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Updated: June 2, 2025
Of De Quincey's autobiographical sketches the best known is his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater . This is only partly a record of opium dreams, and its chief interest lies in glimpses it gives us of De Quincey's own life and wanderings. This should be followed by Suspiria de Profundis , which is chiefly a record of gloomy and terrible dreams produced by opiates.
Thus cathartic medicines, opiates, poisons, contagious matter, cease to influence our system after it has been habituated to the use of them, except by the exhibition of increased quantities of them; our fibres not only become unaffected by stimuli, by which they have previously been violently irritated, as by the matter of the small-pox or measles; but they also become unaffected by sensation, where the violent exertions, which disabled them, were in consequence of too great quantity of sensation.
People were compelled to take all manner of poisons and opiates even from skilled hands. But in Dore-lyn those days of darkness and misery are past and the people enjoy the benefit of a medical skill one thousand years ahead of us.
His favourite spaniel nestled at her feet, and occasionally threw up his head and gazed wistfully at his master. Thus two hours passed, and as she rose to administer the medicine he waved it off, saying "Give me no more of it. I won't be drugged in my last hours. I won't have my intellect clouded by opiates. Throw it into the fire, and let me rest." "Oh, sir! can I do nothing for you?"
In an hour's time, and not before, my people will carry this couch and its burden to my bedroom. Then I shall pretend to sleep; but I shall not sleep. Somehow of late the habit of sleep has left me. Hitherto, I have scorned opiates, which are the refuge of the weak-minded, yet I fear I may be compelled to ask you for one. There was a time when I could will myself to sleep. But not now, not now!"
He was a quack dentist on his rounds, who was offering to the public full sets of teeth, opiates, powders and elixirs. Fantine mingled in the group, and began to laugh with the rest at the harangue, which contained slang for the populace and jargon for respectable people.
"This makes the second time I have heard him groaning, and it's so unlike him." "We have no opiates, and I doubt if he would use one if we had. He declares there is no intense pain." "Well, first off, sir, I thought he was dreaming, but he was wide awake, and Miss Harvey came in only a moment after I got to him.
"Have you seen Lindau to-day?" Mrs. March asked. "You inferred it from the quality of my piety?" March laughed, and then suddenly sobered. "Yes, I saw him. It's going rather hard with him, I'm afraid. The amputation doesn't heal very well; the shock was very great, and he's old. It 'll take time. There's so much pain that they have to keep him under opiates, and I don't think he fully knew me.
No drowsy poppy-bed was Julian's. The shadowy spirit of sleep strove not to influence him. No opiates gave him peace. No veil of gentle forgetfulness descended upon him. He was a human being plunged in the deepest abyss of fate, beneath the range of the starlight and the gaze of other worlds.
All is not affectation in the poet who says, "Now more than ever seems it rich to die"; and, without any poetry or affectation, men may love sleep, and opiates, and every luxurious escape from humanity. The step by which pleasure and pain are attached to ideas, so as to be predictable and to become factors in action, is therefore by no means irrevocable.
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