the stomach; afterwards this indefinite yearning gave place
to a specific one, which was unmistakable in its demands. Daily, like
the daughters of the horse-leech, it cried, "Give, give!" Toward the
last, this craving became, in De Quincey's solemn belief, an animal
incarnate, and the opium-eater reasoned after the following fashion:--It
is not I that eat, it is not I that am responsible either for the fact
of eating or the amount; am I the keeper of this horrid monster's
conscience? He even carried the conceit so far as to consider a portion
of each meal as especially devoted to this insane stomachic reveller,
just as a voracious Greek or Roman would have attributed no small part
of his outrageous appetite to the gods, as eating by proxy through the
mouths of mortals. This is almost as bad as the case reported of
Stonewall Jackson, who, it is said, religiously believed that whatever
he ate was, by some mysterious physiological economy, conveyed into his
left leg.

No less was De Quincey _psychologically_ preconformed to opium. The
prodigious mental activity so early awakened in him counteracted the
narcotic despotism of the drug, and made it a sort of ally. The reader
sees from this how much depends upon predispositions as to the effect of
opium. De Quincey himself says that the man whose daily talk is of oxen
will pursue his bovine speculations into dreams. Opium originates
nothing; but, given activity of a certain type and moving in a certain
direction, and there will be perhaps through opium a multiplication of
energies and velocities. What was De Quincey _without_ opium? is,
therefore, the question preliminary to any proper estimate as to what in
him was due to opium. This question has already been answered in the
remarks made concerning his childhood. His meditative tendencies were
especially noticed as most characteristic. There was besides this a
natural leaning toward the mysterious,--the mysterious, I mean, as
depending, not upon the terrible or ghostly, or upon anything which
excites gloom or fear, but upon operations that are simply inscrutable
as moving in darkness. Take, for example, the idea of a grand
combination of human energies mustered together in secret, and operating
through invisible agencies for the downfall of Christianity,--an idea
which was conveyed to De Quincey in his childhood through the Abbe
Baruel's book exposing such a general conspiracy was existing throughout
Europe: this was the sor