which wraps my limbs as with
a velvet mantle, I marvel how the poets and artists and scholars of olden
times nursed those dreams which the world calls indolence, but which are
the seeds that germinate into great achievements. How did Plato
philosophize without the pipe? How did gray Homer, sitting on the
temple-steps in the Grecian twilights, drive from his heart the bitterness
of beggary and blindness? How did Phidias charm the Cerberus of his animal
nature to sleep, while his soul entered the Elysian Fields and beheld the
forms of heroes? For, in the higher world of Art, Body and Soul are sworn
enemies, and the pipe holds an opiate more potent than all the drowsy
syrups of the East, to drug the former into submission. Milton knew this,
as he smoked his evening pipe at Chalfont, wandering, the while, among the
palms of Paradise.

But it is also our loss, that Tobacco was unknown to the Greeks. They
would else have given us, in verse and in marble, another divinity in
their glorious Pantheon--a god less drowsy than Morpheus and Somnus, less
riotous than Bacchus, less radiant than Apollo, but with something of the
spirit of each: a figure, beautiful with youth, every muscle in perfect
repose, and the vague expression of dreams in his half-closed eyes. His
temple would have been built in a grove of Southern pines, on the borders
of a land-locked gulf, sheltered from the surges that buffet without,
where service would have been rendered him in the late hours of the
afternoon, or in the evening twilight. From his oracular tripod words of
wisdom would have been spoken, and the fanes of Delphi and Dodona would
have been deserted for his.

Oh, non-smoking friends, who read these lines with pain and
incredulity--and you, ladies, who turn pale at the thought of a pipe--let
me tell you that you are familiar only with the vulgar form of tobacco,
and have never passed between the wind and its gentility. The word conveys
no idea to you but that of "long nines," and pig-tail, and cavendish.
Forget these for a moment, and look upon this dark-brown cake of dried
leaves and blossoms, which exhales an odor of pressed flowers. These are
the tender tops of the _Jebelee_, plucked as the buds begin to expand, and
carefully dried in the shade. In order to be used, it is moistened with
rose-scented water, and cut to the necessary degree of fineness. The test
of true Jebelee is, that it burns with a slow, hidden fire, like tinder,
and causes n