Chapter V: Part 5

The narrative part of De Quincey's "Confessions" by no means exhausts the story of his suffering as recorded by himself. Scattered through his miscellaneous papers are to be found frequent references to the opium habit and its protracted hold upon the system long after the drug itself had been discarded. The succeeding extracts from his "Literary Reminiscences" will throw light upon his bodily and mental condition in the years immediately following his opium struggle:

"I was ill at that time and for years after--ill from the effects of opium upon the liver, and one primary indication of any illness felt in that organ is peculiar depression of spirits. Hence arose a singular effect of reciprocal action in maintaining a state of dejection. From the original physical depression caused by the derangement of the liver arose a sympathetic depression of the mind, disposing me to believe that I never _could_ extricate myself; and from this belief arose, by reaction, a thousand-fold increase of the physical depression. I began to view my unhappy London life--a life of literary toils odious to my heart--as a permanent state of exile from my Westmoreland home. My three eldest children, at that time in the most interesting stages of childhood and infancy, were in Westmoreland, and so powerful was my feeling (derived merely from a deranged liver) of some long, never-ending separation from my family, that at length, in pure weakness of mind, I was obliged to relinquish my daily walks in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens from the misery of seeing children in multitudes that too forcibly recalled my own.

"Meantime it is very true that the labors I had to face would not even to myself, in a state of good bodily health, have appeared alarming. _Myself_, I say, for in any state of health I do not write with rapidity. Under the influence, however, of opium, when it reaches its maximum in diseasing the liver and deranging the digestive functions, all exertion whatever is revolting in excess. Intellectual exertion above all is connected habitually, when performed under opium influence, with a sense of disgust the most profound for the subject (no matter what) which detains the thoughts; all that morning freshness of animal spirits, which under ordinary circumstances consumes, as it were, and swallows up the interval between one's self and one's distant object, all that dewy freshness is exhaled and burned off by the parching effects of opium on the animal economy.

"I was, besides, and had been for some time engaged in the task of unthreading the labyrinth by which I had reached, unawares, my present state of slavery to opium. I was descending the mighty ladder, stretching to the clouds as it seemed, by which I had imperceptibly attained my giddy altitude--that point from which it had seemed equally impossible to go forward or backward. To wean myself from opium I had resolved inexorably, and finally I accomplished my vow. But the transition state was the worst state of all to support. All the pains of martyrdom were there; all the ravages in the economy of the great central organ, the stomach, which had been wrought by opium; the sickening disgust which attended each separate respiration; and the rooted depravation of the appetite and the digestion--all these must be weathered for months upon months, and without stimulus (however false and treacherous) which, for some part of each day, the old doses of laudanum would have supplied. These doses were to be continually diminished, and under this difficult dilemma: If, as some people advised, the diminution were made by so trifling a quantity as to be imperceptible, in that case the duration of the process was interminable and hopeless--thirty years would not have sufficed to carry it through. On the other hand, if twenty-five to fifty drops were withdrawn on each day (that is, from one to two grains of opium), inevitably within three, four, or five days the deduction began to tell grievously, and the effect was to restore the craving for opium more keenly than ever. There was the collision of both evils--that from the laudanum and that from the want of laudanum. The last was a state of distress perpetually increasing, the other was one which did not sensibly diminish--no, not for a long period of months. Irregular motions, impressed by a potent agent upon the blood and other processes of life, are slow to subside; they maintain themselves long after the exciting cause has been partially or even wholly withdrawn; and, in my case, they did not perfectly subside into the motion of tranquil health for several years. From all this it will be easy to understand the _fact_--though after all impossible, without a similar experience, to understand the _amount_--of my suffering and despondency in the daily task upon which circumstances had thrown me at this period--the task of writing and producing something for the journals, _invita Minerva_. Over and above the principal operation of my suffering state, as felt in the enormous difficulty with which it loaded every act of exertion, there was another secondary effect which always followed as a reaction from the first. And that this was no accident or peculiarity attached to my individual temperament, I may presume from the circumstance that Mr. Coleridge experienced the very same sensations, in the same situation, throughout his literary life, and has often noticed it to me with surprise and vexation. The sensation was that of powerful disgust with any subject upon which he had occupied his thoughts or had exerted his powers of composition for any length of time, and an equal disgust with the result of his exertions--powerful abhorrence, I may call it, absolute loathing of all that he had produced.

