add another, a living name?--have attained to. Then, again, what a field
for poetical vagaries, and madnesses of imagination, would be afforded
by the subject of opium-dreams! Now, strictly speaking, in order to
hallucinate honestly, your opium-writer ought to have had some
practical knowledge of opium-eating: then could he descant with the
authority of experience--yea, though he write himself thereby down an
ass--on its effects upon mind and body; then could he tell of luxuries
and torments in true Frenchified detail; then could he expound its pains
and pleasures with all the eloquence of personal conviction. But, as to
such real risk of poisoning myself, and of making I wot not how actual a
mooncalf, of my present sound mind and body, I herein would reasonably
demur: and, if I wanted dreams, would tax my fancy, and not my
apothecary's bill. Dreams? I need not whiff opium, nor toss off laudanum
negus, to imagine myself--a young Titan, sucking fiery milk from the
paps of a volcano; a despot so limitless and magnificent, as to spurn
such a petty realm as the Solar System, with Cassiopeia, Booetes, and his
dog, to boot; an intellect, so ravished, that it feels all flame, or a
mass of matter so inert, that it lies for ages in the silent depths of
ocean, a lump of primeval metal: Madness, with the red-hot iron hissing
in his brain: Murder, with the blood-hound ghost, over land, over sea,
through crowds, deserts, woods, and happy fields, ever tracking silently
in horrid calmness; the oppression of indefinite Guilt, with that Holy
Eye still watching; the consciousness of instant danger, the sense of
excruciating pain, the intolerable tyranny of vague wild fear, without
will or power to escape: spurring for very life on a horse of marble:
flying upward to meet the quick-falling skies--O, that universal
crash!--greeted in a new-entered world with the execrations of the
assembled dead--that hollow, far-echoing, malicious laughter--that
hurricane-sound of clattering skulls; to be pent up, stifling like a
toad, in a limestone rock for centuries; to be haunted, hunted, hooted;
to eat off one's own head with its cruel madly crunching under-jaw;
to--but enough of horrors: and as to delights, all that Delacroix
suggests of perfume, and Mahomet of Houris, and Gunter of cookery, and
the German opera of music: all Camilla-like running unexertive, all that
sea unicorns can effect in swift swimming, or storm-caught condors in
things aerial;