further. How
unmeaning a sound was it at that time: what solemn chords does it now
strike upon my heart! what heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy
remembrances! Reverting for a moment to these, I feel a mystic
importance attached to the minutest circumstances connected with the
place and the time and the man (if man he was) that first laid open to me
the Paradise of Opium-eaters. It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and
cheerless: and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than
a rainy Sunday in London. My road homewards lay through Oxford Street;
and near "the stately Pantheon" (as Mr. Wordsworth has obligingly called
it) I saw a druggist's shop. The druggist--unconscious minister of
celestial pleasures!--as if in sympathy with the rainy Sunday, looked
dull and stupid, just as any mortal druggist might be expected to look on
a Sunday; and when I asked for the tincture of opium, he gave it to me as
any other man might do, and furthermore, out of my shilling returned me
what seemed to be real copper halfpence, taken out of a real wooden
drawer. Nevertheless, in spite of such indications of humanity, he has
ever since existed in my mind as the beatific vision of an immortal
druggist, sent down to earth on a special mission to myself. And it
confirms me in this way of considering him, that when I next came up to
London I sought him near the stately Pantheon, and found him not; and
thus to me, who knew not his name (if indeed he had one), he seemed
rather to have vanished from Oxford Street than to have removed in any
bodily fashion. The reader may choose to think of him as possibly no
more than a sublunary druggist; it may be so, but my faith is better--I
believe him to have evanesced, {11} or evaporated. So unwillingly would
I connect any mortal remembrances with that hour, and place, and
creature, that first brought me acquainted with the celestial drug.

Arrived at my lodgings, it may be supposed that I lost not a moment in
taking the quantity prescribed. I was necessarily ignorant of the whole
art and mystery of opium-taking, and what I took I took under every
disadvantage. But I took it--and in an hour--oh, heavens! what a
revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of 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