"In after years Coleridge assured me that he never could read any thing he had written without a sense of overpowering disgust. Reverting to my own case, which was pretty nearly the same as this, there was, however, this difference--that at times, when I had slept at more regular hours for several nights consecutively, and had armed myself by a sudden increase of the opium for a few days running, I recovered at times a remarkable glow of jovial spirits. In some such artificial respites, it was, from my usual state of distress, and purchased at a heavy price of subsequent suffering, that I wrote the greater part of the opium 'Confessions' in the autumn of 1821.

"These circumstances I mention to account for my having written any thing in a happy or genial state of mind, when I was in a general state so opposite, by my own description, to every thing like enjoyment. That description, as a _general_ one, states most truly the unhappy condition, and the somewhat extraordinary condition of feeling to which opium had brought me. I, like Mr. Coleridge, could not endure what I had written for some time after I had written it. I also shrunk from treating any subject which I had much considered; but more, I believe, as recoiling from the intricacy and the elaborateness which had been made known to me in the course of considering it, and on account of the difficulty or the toilsomeness which might be fairly presumed from the mere fact that I _had_ long considered it, or could have found it necessary to do so, than from any blind mechanical feeling inevitably associated (as in Coleridge it was) with a second survey of the same subject. One other effect there was from the opium, and I believe it had some place in Coleridge's list of morbid affections caused by opium, and of disturbances extended even to the intellect, which was, that the judgment was for a time grievously impaired, sometimes even totally abolished, as applied to any thing I had recently written. Fresh from the labor of composition, I believe, indeed, that almost every man, unless he has had a very long and close experience in the practice of writing, finds himself a little dazzled and bewildered in computing the effect, as it will appear to neutral eyes, of what he has produced. But the incapacitation which I speak of here as due to opium, is of another kind and another degree. It is mere childish helplessness, or senile paralysis, of the judgment, which distresses the man in attempting to grasp the upshot and the total effect (the _tout ensemble_) of what he has himself so recently produced. There is the same imbecility in attempting to hold things steadily together, and to bring them under a comprehensive or unifying act of the judging faculty, as there is in the efforts of a drunken man to follow a chain of reasoning. Opium is said to have some _specific_ effect of debilitation upon the memory: [Footnote: The technical memory, or that which depends upon purely arbitrary links of connection, and therefore more upon a _nisus_ or separate activity of the mind--that memory, for instance, which recalls names--is undoubtedly affected, and most powerfully, by opium. On the other hand, the _logical_ memory, or that which recalls facts that are connected by fixed relations, and where A being given, B must go before or after--historical memory, for instance--is not much affected by opium.] that is, not merely the general one which might be supposed to accompany its morbid effects upon the bodily system, but some other, more direct, subtle, and exclusive; and this, of whatever nature, may possibly extend to the faculty of judging. Such, however, over and above the more known and more obvious ill effects upon fhe spirits and the health, were some of the stronger and more subtle effects of opium in disturbing the intellectual system as well as the animal, the functions of the will also no less than those of the intellect, from which both Coleridge and myself were suffering at the period to which I now refer (1821-25); evils which found their fullest exemplification in the very act upon which circumstances had now thrown me as the _sine qua non_ of my extrication from difficulties-- viz., the act of literary composition. This necessity--the fact of its being my one sole resource for the present, and the established experience which I now had of the peculiar embarrassments and counteracting forces which I should find in opium, but still more in the train of consequences left behind by past opium--strongly co-operated with the mere physical despondency arising out of the liver: and the state of partial unhappiness, among other outward indications, expressed itself by one mark, which some people are apt greatly to misapprehend--as if it were some result of a sentimental turn of feeling--I mean perpetual sighs. But medical men must very well know that a certain state of the liver, _mechanically_ and without any co-operation of the will, expresses itself in sighs. I was much too firm-minded and too reasonable to murmur or complain. I certainly suffered deeply, as one who finds himself a banished man from all that he loves, and who had not the consolations of hope, but feared too profoundly that all my efforts--efforts poisoned so sadly by opium--might be unavailing for the end.

