ion of what opium can do for
human nature. I, whose disease it was to meditate too much and to
observe too little, and who upon my first entrance at college was nearly
falling into a deep melancholy, from brooding too much on the sufferings
which I had witnessed in London, was sufficiently aware of the tendencies
of my own thoughts to do all I could to counteract them. I was, indeed,
like a person who, according to the old legend, had entered the cave of
Trophonius; and the remedies I sought were to force myself into society,
and to keep my understanding in continual activity upon matters of
science. But for these remedies I should certainly have become
hypochondriacally melancholy. In after years, however, when my
cheerfulness was more fully re-established, I yielded to my natural
inclination for a solitary life. And at that time I often fell into
these reveries upon taking opium; and more than once it has happened to
me, on a summer night, when I have been at an open window, in a room from
which I could overlook the sea at a mile below me, and could command a
view of the great town of L---, at about the same distance, that I have
sate from sunset to sunrise, motionless, and without wishing to move.

I shall be charged with mysticism, Behmenism, quietism, &c., but _that_
shall not alarm me. Sir H. Vane, the younger, was one of our wisest men;
and let my reader see if he, in his philosophical works, be half as
unmystical as I am. I say, then, that it has often struck me that the
scene itself was somewhat typical of what took place in such a reverie.
The town of L--- represented the earth, with its sorrows and its graves
left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly forgotten. The ocean, in
everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a dove-like calm,
might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it. For
it seemed to me as if then first I stood at a distance and aloof from the
uproar of life; as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife were
suspended; a respite granted from the secret burthens of the heart; a
sabbath of repose; a resting from human labours. Here were the hopes
which blossom in the paths of life reconciled with the peace which is in
the grave; motions of the intellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for
all anxieties a halcyon calm; a tranquillity that seemed no product of
inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms; infinite
activities, infinite r