or otherwise). No, you may as well
paint the real receptacle, which was not of gold, but of glass, and as
much like a wine-decanter as possible. Into this you may put a quart of
ruby-coloured laudanum; that, and a book of German Metaphysics placed by
its side, will sufficiently attest my being in the neighbourhood. But as
to myself--there I demur. I admit that, naturally, I ought to occupy the
foreground of the picture; that being the hero of the piece, or (if you
choose) the criminal at the bar, my body should be had into court. This
seems reasonable; but why should I confess on this point to a painter? or
why confess at all? If the public (into whose private ear I am
confidentially whispering my confessions, and not into any painter's)
should chance to have framed some agreeable picture for itself of the
Opium-eater's exterior, should have ascribed to him, romantically an
elegant person or a handsome face, why should I barbarously tear from it
so pleasing a delusion--pleasing both to the public and to me? No; paint
me, if at all, according to your own fancy, and as a painter's fancy
should teem with beautiful creations, I cannot fail in that way to be a
gainer. And now, reader, we have run through all the ten categories of
my condition as it stood about 1816-17, up to the middle of which latter
year I judge myself to have been a happy man, and the elements of that
happiness I have endeavoured to place before you in the above sketch of
the interior of a scholar's library, in a cottage among the mountains, on
a stormy winter evening.

But now, farewell--a long farewell--to happiness, winter or summer!
Farewell to smiles and laughter! Farewell to peace of mind! Farewell to
hope and to tranquil dreams, and to the blessed consolations of sleep.
For more than three years and a half I am summoned away from these. I am
now arrived at an Iliad of woes, for I have now to record



THE PAINS OF OPIUM


As when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.

SHELLEY'S _Revolt of Islam_.

Reader, who have thus far accompanied me, I must request your attention
to a brief explanatory note on three points:

1. For several reasons I have not been able to compose the notes for
this part of my narrative into any regular and connected shape. I give
the notes disjointed as I find them, or have now drawn them up from
memory. Some of them point to their own date, some I have dated, and
some are undated. Whenever it could answer my purpose to transplant them
from the natural or chronological order, I have not scrupled to do so.
Sometimes I speak in the present, sometimes in the past tense. Few of
the notes, perhaps, were written exactly at the period of time to which
they relate; but this can little affect their accuracy, as the
impressions were such that they can never fade from my mind. Much has
been omitted. I could not, without effort, constrain myself to the task
of either recalling, or constructing into a regular narrative, the whole
burthen of horrors which lies upon my brain. This feeling partly I plead
in excuse, and partly that I am now in London, and am a helpless sort of
person, who cannot even arrange his own papers without assistance; and I
am separated from the hands which are wont to perform for me the offices
of an amanuensis.

2. You will think perhaps that I am too confidential and communicative
of my own private history. It may be so. But my way of writing is
rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider
who is listening to me; and if I stop to consider what is proper to be
said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part
at all is proper. The fact is, I place myself at a distance of fifteen
or twenty years ahead of this time, and suppose myself writing to those
who will be interested about me hereafter; and wishing to have some
record of time, the entire history of which no one can know but myself, I
do it as fully as I am able with the efforts I am now capable of making,
because I know not whether I can ever find time to do it again.

3. It will occur to you often to ask, why did I not release myself from
the horrors of opium by leaving it off or diminishing it? To this I must
answer briefly: it might be supposed that I yielded to the fascinations
of opium too easily; it cannot be supposed that any man can be charmed by
its terrors. The reader may be sure, therefore, that I made attempts
innumerable to reduce the quantity. I add, that those who witnessed the
agonies of those attempts, and not myself, were the first to beg me to
desist. But could not have I reduced it a drop a day, or, by adding
water, have bisected or trisected a drop? A thousand drops bisected
would thus have taken nearly six years to reduce, and that way would
certainly not have answered. But this is a common mistake of those who
know nothing of opium experimentally; I appeal to those who do, whether
it is not always found that down to a certain point it can be reduced
with ease and even pleasure, but that after that point further reduction
causes intense suffering. Yes, say many thoughtless persons, who know
not what they are talking of, you will suffer a little low spirits and
dejection for a few days. I answer, no; there is nothing like low
spirits; on the contrary, the mere animal spirits are uncommonly raised:
the pulse is improved: the health is better. It is not there that the
suffering lies. It has no resemblance to the sufferings caused by
renouncing wine. It is a state of unutterable irritation of stomach
(which surely is not much like dejection), accompanied by intense
perspirations, and feelings such as I shall not attempt to describe
without more space at my command.

I shall now enter _in medias res_, and shall anticipate, from a time when
my opium pains might be said to be at their _acme_, an account of their
palsying effects on the intellectual faculties.