"In 1824 I had come up to London upon an errand--in itself sufficiently vexatious--of fighting against pecuniary embarrassments by literary labors; but, as always happened hitherto, with very imperfect success, from the miserable thwartings I incurred through the deranged state of the liver. My zeal was great and my application was unintermitting, but spirits radically vitiated, chiefly through the direct mechanical depression caused by one important organ deranged; and secondly, by a reflex effect of depression, through my own thoughts in estimating my prospects, together with the aggravation of my case by the inevitable exile from my own mountain home--all this reduced the value of my exertion in a deplorable way. It was rare, indeed, that I could satisfy my own judgment even tolerably with the quality of any article I produced; and my power to make sustained exertions drooped in a way I could not control, every other hour of the day; insomuch that, what with parts to be cancelled, and what with whole days of torpor and pure defect of power to produce any thing at all, very often it turned out that all my labors were barely sufficient (sometimes not sufficient) to meet the current expenses of my residence in London. Gloomy indeed was my state of mind at that period, for though I made prodigious efforts to recover my health, yet all availed me not, and a curse seemed to settle upon whatever I then undertook. One canopy of murky clouds brooded forever upon my spirits, which were in one uniformly low key of cheerless despondency."

De Quincey has given his views pretty freely as to the regimen to be observed by reforming opium-eaters, in a paper on "The Temperance Movement" which is specially worthy of attention.

"My own experience had never travelled in that course which could much instruct me in the miseries from wine or in the resources for struggling with it. I had repeatedly been obliged, indeed, to lay it aside altogether; but in this I never found room for more than seven or ten days' struggle: excesses I had never practiced in the use of wine: simply the habit of using it, and the collateral habits formed by excessive use of opium, had produced no difficulty at all in resigning it even on an hour's notice. From opium I derive my right of offering hints at all upon the subject of abstinence in other forms. But the modes of suffering from the evil, and the separate modes of suffering from the effort of self-conquest, together with errors of judgment incident to such states of transitional torment, are all nearly allied, practically analogous as regards the remedies, even if characteristically distinguished to the inner consciousness. I make no scruple, therefore, of speaking as from a station of high experience and of most watchful attention, which never remitted even under sufferings that were at times absolutely frantic. Once for all, however, in cases deeply rooted no advances ought ever to be made but by small stages; for the effect, which is insensible at first, by the tenth, twelfth, or fifteenth day generally accumulates unendurably under any bolder deduction. Certain it is, that by an error of this nature at the outset, most natural to human impatience under exquisite suffering, too generally the triai is abruptly brought to an end through the crisis of a passionate relapse.

"Another object, and one to which the gladiator matched in single duel with intemperance must direct a religious vigilance, is the digestibility of his food. It must be digestible not only by its original qualities, but also by its culinary preparation.

