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Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish; I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. I am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater's heaven. I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness.
All were as transitory as smoke, as illusionary as the opium-eater's mid-day dream. What did it signify this mad rush to get round a corner to creep into a hole? Why should he trouble himself about one of the millions of women, evanescent as butterflies, with which the earth continually replenished its swarms of men?
"One spice of danger, and he's himself again, and will overawe the poor cur by mere civility. I was afraid of some abject methodist parson humility, which would give the other party a handle." Elsley heard him with a stupefied look, like that of a trapped wild beast, in which rage, shame, suspicion, and fear, were mingled with the vacant glare of the opium-eater's eye.
Applied to the back and legs especially, it is a sovereign soother for both the opium-eater's acute pain and that malaise which is only less terrible.
Its absolute poise of bearing brought into his mind the opium-eater's words that "no dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally itself with the mysterious"; and he became suddenly aware that the presence of the dog in this foggy, haunted room on the top of Putney Hill was uncommonly welcome to him. He was glad to feel that Flame's dependable personality was with him.
Uneasiness, corresponding to the irritations of dressing a stump may continue a year longer; a few victims of the habit outlive a certain opium-prurience, which has also its analogue in the occasional titillation of a healed wound these are comparatively tolerable; but, if we expect to save a patient's life, we must not protract an agony which so absolutely interferes with normal sleep as that of the opium-eater's for longer than three months in the case of any constitution I have thus far encountered.
Orchestras of many instruments discourse most eloquent music, and involuted strains are criticized in learned style, in capitals thousands of miles from the seashore. And there is no appreciation of art in all this! there is no embodiment of the love of the age for material magnificence, there is no poetry incarnated into form, in this combination of splendors rivalling the opium-eater's visions!
Remembering that Chinaman's face, I can not wonder at the popular notion regarding the abandonment of opium. Men say it is a mental pain; because spiritual woe is the expression of the sufferer's countenance. And so it is, but this woe is underlain by the keenest brute suffering. Let me sketch the opium-eater's experience on the rugged road upward.
It would be too much to say that the talent that attracts the young to him must needs be the Opium-Eater's grand talent, though the notion is defensible, seeing that only salient qualities in good writing appeal to inexperienced readers.
In many cases where the moral sense has suffered no such general bouleversement, the tendency which opium superinduces to look at every thing from the most sanguine point of view the vague, dreamy habit of thought and the inability to deal with hard facts or fixed quantities make it necessary to take an opium-eater's assertions upon any subject with a certain degree of allowance to translate them, as it were, into the accurate expressions of literal life; but even where this necessity docs not exist, in cases sometimes though rarely met with, where opium has been long used without tinging any of life's common facts with uncertainty, an opium-eater can scarcely even be relied on for the exact truth concerning his own habit.
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