ully
developed in Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters":--

"Branches they bore of that enchanted stem,
Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave
To each; but whoso did receive of them,
And taste, to him the gushing of the wave,
Far, far away, did seem to mourn and rave
On alien shores; and if his fellows spake,
His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;
And deaf-asleep he seemed, yet all awake,
And music in his ears his beating heart did make."

By causing the life to flow inward upon a more ideal centre, opium
deepens the consciousness, and compels it to give testimony to processes
and connections that in ordinary moments escape unrecorded. It is as if
new materials were found for a history of the individual
life,--materials which, like freshly discovered records, sound the
deepest meanings of the present and measure the abysses of the past.
Thus it is that the fugitive imagery of sense is interpreted as a scroll
which hides infinite truths under the most fleeting of symbols,--symbols
which are not sufficiently enduring to call them words, or even
syllables of words, since the most trivial hint or whisper of them has
hardly reached us ere they have perished. Thus it is that even the still
more intangible record of memory, where are preserved only images and
echoes of that which undeniably has perished, is revivified and
enlarged.

There is, then, in the opium-eater a most marked, a polar antithesis
between his every-day life and the central manifestations of his genius.
In the latter, there is beautiful order, as in a symphony of
Beethoven's; but in the former, looked upon from without, all seems
confusion. There is the same antithesis in every meditative mind; but
here opium has heightened each part of the contrast. The more we admire
the _en_centric harmonies of inwrapt power, the more do we find to draw
forth laughter in the eccentricities of outward habit. The very same
agencies which undisguised and unveiled the deep, divine heaven, masked
the earth with desert sands; and De Quincey's outward life was thus
masked and rendered abnormal, that the blue heaven in which he revelled
might be infinitely exalted.

Thus is it possible for the seemingly ludicrous to harmonize with
transcendent sublimity. We smile at De Quincey's giving in "copy" on the
generous margins of a splendid "Somnium Scipionis"; but the precious
words, that might perhaps have found some more fit vehicle to the
composer's eye,