re expect beforehand in De Quincey an overruling tendency
towards this remote architecture of dreams. The careful reader of his
"Autobiographic Sketches" will remember, that, at the early age of
seven, and before he knew of even the existence of opium, the least
material hint which bordered on the shadowy was sufficient to lift him
up into aerial structures, and to lead his infant footsteps amongst the
clouds. Such hints, after his little sister's death, were furnished by
certain expressions of the Litany, by pictures in the stained windows of
the church, and by the tumult of the organ. Nor were the dreams thus
introduced mere fantasies, irregular and inconsistent. Throughout, they
were self-sustained and majestic.

The natural effects of opium were concurrent with preexisting tendencies
of De Quincey's mind. If, instead of having his restless intellect, he
had been indolent,--if, instead of loving the mysterious, because it
invited a Titanic energy to reduce its anarchy to order, he had loved it
as simply dark or obscure,--if his natural subtilty of reflection had
been less, or if he had been endowed with inferior powers in the sublime
architecture of impassioned expression,--then might he as well have
smoked a meerschaum, taken snuff or grog or any other stimulant, as to
have gone out of his way for the more refined pleasures of opium.

The reader will indulge us in a single philosophical distinction, at
this point, by which we mean to classify the effects of opium under two
heads: first, the _external_, and, secondly, the _internal_. Properly
speaking, all the _positive_ effects of opium must be internal; for all
its movements are inward in their direction, being refluent upon the
focal centres of life. Thus, one of the most noticeable phenomena
connected with opium-eating is the burden of life resting back upon the
heart, which deliberately pulsates the moments of existence, as if the
most momentous issues depended upon each separate throb. But this very
reflux of sensibility will produce great effects at the surface, which
are purely negative. This latter class of effects Homer has indicated
with considerable accuracy, in the ninth Odyssey, (82-105,) where he
notices specifically an air of carelessness regarding external
things,--carelessness as to the mutual interchange of conversation by
question and answer, and as to the ordinary pursuits of life as
disturbing an inward peace. The same characteristics are more f