* * * * *

My studies have now been long interrupted. I cannot read to myself with
any pleasure, hardly with a moment's endurance. Yet I read aloud
sometimes for the pleasure of others, because reading is an
accomplishment of mine, and, in the slang use of the word
"accomplishment" as a superficial and ornamental attainment, almost the
only one I possess; and formerly, if I had any vanity at all connected
with any endowment or attainment of mine, it was with this, for I had
observed that no accomplishment was so rare. Players are the worst
readers of all:--reads vilely; and Mrs. ---, who is so celebrated, can
read nothing well but dramatic compositions: Milton she cannot read
sufferably. People in general either read poetry without any passion at
all, or else overstep the modesty of nature, and read not like scholars.
Of late, if I have felt moved by anything it has been by the grand
lamentations of Samson Agonistes, or the great harmonies of the Satanic
speeches in Paradise Regained, when read aloud by myself. A young lady
sometimes comes and drinks tea with us: at her request and M. 's, I now
and then read W-'s poems to them. (W. , by-the-bye is the only poet I
ever met who could read his own verses: often indeed he reads admirably. )

For nearly two years I believe that I read no book, but one; and I owe it
to the author, in discharge of a great debt of gratitude, to mention what
that was. The sublimer and more passionate poets I still read, as I have
said, by snatches, and occasionally. But my proper vocation, as I well
know, was the exercise of the analytic understanding. Now, for the most
part analytic studies are continuous, and not to be pursued by fits and
starts, or fragmentary efforts. Mathematics, for instance, intellectual
philosophy, &c, were all become insupportable to me; I shrunk from them
with a sense of powerless and infantine feebleness that gave me an
anguish the greater from remembering the time when I grappled with them
to my own hourly delight; and for this further reason, because I had
devoted the labour of my whole life, and had dedicated my intellect,
blossoms and fruits, to the slow and elaborate toil of constructing one
single work, to which I had presumed to give the title of an unfinished
work of Spinosa's--viz. , _De Emendatione Humani Intellectus_. This was
now lying locked up, as by frost, like any Spanish bridge or aqueduct,
begun upon too great a scale for the resources of the architect; and
instead of reviving me as a monument of wishes at least, and aspirations,
and a life of labour dedicated to the exaltation of human nature in that
way in which God had best fitted me to promote so great an object, it was
likely to stand a memorial to my children of hopes defeated, of baffled
efforts, of materials uselessly accumulated, of foundations laid that
were never to support a super-structure--of the grief and the ruin of the
architect. In this state of imbecility I had, for amusement, turned my
attention to political economy; my understanding, which formerly had been
as active and restless as a hyaena, could not, I suppose (so long as I
lived at all) sink into utter lethargy; and political economy offers this
advantage to a person in my state, that though it is eminently an organic
science (no part, that is to say, but what acts on the whole as the whole
again reacts on each part), yet the several parts may be detached and
contemplated singly. Great as was the prostration of my powers at this
time, yet I could not forget my knowledge; and my understanding had been
for too many years intimate with severe thinkers, with logic, and the
great masters of knowledge, not to be aware of the utter feebleness of
the main herd of modern economists. I had been led in 1811 to look into
loads of books and pamphlets on many branches of economy; and, at my
desire, M. sometimes read to me chapters from more recent works, or parts
of parliamentary debates. I saw that these were generally the very dregs
and rinsings of the human intellect; and that any man of sound head, and
practised in wielding logic with a scholastic adroitness, might take up
the whole academy of modern economists, and throttle them between heaven
and earth with his finger and thumb, or bray their fungus-heads to powder
with a lady's fan. At length, in 1819, a friend in Edinburgh sent me
down Mr. Ricardo's book; and recurring to my own prophetic anticipation
of the advent of some legislator for this science, I said, before I had
finished the first chapter, "Thou art the man! " Wonder and curiosity
were emotions that had long been dead in me. Yet I wondered once more: I
wondered at myself that I could once again be stimulated to the effort of
reading, and much more I wondered at the book. Had this profound work
been really written in England during the nineteenth century? Was it
possible? I supposed thinking {19} had been extinct in England. Could
it be that an Englishman, and he not in academic bowers, but oppressed by
mercantile and senatorial cares, had accomplished what all the
universities of Europe and a century of thought had failed even to
advance by one hair's breadth? All other writers had been crushed and
overlaid by the enormous weight of facts and documents. Mr. Ricardo had
deduced _a priori_ from the understanding itself laws which first gave a
ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had constructed
what had been but a collection of tentative discussions into a science of
regular proportions, now first standing on an eternal basis.

Thus did one single work of a profound understanding avail to give me a
pleasure and an activity which I had not known for years. It roused me
even to write, or at least to dictate what M. wrote for me. It seemed to
me that some important truths had escaped even "the inevitable eye" of
Mr. Ricardo; and as these were for the most part of such a nature that I
could express or illustrate them more briefly and elegantly by algebraic
symbols than in the usual clumsy and loitering diction of economists, the
whole would not have filled a pocket-book; and being so brief, with M.
for my amanuensis, even at this time, incapable as I was of all general
exertion, I drew up my _Prolegomena to all future Systems of Political
Economy_. I hope it will not be found redolent of opium; though, indeed,
to most people the subject is a sufficient opiate.

