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Updated: June 9, 2025
Charles Lamb. The latter, outwardly friendly to De Quincey, seemed, as Clare observed, not altogether partial to him, but stuttered forth more than one witticism which evidently displeased the 'opium-eater. Further arrivals, the same evening, continued to enliven the scene. There came the Rev. Mr.
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.
Here we design only to make a coasting voyage of survey round the headlands and most conspicuous seamarks of our subject, as they are brought forward by Mr. Gillman, or collaterally suggested by our own reflections; and especially we wish to say a word or two on Coleridge as an opium-eater.
Take an opium-eater, for instance, whose life is one long confused vista of visions, suppose he were to accept all the wild suggestions offered to his drugged brain, and persist in following them out to some sort of definite conclusion, the only place for that man would be a lunatic asylum.
You would better become an opium-eater than to permit this paralysis of mind and soul. Believe in things. Believe in other young men. When you see other young men trying to do things in business, politics, art, the professions, believe in the honesty of their purpose and their ability to do well what they have started out to do. Assume that they will succeed until they prove that they cannot.
It does not generally distort the person of the English or American opium-eater; in the East it is represented as frequently producing this effect.
The war of the elements increased to such a pitch, that the guest was induced to pass the night in his new quarters. Though the storm soon subsided, not so with the "Opium-Eater." The visit, begun from necessity, was continued from choice, until the revolving days had nearly made up the full year.
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.
I close this brief reference to the remoter consequences of the habits of the opium-eater by calling the attention of the reader to the physical weakness with consequent inaptitude for continuous exertion which forms a part of my own experience.
The appetite of the recovering opium-eater will probably be voracious and not at all discriminating during the earlier stages of his experiment, and will continue unimpaired even when the stomach begins to be fastidious as to what it will receive.
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