hen, as a runaway from
school, I made acquaintance with starvation and horror, had struck root
so deeply in my bodily constitution that afterwards they shot up and
flourished afresh, and grew into a noxious umbrage that has overshadowed
and darkened my latter years.

It is so long since I first took opium that, if it had been a trifling
incident in my life, I might have forgotten its date; but, from
circumstances connected with it, I remember that it must be referred to
the autumn of 1804. During that season I was in London, having come
thither for the first time since my entrance at college. And my
introduction to opium arose in the following way. One morning I awoke
with excruciating rheumatic pains of the head and face, from which I had
hardly any respite.

On the twenty-first day, I think it was, and on a Sunday, I went out
into the streets, rather to run away, if possible, from my torments than
with any distinct purpose. By accident, I met a college acquaintance,
who recommended opium. Opium! dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and
pain! I had heard of it as I had of manna or of ambrosia, but no
further. My road homewards lay through Oxford Street; and near "the
stately Pantheon" I saw a druggist's shop, where I first became
possessed of the celestial drug.

Arrived at my lodgings, I took it, and in an hour--oh, heavens! what a
revulsion! what an unheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner
spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had
vanished was now a trifle in my eyes; this negative effect was swallowed
up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before
me, in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed.

_II.--Effects of the Seductive Drug_

First one word with respect to its bodily effects. It is not so much
affirmed as taken for granted that opium does, or can, produce
intoxication. Now, reader, assure yourself that no quantity of the drug
ever did, or could, intoxicate. The pleasure given by wine is always
mounting and tending to a crisis, after which it declines; that from
opium, when once generated, is stationary for eight or ten hours; the
one is a flame, the other a steady and equable glow.

Another error is that the elevation of spirits produced by opium is
necessarily followed by a proportionate depression. This I shall content
myself with simply denying; assuring my readers that for ten years,
during which I took opium at intervals, th