"The whole process and elaborate machinery of digestion are felt to be mean and humiliating when viewed in relation to our mere animal economy. But they rise into dignity and assert their own supreme importance when they are studied from another station, viz., in relation to the intellect and temper. No man dares _then_ to despise them; it is then seen that these functions of the human system form the essential basis upon which the strength and health of our higher nature repose; and that upon these functions, chiefly, the general happiness of life is dependent. All the rules of prudence or gifts of experience that life can accumulate, will never do as much for human comfort and welfare as would be done by a stricter attention, and a wiser science, directed to the digestive system. In this attention lies the key to any perfect restoration for the victim of intemperance. The sheet-anchor for the storm-beaten sufferer who is laboring to recover a haven of rest from the agonies of intemperance, and who has had the fortitude to abjure the poison which ruined, but which also for brief intervals offered him his only consolation, lies, beyond all doubt, in a most anxious regard to every thing connected with this supreme function of our animal economy. By how much the organs of digestion are feebler, by so much is it the more indispensable that solid and animal food should be adopted. A robust stomach may be equal to the trying task of supporting a fluid such as tea for breakfast; but for a feeble stomach, and still worse for a stomach _enfeebled_ by bad habits, broiled beef or something equally solid and animal, but not too much subjected to the action of fire, is the only tolerable diet. This indeed is the capital rule for a sufferer from habitual intoxication, who must inevitably labor under an impaired digestion: that as little as possible he should use of any liquid diet, and as little as possible of vegetable diet. Beef and a little bread (at the least sixty hours old) compose the privileged bill of fare for his breakfast. Errors of digestion, either from impaired powers or from powers not so much enfeebled as deranged, is the one immeasurable source both of disease and of secret wretchedness to the human race. Next, after the most vigorous attention, and a scientific attention, to the digestive system, in power of operation, stands _exercise_. For myself, under the ravages of opium, I have found walking the most beneficial exercise; besides that, it requires no previous notice or preparation of any kind; and this is a capital advantage in a state of drooping energies, or of impatient and unresting agitation. I may mention, as possibly an accident of my individual temperament, but possibly, also, no accident at all, that the relief obtained by walking was always most sensibly brought home to my consciousness, when some part of it (at least a mile and a half) had been performed before breakfast. In this there soon ceased to be any difficulty; for, while under the full oppression of opium it was impossible for me to rise at any hour that could, by the most indulgent courtesy, be described as within the pale of morning, no sooner had there been established any considerable relief from this oppression than the tendency was in the opposite direction--the difficulty became continually greater of sleeping even to a reasonable hour. Having once accomplished the feat of walking at 9 A.M., I backed in a space of seven or eight months to eight o'clock, to seven, to six, five, four, three; until at this point a metaphysical fear fell upon me that I was actually backing into 'yesterday,' and should soon have no sleep at all. Below three, however, I did not descend; and, for a couple of years, three and a half hours' sleep was all that I could obtain in the twenty-four hours. From this no particular suffering arose, except the nervous impatience of lying in bed for one moment after awaking. Consequently the habit of walking before breakfast became at length troublesome no longer as a most odious duty, but on the contrary, as a temptation that could hardly be resisted on the wettest mornings. As to the quantity of the exercise, I found that six miles a day formed the _minimum_ which would support permanently a particular standard of animal spirits, evidenced to myself by certain apparent symptoms. I averaged about nine and a half miles a day, but ascended on particular days to fifteen or sixteen, and more rarely to twenty-three or twenty-four; a quantity which did not produce fatigue: on the contrary it spread a sense of improvement through almost the whole week that followed; but usually, in the night immediately succeeding to such an exertion, I lost much of my sleep--a privation that under the circumstances explained, deterred me from trying the experiment too often. For one or two years I accomplished more than I have here claimed, viz., from six to seven thousand miles in the twelve months.

"A necessity more painful to me by far than that of taking continued exercise arose out of a cause which applies perhaps with the same intensity only to opium cases, but must also apply in some degree to all cases of debilitation from morbid stimulation of the nerves, whether by means of wine, or opium, or distilled liquors. In travelling on the outside of mails during my youthful days, I made the discovery that opium, after an hour or so, diffuses a warmth deeper and far more permanent than could be had from any other known source. I mention this to explain in some measure the awful passion of cold which for some years haunted the inverse process of laying aside the opium. It was a perfect frenzy of misery; cold was a sensation which then first, as a mode of torment, seemed to have been revealed. In the months of July and August, and not at all the less during the very middle watch of the day, I sat in the closest proximity to a blazing fire: cloaks, blankets, counterpanes, hearth-rugs, horse-cloths, were piled upon my shoulders, but with hardly a glimmering of relief.

"At night, and after taking coffee, I felt a little warmer, and could sometimes afford to smile at the resemblance of my own case to that of Harry Gile. Meantime, the external phenomenon by which the cold expressed itself was a sense (but with little reality) of eternal freezing perspiration. From this I was never free; and at length, from finding one general ablution sufficient for one day, I was thrown upon the irritating necessity of repeating it more frequently than would seem credible if stated. At this time I used always hot water, and a thought occurred to me very seriously that it would be best to live constantly, and perhaps to sleep, in a bath. What caused me to renounce this plan was an accident that compelled me for one day to use cold water. This, first of all, communicated any lasting warmth; so that ever afterward I used none _but_ cold water. Now to live in a cold bath in our climate, and in my own state of preternatural sensibility to cold, was not an idea to dally with. I wish to mention, however, for the information of other sufferers in the same way, one change in the mode of applying the water which led to a considerable and a sudden improvement in the condition of my feelings. I had endeavored in vain to procure a child's battledore, as an easy means (when clothed with sponge) of reaching the interspace between the shoulders. In default of a battledore, therefore, my necessity threw my experiment upon a long hair-brush; and this, eventually, proved of much greater service than any sponge or any battledore, for the friction of the brush caused an irritation on the surface of the skin, which, more than any thing else, has gradually diminished the once continual misery of unrelenting frost, although even yet it renews itself most distressingly at uncertain intervals.