This exertion, however, was but a temporary flash, as the sequel showed;
for I designed to publish my work. Arrangements were made at a
provincial press, about eighteen miles distant, for printing it. An
additional compositor was retained for some days on this account. The
work was even twice advertised, and I was in a manner pledged to the
fulfilment of my intention. But I had a preface to write, and a
dedication, which I wished to make a splendid one, to Mr. Ricardo. I
found myself quite unable to accomplish all this. The arrangements were
countermanded, the compositor dismissed, and my "Prolegomena" rested
peacefully by the side of its elder and more dignified brother.

I have thus described and illustrated my intellectual torpor in terms
that apply more or less to every part of the four years during which I
was under the Circean spells of opium. But for misery and suffering, I
might indeed be said to have existed in a dormant state. I seldom could
prevail on myself to write a letter; an answer of a few words to any that
I received was the utmost that I could accomplish, and often _that_ not
until the letter had lain weeks or even months on my writing-table.
Without the aid of M. all records of bills paid or _to be_ paid must have
perished, and my whole domestic economy, whatever became of Political
Economy, must have gone into irretrievable confusion. I shall not
afterwards allude to this part of the case. It is one, however, which
the opium-eater will find, in the end, as oppressive and tormenting as
any other, from the sense of incapacity and feebleness, from the direct
embarrassments incident to the neglect or procrastination of each day's
appropriate duties, and from the remorse which must often exasperate the
stings of these evils to a reflective and conscientious mind. The opium-
eater loses none of his moral sensibilities or aspirations. He wishes
and longs as earnestly as ever to realize what he believes possible, and
feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is
possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of
power to attempt. He lies under the weight of incubus and nightmare; he
lies in sight of all that he would fain perform, just as a man forcibly
confined to his bed by the mortal languor of a relaxing disease, who is
compelled to witness injury or outrage offered to some object of his
tenderest love: he curses the spells which chain him down from motion; he
would lay down his life if he might but get up and walk; but he is
powerless as an infant, and cannot even attempt to rise.

I now pass to what is the main subject of these latter confessions, to
the history and journal of what took place in my dreams, for these were
the immediate and proximate cause of my acutest suffering.

The first notice I had of any important change going on in this part of
my physical economy was from the reawakening of a state of eye generally
incident to childhood, or exalted states of irritability. I know not
whether my reader is aware that many children, perhaps most, have a power
of painting, as it were upon the darkness, all sorts of phantoms. In
some that power is simply a mechanical affection of the eye; others have
a voluntary or semi-voluntary power to dismiss or to summon them; or, as
a child once said to me when I questioned him on this matter, "I can tell
them to go, and they go ---, but sometimes they come when I don't tell
them to come. " Whereupon I told him that he had almost as unlimited a
command over apparitions as a Roman centurion over his soldiers. --In the
middle of 1817, I think it was, that this faculty became positively
distressing to me: at night, when I lay awake in bed, vast processions
passed along in mournful pomp; friezes of never-ending stories, that to
my feelings were as sad and solemn as if they were stories drawn from
times before OEdipus or Priam, before Tyre, before Memphis. And at the
same time a corresponding change took place in my dreams; a theatre
seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented
nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour. And the four
following facts may be mentioned as noticeable at this time:

1. That as the creative state of the eye increased, a sympathy seemed to
arise between the waking and the dreaming states of the brain in one
point--that whatsoever I happened to call up and to trace by a voluntary
act upon the darkness was very apt to transfer itself to my dreams, so
that I feared to exercise this faculty; for, as Midas turned all things
to gold that yet baffled his hopes and defrauded his human desires, so
whatsoever things capable of being visually represented I did but think
of in the darkness, immediately shaped themselves into phantoms of the
eye; and by a process apparently no less inevitable, when thus once
traced in faint and visionary colours, like writings in sympathetic ink,
they were drawn out by the fierce chemistry of my dreams into
insufferable splendour that fretted my heart.

2. For this and all other changes in my dreams were accompanied by deep-
seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly incommunicable
by words. I seemed every night to descend, not metaphorically, but
literally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below
depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever reascend. Nor
did I, by waking, feel that I _had_ reascended. This I do not dwell
upon; because the state of gloom which attended these gorgeous
spectacles, amounting at last to utter darkness, as of some suicidal
despondency, cannot be approached by words.

3. The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both
powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, &c. , were exhibited in
proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space
swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This,
however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I
sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night--nay,
sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that
time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human
experience.

4. The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later
years, were often revived: I could not be said to recollect them, for if
I had been told of them when waking, I should not have been able to
acknowledge them as parts of my past experience. But placed as they were
before me, in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their evanescent
circumstances and accompanying feelings, I _recognised_ them
instantaneously. I was once told by a near relative of mine, that having
in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of
death but for the critical assistance which reached her, she saw in a
moment her whole life, in its minutest incidents, arrayed before her
simultaneously as in a mirror; and she had a faculty developed as
suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part.
This, from some
opium experiences of mine, I can believe; I have indeed seen the same
thing asserted twice in modern books, and accompanied by a remark which I
am convinced is true; viz. , that the dread book of account which the
Scriptures speak of is in fact the mind itself of each individual. Of
this at least I feel assured, that there is no such thing as _forgetting_
possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil
between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the
mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but
alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever, just
as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas in
fact we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil,
and that they are waiting to be revealed when the obscuring daylight
shall have withdrawn.

