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Updated: June 20, 2025
It is urged, however, that, even on his philosophic speculations, opium operated unfavorably in one respect, by often causing him to leave them unfinished. This is true. All opium-eaters are tainted with the infirmity of leaving works unfinished, and suffering reactions of disgust. But Coleridge taxed himself with that infirmity in verse before he could at all have commenced opium-eating.
To those who have studied the author's life of opium-eating; of constant wandering from place to place; of impecuniousness so utter that, after all the painstaking of the modern biographer, and after full allowance for the ravens who seem always to have been ready to feed him, it is a mystery how he escaped the workhouse; of endless schemes and endless non-performance it is only a wonder that anything of Coleridge's ever reached the public except in newspaper columns.
It is more innocent than opium-eating, though, like opium-eating, it unlocks to us artificial paradises. In beginning an autobiographia literaria, an account of how, and in what order, books have appealed to a mind, which books have ever above all things delighted, the author must pray to be pardoned for the sin of egotism.
This expedient soon exhausts itself in a death from colliquative diarrhea, produced partly by the final decompositions of tissue which the poisonously antiseptic property of opium has all along improperly stored away; partly by the definite corrosions of the new addition to the dose. But in no case is there any relief to a desperate case of opium-eating save death.
One fortunate circumstance the traveller will notice in Yungchang there is a marked diminution in the number of cases of goitre. And the diminution is not confined to the town, but is apparent from this point right on to Burma. Long after our arrival in Yungchang my opium-eating coolie "Bones" had not come, and we had to wait for him in anger and annoyance.
Sir Jasper Threlfall had chosen for their patient a private establishment in Ealing, owned and managed by a friend of his, a place for the treatment of morphia mania, opium-eating, and alcoholism. To all intents and purposes, as Logotheti had told Margaret, Charles Feist might as well have been in gaol.
Gone, too, not only from Whittlesea but from the whole world, is that most exquisite of English butterflies, Lycaena dispar the great copper; and many a curious insect more. Ah, well, at least we shall have wheat and mutton instead, and no more typhus and ague; and, it is to be hoped, no more brandy-drinking and opium-eating; and children will live and not die.
In the absence, however, of such instruction, these imperfect, and in some cases fragmentary, records of the experience of opium-eaters are given, chiefly in the language of the sufferers themselves, that the opium-eating reader may compare case with case, and deduce from such comparison the lesson of the entire practicability of his own release from what has been the burden and the curse of his existence.
These are substantially all the physical peculiarities I experienced during my opium-using years. But what of the effects of opium-eating on the mind? Hardihood, manliness, resolution, enterprise, ambition, whatever the original degree of these qualities, become grievously debilitated if not wholly extinct.
For he was Eurasian; half European, half Indian, having his place twixt heaven and hell, which is to say, nowhere. His father had died of a complication of bhang-drinking and opium-eating; and as a consequence, James was full of humorless imagination, spells of moodiness and outbursts of hilarious politics.
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