we cannot quote
chapter and verse; but we distinctly remember, that toothach is
recorded in that book as the particular occasion which first
introduced the author to the knowledge of opium. Whether afterwards,
having been thus initiated by the demon of pain, the opium confessor
did not apply powers thus discovered to purposes of mere pleasure, is
a question for himself; and the same question applies with the same
cogency to Coleridge. Coleridge began in rheumatic pains. What then?
That is no proof that he did not end in voluptuousness. For our parts,
we are slow to believe that ever any man did, or could, learn the
somewhat awful truth, that in a certain ruby-coloured elixir, there
lurked a divine power to chase away the genius of ennui, without
subsequently abusing this power. To taste but once from the tree of
knowledge, is fatal to the subsequent power of abstinence. True it is,
that generations have used laudanum as an anodyne, (for instance,
hospital patients,) who have not afterwards courted its powers as a
voluptuous stimulant; but that, be sure, has arisen from no abstinence
in _them_. There are, in fact, two classes of temperaments as to this
terrific drug--those which are, and those which are not, preconformed
to its power; those which genially expand to its temptations, and
those which frostily exclude them. Not in the energies of the will,
but in the qualities of the nervous organization, lies the dread
arbitration of--Fall or stand: doomed thou art to yield; or,
strengthened constitutionally, to resist. Most of those who have but a
low sense of the spells lying couchant in opium, have practically none
at all. For the initial fascination is for _them_ effectually defeated
by the sickness which nature has associated with the first stages of
opium-eating. But to that other class, whose nervous sensibilities
vibrate to their profoundest depths under the first touch of the
angelic poison, even as a lover's ear thrills on hearing unexpectedly
the voice of her whom he loves, opium is the Amreeta cup of beatitude.
You know the _Paradise Lost_? and you remember, from the eleventh
book, in its earlier part, that laudanum already existed in Eden--nay,
that it was used medicinally by an archangel; for, after Michael had
"purged with euphrasy and rue" the eyes of Adam, lest he should be
unequal to the mere _sight_ of the great visions about to unfold their
draperies before him, next he fortifies his fleshly spirits again