Having noticed these four facts as memorably distinguishing my dreams
from those of health, I shall now cite a case illustrative of the first
fact, and shall then cite any others that I remember, either in their
chronological order, or any other that may give them more effect as
pictures to the reader.

I had been in youth, and even since, for occasional amusement, a great
reader of Livy, whom I confess that I prefer, both for style and matter,
to any other of the Roman historians; and I had often felt as most solemn
and appalling sounds, and most emphatically representative of the majesty
of the Roman people, the two words so often occurring in Livy--_Consul
Romanus_, especially when the consul is introduced in his military
character. I mean to say that the words king, sultan, regent, &c. , or
any other titles of those who embody in their own persons the collective
majesty of a great people, had less power over my reverential feelings. I
had also, though no great reader of history, made myself minutely and
critically familiar with one period of English history, viz. , the period
of the Parliamentary War, having been attracted by the moral grandeur of
some who figured in that day, and by the many interesting memoirs which
survive those unquiet times. Both these parts of my lighter reading,
having furnished me often with matter of reflection, now furnished me
with matter for my dreams. Often I used to see, after painting upon the
blank darkness a sort of rehearsal whilst waking, a crowd of ladies, and
perhaps a festival and dances. And I heard it said, or I said to myself,
"These are English ladies from the unhappy times of Charles I. These are
the wives and the daughters of those who met in peace, and sate at the
same table, and were allied by marriage or by blood; and yet, after a
certain day in August 1642, never smiled upon each other again, nor met
but in the field of battle; and at Marston Moor, at Newbury, or at
Naseby, cut asunder all ties of love by the cruel sabre, and washed away
in blood the memory of ancient friendship. " The ladies danced, and
looked as lovely as the court of George IV. Yet I knew, even in my
dream, that they had been in the grave for nearly two centuries. This
pageant would suddenly dissolve; and at a clapping of hands would be
heard the heart-quaking sound _of Consul Romanus_; and immediately came
"sweeping by," in gorgeous paludaments, Paulus or Marius, girt round by a
company of centurions, with the crimson tunic hoisted on a spear, and
followed by the _alalagmos_ of the Roman legions.

Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi's, Antiquities of Rome,
Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by
that artist, called his _Dreams_, and which record the scenery of his own
visions during the delirium of a fever. Some of them (I describe only
from memory of Mr. Coleridge's account) represented vast Gothic halls, on
the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels,
cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c. &c. , expressive of enormous power
put forth and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls
you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was
Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further and you perceive it
come to a sudden and abrupt termination without any balustrade, and
allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity except into
the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose at
least that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your
eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher, on which again
Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the
abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs
is beheld, and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours; and
so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the
upper gloom of the hall. With the same power of endless growth and self-
reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams. In the early stage
of my malady the splendours of my dreams were indeed chiefly
architectural; and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was never
yet beheld by the waking eye unless in the clouds. From a great modern
poet I cite part of a passage which describes, as an appearance actually
beheld in the clouds, what in many of its circumstances I saw frequently
in sleep:

The appearance, instantaneously disclosed,
Was of a mighty city--boldly say
A wilderness of building, sinking far
And self-withdrawn into a wondrous depth,
Far sinking into splendour--without end!
Fabric it seem'd of diamond, and of gold,
With alabaster domes, and silver spires,
And blazing terrace upon terrace, high
Uplifted; here, serene pavilions bright
In avenues disposed; there towers begirt
With battlements that on their restless fronts
Bore stars--illumination of all gems!
By earthly nature had the effect been wrought
Upon the dark materials of the storm
Now pacified; on them, and on the coves,
And mountain-steeps and summits, whereunto
The vapours had receded,--taking there
Their station under a cerulean sky. &c. &c.

The sublime circumstance, "battlements that on their _restless_ fronts
bore stars," might have been copied from my architectural dreams, for it
often occurred. We hear it reported of Dryden and of Fuseli, in modern
times, that they thought proper to eat raw meat for the sake of obtaining
splendid dreams: how much better for such a purpose to have eaten opium,
which yet I do not remember that any poet is recorded to have done,
except the dramatist Shadwell; and in ancient days Homer is I think
rightly reputed to have known the virtues of opium.

To my architecture succeeded dreams of lakes and silvery expanses of
water: these haunted me so much that I feared (though possibly it will
appear ludicrous to a medical man) that some dropsical state or tendency
of the brain might thus be making itself (to use a metaphysical word)
_objective_; and the sentient organ _project_ itself as its own object.
For two months I suffered greatly in my head, a part of my bodily
structure which had hitherto been so clear from all touch or taint of
weakness (physically I mean) that I used to say of it, as the last Lord
Orford said of his stomach, that it seemed likely to survive the rest of
my person. Till now I had never felt a headache even, or any the
slightest pain, except rheumatic pains caused by my own folly. However,
I got over this attack, though it must have been verging on something
very dangerous.

