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Updated: June 9, 2025
Whether it was possible at present to carry the descent much further had become a grave question. The next day, however, a reduction of five grains was somehow attained; but it was a hard fight to hold my own within this limit of twenty grains. From this stage commenced the really intolerable part of the experience of an opium-eater retiring from service.
Why, when that English reviewer what's his name that friend of Kipling's passed through New York, he said to a lot of us at the Press Club, 'You've got a young man here on Park Row an opium-eater, I should say, by the look of him, who if he would work and leave whiskey alone, would make us all sweat. That's just what he said, and he's the best in England!"
So important is this element in the restorative process that it may well be doubted whether without its aid a confirmed opium-eater could be restored to health. It is useless for any person to think that he can break off even the least inveterate of his habits without effort, or the more obstinate ones without a struggle.
"If you were charged with being an opium-eater, does it follow that you are one because you do not deny it? There was a Man who was said to blaspheme, to have all 'the crafts and assaults of the devil' was it His duty to deny it? Suppose you were accused of being a highwayman, would you be less a highwayman if you denied it? Or would you be less guilty if you denied it?"
It will be seen to contain an outline of his views upon the subject to which he has devoted some years of study and practice, and is especially valuable as embodying the germ of a plan by which, according to his growing conviction, the opium-eater can alone be saved.
That episode, or impassioned parenthesis in my life, which is comprehended in "The Confessions of the Opium-Eater," had finished; suppose it over and gone, and once more, after the storms of London, suppose me resting from my dreadful remembrances, in the deep monastic tranquillity, of St. John's Priory; and just then, by accident, with no associates except my mother and my uncle.
The Opium-Eater crossed us once with a dazzling path, and hath as suddenly left us darkling; and, in short, I shall go on from dull to worse, because I cannot resist the booksellers' importunity, the old plea, you know, of authors; but I believe on my part sincere. Hartley I do not so often see, but I never see him in unwelcome hour. I thoroughly love and honor him.
One month I waged the fight, and I have now been nearly two without looking at the drug. Before, four hours was the longest interval I could endure. Now I am free and the demon is behind me. This, and a long sea-voyage, aided efforts which would have been otherwise fruitless. On the other hand, let us not too rashly cast a stone at the opium-eater and think of him as a being unworthy of sympathy.
Yet happy as I was in its belief, I always regretted that I had been born, notwithstanding that I was aware that an endless sleep and non-existence must be one and the same thing. My love of existence then, of some sort, must have been an acquired taste, like that of the opium-eater I would that it had never commenced, but had not sufficient fortitude to relinquish it.
Carlyle sent his papers on Schiller to be printed in it; De Quincey's "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" appeared in its pages; and the essays of "Elia" came out first in that potent periodical; Landor, Keats, and John Bowring contributed to it; and to have printed a prose or poetical article in the "London" entitled a man to be asked to dine out anywhere in society in those days.
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