The waters now changed their character--from translucent lakes shining
like mirrors they now became seas and oceans. And now came a tremendous
change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll through many months,
promised an abiding torment; and in fact it never left me until the
winding up of my case. Hitherto the human face had mixed often in my
dreams, but not despotically nor with any special power of tormenting.
But now that which I have called the tyranny of the human face began to
unfold itself. Perhaps some part of my London life might be answerable
for this. Be that as it may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of
the ocean the human face began to appear; the sea appeared paved with
innumerable faces upturned to the heavens--faces imploring, wrathful,
despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by
centuries: my agitation was infinite; my mind tossed and surged with the
ocean.



May 1818


The Malay has been a fearful enemy for months. I have been every night,
through his means, transported into Asiatic scenes. I know not whether
others share in my feelings on this point; but I have often thought that
if I were compelled to forego England, and to live in China, and among
Chinese manners and modes of life and scenery, I should go mad. The
causes of my horror lie deep, and some of them must be common to others.
Southern Asia in general is the seat of awful images and associations. As
the cradle of the human race, it would alone have a dim and reverential
feeling connected with it. But there are other reasons. No man can
pretend that the wild, barbarous, and capricious superstitions of Africa,
or of savage tribes elsewhere, affect him in the way that he is affected
by the ancient, monumental, cruel, and elaborate religions of Indostan,
&c. The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions,
histories, modes of faith, &c. , is so impressive, that to me the vast age
of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A
young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed. Even Englishmen,
though not bred in any knowledge of such institutions, cannot but shudder
at the mystic sublimity of _castes_ that have flowed apart, and refused
to mix, through such immemorial tracts of time; nor can any man fail to
be awed by the names of the Ganges or the Euphrates. It contributes much
to these feelings that southern Asia is, and has been for thousands of
years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life, the great
_officina gentium_. Man is a weed in those regions. The vast empires
also in which the enormous population of Asia has always been cast, give
a further sublimity to the feelings associated with all Oriental names or
images. In China, over and above what it has in common with the rest of
southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and
the barrier of utter abhorrence and want of sympathy placed between us by
feelings deeper than I can analyse. I could sooner live with lunatics or
brute animals. All this, and much more than I can say or have time to
say, the reader must enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable
horror which these dreams of Oriental imagery and mythological tortures
impressed upon me. Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and
vertical sunlights I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts,
reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in
all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan.
From kindred feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the
same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by
monkeys, by parroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixed
for centuries at the summit or in secret rooms: I was the idol; I was the
priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of
Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait
for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they
said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a
thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow
chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous
kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy
things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of my Oriental dreams,
which always filled me with such amazement at the monstrous scenery that
horror seemed absorbed for a while in sheer astonishment. Sooner or
later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment, and
left me not so much in terror as in hatred and abomination of what I saw.
Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless
incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me
into an oppression as of madness. Into these dreams only it was, with
one or two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of physical horror
entered. All before had been moral and spiritual terrors. But here the
main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles; especially the
last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than
almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him, and (as was
always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped sometimes,
and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet
of the tables, sofas, &c. , soon became instinct with life: the abominable
head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied
into a thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and fascinated. And so
often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams that many times the very
same dream was broken up in the very same way: I heard gentle voices
speaking to me (I hear everything when I am sleeping), and instantly I
awoke. It was broad noon, and my children were standing, hand in hand,
at my bedside--come to show me their coloured shoes, or new frocks, or to
let me see them dressed for going out. I protest that so awful was the
transition from the damned crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters
and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innocent _human_ natures and
of infancy, that in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind I wept, and
could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces.



June 1819


I have had occasion to remark, at various periods of my life, that the
deaths of those whom we love, and indeed the contemplation of death
generally, is (_caeteris paribus_) more affecting in summer than in any
other season of the year. And the reasons are these three, I think:
first, that the visible heavens in summer appear far higher, more
distant, and (if such a solecism may be excused) more infinite; the
clouds, by which chiefly the eye expounds the distance of the blue
pavilion stretched over our heads, are in summer more voluminous, massed
and accumulated in far grander and more towering piles. Secondly, the
light and the appearances of the declining and the setting sun are much
more fitted to be types and characters of the Infinite. And thirdly
(which is the main reason), the exuberant and riotous prodigality of life
naturally forces the mind more powerfully upon the antagonist thought of
death, and the wintry sterility of the grave. For it may be observed
generally, that wherever two thoughts stand related to each other by a
law of antagonism, and exist, as it were, by mutual repulsion, they are
apt to suggest each other. On these accounts it is that I find it
impossible to banish the thought of death when I am walking alone in the
endless days of summer; and any particular death, if not more affecting,
at least haunts my mind more obstinately and besiegingly in that season.
Perhaps this cause, and a slight incident which I omit, might have been
the immediate occasions of the following dream, to which, however, a
predisposition must always have existed in my mind; but having been once
roused it never left me, and split into a thousand fantastic varieties,
which often suddenly reunited, and composed again the original dream.

I thought that it was a Sunday morning in May, that it was Easter Sunday,
and as yet very early in the morning. I was standing, as it seemed to
me, at the door of my own cottage. Right before me lay the very scene
which could really be commanded from that situation, but exalted, as was
usual, and solemnised by the power of dreams. There were the same
mountains, and the same lovely valley at their feet; but the mountains
were raised to more than Alpine height, and there was interspace far
larger between them of meadows and forest lawns; the hedges were rich
with white roses; and no living creature was to be seen, excepting that
in the green churchyard there were cattle tranquilly reposing upon the
verdant graves, and particularly round about the grave of a child whom I
had tenderly loved, just as I had really beheld them, a little before
sunrise in the same summer, when that child died. I gazed upon the well-
known scene, and I said aloud (as I thought) to myself, "It yet wants
much of sunrise, and it is Easter Sunday; and that is the day on which
they celebrate the first fruits of resurrection. I will walk abroad; old
griefs shall be forgotten to-day; for the air is cool and still, and the
hills are high and stretch away to heaven; and the forest glades are as
quiet as the churchyard, and with the dew I can wash the fever from my
forehead, and then I shall be unhappy no longer. " And I turned as if to
open my garden gate, and immediately I saw upon the left a scene far
different, but which yet the power of dreams had reconciled into harmony
with the other. The scene was an Oriental one, and there also it was
Easter Sunday, and very early in the morning. And at a vast distance
were visible, as a stain upon the horizon, the domes and cupolas of a
great city--an image or faint abstraction, caught perhaps in childhood
from some picture of Jerusalem. And not a bow-shot from me, upon a stone
and shaded by Judean palms, there sat a woman, and I looked, and it
was--Ann! She fixed her eyes upon me earnestly, and I said to her at
length: "So, then, I have found you at last. " I waited, but she answered
me not a word. Her face was the same as when I saw it last, and yet
again how different! Seventeen years ago, when the lamplight fell upon
her face, as for the last time I kissed her lips (lips, Ann, that to me
were not polluted), her eyes were streaming with tears: the tears were
now wiped away; she seemed more beautiful than she was at that time, but
in all other points the same, and not older. Her looks were tranquil,
but with unusual solemnity of expression, and I now gazed upon her with
some awe; but suddenly her countenance grew dim, and turning to the
mountains I perceived vapours rolling between us. In a moment all had
vanished, thick darkness came on, and in the twinkling of an eye I was
far away from mountains, and by lamplight in Oxford Street, walking again
with Ann--just as we walked seventeen years before, when we were both
children.

As a final specimen, I cite one of a different character, from 1820.

The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in dreams--a
music of preparation and of awakening suspense, a music like the opening
of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like _that_, gave the feeling of a
vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of
innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day--a day of
crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious
eclipse, and labouring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I knew not
where--somehow, I knew not how--by some beings, I knew not whom--a
battle, a strife, an agony, was conducting, was evolving like a great
drama or piece of music, with which my sympathy was the more
insupportable from my confusion as to its place, its cause, its nature,
and its possible issue. I, as is usual in dreams (where of necessity we
make ourselves central to every movement), had the power, and yet had not
the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself to
will it, and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty
Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. "Deeper
than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive. Then like a chorus the
passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake, some mightier
cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed.
Then came sudden alarms, hurryings to and fro, trepidations of
innumerable fugitives--I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad,
darkness and lights, tempest and human faces, and at last, with the sense
that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the
world to me, and but a moment allowed--and clasped hands, and
heart-breaking partings, and then--everlasting farewells! And with a
sigh, such as the caves of Hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered
the abhorred name of death, the sound was reverberated--everlasting
farewells! And again and yet again reverberated--everlasting farewells!

And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud--"I will sleep no more. "

But I am now called upon to wind up a narrative which has already
extended to an unreasonable length. Within more spacious limits the
materials which I have used might have been better unfolded, and much
which I have not used might have been added with effect. Perhaps,
however, enough has been given. It now remains that I should say
something of the way in which this conflict of horrors was finally
brought to a crisis. The reader is already aware (from a passage near
the beginning of the introduction to the first part) that the Opium-eater
has, in some way or other, "unwound almost to its final links the
accursed chain which bound him. " By what means? To have narrated this
according to the original intention would have far exceeded the space
which can now be allowed. It is fortunate, as such a cogent reason
exists for abridging it, that I should, on a maturer view of the case,
have been exceedingly unwilling to injure, by any such unaffecting
details, the impression of the history itself, as an appeal to the
prudence and the conscience of the yet unconfirmed opium-eater--or even
(though a very inferior consideration) to injure its effect as a
composition. The interest of the judicious reader will not attach itself
chiefly to the subject of the fascinating spells, but to the fascinating
power. Not the Opium-eater, but the opium, is the true hero of the tale,
and the legitimate centre on which the interest revolves. The object was
to display the marvellous agency of opium, whether for pleasure or for
pain: if that is done, the action of the piece has closed.

However, as some people, in spite of all laws to the contrary, will
persist in asking what became of the Opium-eater, and in what state he
now is, I answer for him thus: The reader is aware that opium had long
ceased to found its empire on spells of pleasure; it was solely by the
tortures connected with the attempt to abjure it that it kept its hold.
Yet, as other tortures, no less it may be thought, attended the
non-abjuration of such a tyrant, a choice only of evils was left; and
_that_ might as well have been adopted which, however terrific in itself,
held out a prospect of final restoration to happiness. This appears
true; but good logic gave the author no strength to act upon it. However,
a crisis arrived for the author's life, and a crisis for other objects
still dearer to him--and which will always be far dearer to him than his
life, even now that it is again a happy one. I saw that I must die if I
continued the opium. I determined, therefore, if that should be
required, to die in throwing it off. How much I was at that time taking
I cannot say, for the opium which I used had been purchased for me by a
friend, who afterwards refused to let me pay him; so that I could not
ascertain even what quantity I had used within the year. I apprehend,
however, that I took it very irregularly, and that I varied from about
fifty or sixty grains to 150 a day. My first task was to reduce it to
forty, to thirty, and as fast as I could to twelve grains.

I triumphed. But think not, reader, that therefore my sufferings were
ended, nor think of me as of one sitting in a _dejected_ state. Think of
me as one, even when four months had passed, still agitated, writhing,
throbbing, palpitating, shattered, and much perhaps in the situation of
him who has been racked, as I collect the torments of that state from the
affecting account of them left by a most innocent sufferer {20} of the
times of James I. Meantime, I derived no benefit from any medicine,
except one prescribed to me by an Edinburgh surgeon of great eminence,
viz. , ammoniated tincture of valerian. Medical account, therefore, of my
emancipation I have not much to give, and even that little, as managed by
a man so ignorant of medicine as myself, would probably tend only to
mislead. At all events, it would be misplaced in this situation. The
moral of the narrative is addressed to the opium-eater, and therefore of
necessity limited in its application. If he is taught to fear and
tremble, enough has been effected. But he may say that the issue of my
case is at least a proof that opium, after a seventeen years' use and an
eight years' abuse of its powers, may still be renounced, and that _he_
may chance to bring to the task greater energy than I did, or that with a
stronger constitution than mine he may obtain the same results with less.
This may be true. I would not presume to measure the efforts of other
men by my own. I heartily wish him more energy. I wish him the same
success. Nevertheless, I had motives external to myself which he may
unfortunately want, and these supplied me with conscientious supports
which mere personal interests might fail to supply to a mind debilitated
by opium.

Jeremy Taylor conjectures that it may be as painful to be born as to die.
I think it probable; and during the whole period of diminishing the opium
I had the torments of a man passing out of one mode of existence into
another. The issue was not death, but a sort of physical regeneration;
and I may add that ever since, at intervals, I have had a restoration of
more than youthful spirits, though under the pressure of difficulties
which in a less happy state of mind I should have called misfortunes.

One memorial of my former condition still remains--my dreams are not yet
perfectly calm; the dread swell and agitation of the storm have not
wholly subsided; the legions that encamped in them are drawing off, but
not all departed; my sleep is still tumultuous, and, like the gates of
Paradise to our first parents when looking back from afar, it is still
(in the tremendous line of Milton)

With dreadful faces throng'd, and fiery arms.




APPENDIX


From the "London Magazine" for December 1822.

The interest excited by the two papers bearing this title, in our numbers
for September and October 1821, will have kept our promise of a Third
Part fresh in the remembrance of our readers. That we are still unable
to fulfil our engagement in its original meaning will, we, are sure, be
matter of regret to them as to ourselves, especially when they have
perused the following affecting narrative. It was composed for the
purpose of being appended to an edition of the Confessions in a separate
volume, which is already before the public, and we have reprinted it
entire, that our subscribers may be in possession of the whole of this
extraordinary history.

* * * * *

The proprietors of this little work having determined on reprinting it,
some explanation seems called for, to account for the non-appearance of a
third part promised in the _London Magazine_ of December last; and the
more so because the proprietors, under whose guarantee that promise was
issued, might otherwise be implicated in the blame--little or
much--attached to its non-fulfilment. This blame, in mere justice, the
author takes wholly upon himself. What may be the exact amount of the
guilt which he thus appropriates is a very dark question to his own
judgment, and not much illuminated by any of the masters in casuistry
whom he has consulted on the occasion. On the one hand it seems
generally agreed that a promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the
numbers to whom it is made; for which reason it is that we see many
persons break promises without scruple that are made to a whole nation,
who keep their faith religiously in all private engagements, breaches of
promise towards the stronger party being committed at a man's own peril;
on the other hand, the only parties interested in the promises of an
author are his readers, and these it is a point of modesty in any author
to believe as few as possible--or perhaps only one, in which case any
promise imposes a sanctity of moral obligation which it is shocking to
think of. Casuistry dismissed, however, the author throws himself on the
indulgent consideration of all who may conceive themselves aggrieved by
his delay, in the following account of his own condition from the end of
last year, when the engagement was made, up nearly to the present time.
For any purpose of self-excuse it might be sufficient to say that
intolerable bodily suffering had totally disabled him for almost any
exertion of mind, more especially for such as demands and presupposes a
pleasurable and genial state of feeling; but, as a case that may by
possibility contribute a trifle to the medical history of opium, in a
further stage of its action than can often have been brought under the
notice of professional men, he has judged that it might be acceptable to
some readers to have it described more at length. _Fiat experimentum in
corpore vili_ is a just rule where there is any reasonable presumption of
benefit to arise on a large scale. What the benefit may be will admit of
a doubt, but there can be none as to the value of the body; for a more
worthless body than his own the author is free to confess cannot be. It
is his pride to believe that it is the very ideal of a base, crazy,
despicable human system, that hardly ever could have been meant to be
seaworthy for two days under the ordinary storms and wear and tear of
life; and indeed, if that were the creditable way of disposing of human
bodies, he must own that he should almost be ashamed to bequeath his
wretched structure to any respectable dog. But now to the case, which,
for the sake of avoiding the constant recurrence of a cumbersome
periphrasis, the author will take the liberty of giving in the first
person.

* * * * *

Those who have read the Confessions will have closed them with the
impression that I had wholly renounced the use of opium. This impression
I meant to convey, and that for two reasons: first, because the very act
of deliberately recording such a state of suffering necessarily presumes
in the recorder a power of surveying his own case as a cool spectator,
and a degree of spirits for adequately describing it which it would be
inconsistent to suppose in any person speaking from the station of an
actual sufferer; secondly, because I, who had descended from so large a
quantity as 8,000 drops to so small a one (comparatively speaking) as a
quantity ranging between 300 and 160 drops, might well suppose that the
victory was in effect achieved. In suffering my readers, therefore, to
think of me as of a reformed opium-eater, I left no impression but what I
shared myself; and, as may be seen, even this impression was left to be
collected from the general tone of the conclusion, and not from any
specific words, which are in no instance at variance with the literal
truth. In no long time after that paper was written I became sensible
that the effort which remained would cost me far more energy than I had
anticipated, and the necessity for making it was more apparent every
month. In particular I became aware of an increasing callousness or
defect of sensibility in the stomach, and this I imagined might imply a
scirrhous state of that organ, either formed or forming. An eminent
physician, to whose kindness I was at that time deeply indebted, informed
me that such a termination of my case was not impossible, though likely
to be forestalled by a different termination in the event of my
continuing the use of opium. Opium therefore I resolved wholly to abjure
as soon as I should find myself at liberty to bend my undivided attention
and energy to this purpose. It was not, however, until the 24th of June
last that any tolerable concurrence of facilities for such an attempt
arrived. On that day I began my experiment, having previously settled in
my own mind that I would not flinch, but would "stand up to the scratch"
under any possible "punishment. " I must premise that about 170 or 180
drops had been my ordinary allowance for many months; occasionally I had
run up as high as 500, and once nearly to 700; in repeated preludes to my
final experiment I had also gone as low as 100 drops; but had found it
impossible to stand it beyond the fourth day--which, by the way, I have
always found more difficult to get over than any of the preceding three.
I went off under easy sail--130 drops a day for three days; on the fourth
I plunged at once to 80. The misery which I now suffered "took the
conceit" out of me at once, and for about a month I continued off and on
about this mark; then I sunk to 60, and the next day to--none at all.
This was the first day for nearly ten years that I had existed without
opium. I persevered in my abstinence for ninety hours; i. e. , upwards of
half a week. Then I took--ask me not how much; say, ye severest, what
would ye have done? Then I abstained again--then took about 25 drops
then abstained; and so on.

Meantime the symptoms which attended my case for the first six weeks of
my experiment were these: enormous irritability and excitement of the
whole system; the stomach in particular restored to a full feeling of
vitality and sensibility, but often in great pain; unceasing restlessness
night and day; sleep--I scarcely knew what it was; three hours out of the
twenty-four was the utmost I had, and that so agitated and shallow that I
heard every sound that was near me. Lower jaw constantly swelling, mouth
ulcerated, and many other distressing symptoms that would be tedious to
repeat; amongst which, however, I must mention one, because it had never
failed to accompany any attempt to renounce opium--viz. , violent
sternutation. This now became exceedingly troublesome, sometimes lasting
for two hours at once, and recurring at least twice or three times a day.
I was not much surprised at this on recollecting what I had somewhere
heard or read, that the membrane which lines the nostrils is a
prolongation of that which lines the stomach; whence, I believe, are
explained the inflammatory appearances about the nostrils of dram
drinkers. The sudden restoration of its original sensibility to the
stomach expressed itself, I suppose, in this way. It is remarkable also
that during the whole period of years through which I had taken opium I
had never once caught cold (as the phrase is), nor even the slightest
cough. But now a violent cold attacked me, and a cough soon after. In
an unfinished fragment of a letter begun about this time to--I find these
words: "You ask me to write the--Do you know Beaumont and Fletcher's play
of "Thierry and Theodore"?