"I counsel the patient not to make the mistake of supposing that his amendment will necessarily proceed continuously or by equal increments, because this, which is a common notion, will certainly lead to dangerous disappointments. How frequently I have heard people encouraging a self-reformer by such language as this: 'When you have got over the fourth day of abstinence, which suppose to be Sunday, then Monday will find you a trifle better; Tuesday better still--though still it should be only a trifle--and so on. You may at least rely on never going back, you may assure yourself of having seen the worst, and the positive improvements, if trifles separately, must soon gather into a sensible magnitude.' This may be true in a case of short standing, but as a general rule it is perilously delusive. On the contrary, the line of progress, if exhibited in a geometrical construction, would describe an ascending path upon the whole, but with frequent retrocessions into descending curves, which, compared with the point of ascent that had been previously gained and so vexatiously interrupted, would sometimes seem deeper than the original point of starting. This mortifying tendency I can report from experience, many times repeated, with regard to opium, and so unaccountably, as regarded all the previous grounds of expectation, that I am compelled to suppose it a tendency inherent in the very nature of all self-restorations for animal systems.

"I counsel the patient frequently to call back before his thoughts--when suffering sorrowful collapses that seem unmerited by any thing done or neglected--that such, and far worse perhaps, must have been his experience, and with no reversion of hope behind, had he persisted in his intemperate indulgences; _these_ also suffer their own collapses, and (so far as things not co-present can be compared) by many degrees more shocking to the genial instincts. I exhort him to believe that no movement on his own part, not the smallest conceivable, toward the restoration of his healthy state, can by possibility perish. Nothing in this direction is finally lost; but often it disappears and hides itself; suddenly, however, to re-appear, and in unexpected strength, and much more hopefully, because such minute elements of improvement, by re-appearing at a remoter stage, show themselves to have combined with other elements of the same kind, so that equally by their gathering tendency and their duration through intervals of apparent darkness, and below the current of what seemed absolute interruption, they argue themselves to be settled in the system. There is no good gift that does not come from God. Almost his greatest is health, with the peace which it inherits, and man must reap _this_ on the same terms as he was told to reap God's earliest gift, the fruits of the earth, viz., 'in the sweat of his brow,' through labor, often through sorrow, through disappointment, but still through imperishable perseverance, and hoping under clouds when all hope seemed darkened.

"But it seems to me important not to omit this particular caution: The patient will be naturally anxious, as he goes on, frequently to test the amount of his advance, and its rate, if that were possible; but this he will see no mode of doing except through tentative balancings of his feelings, and generally of the moral atmosphere around him, as to pleasure and hope, against the corresponding states so far as he can recall them from his periods of intemperance. But these comparisons I warn him are fallacious when made in this way. The two states are incommensurable on any plan of _direct_ comparison. Some common measure must be found, and _out of himself_; some positive fact that will not bend to his own delusive feeling at the moment; as, for instance, in what degree he finds tolerable what heretofore was _not_ so--the effort of writing letters, or transacting business, or undertaking a journey, or overtaking the arrears of labor, that had been once thrown off to a distance. If in these things he finds himself improved, by tests that can not be disputed, he may safely disregard any sceptical whispers from a wayward sensibility which can not yet, perhaps, have recovered its normal health, however much improved. His inner feelings may not yet point steadily to the truth, though they may vibrate in that direction. Besides, it is certain that sometimes very manifest advances, such as any medical man would perceive at a glance, carry a man through stages of agitation and discomfort. A far worse condition might happen to be less agitated, and so far more bearable. Now when a man is positively suffering discomfort, when he is below the line of pleasurable feeling, he is no proper judge of his own condition, which he neither will nor can appreciate. Toothache extorts more groans than dropsy."

Little is definitely known to the public of De Quincey's opium habits subsequent to the publication in the year 1822 of the Appendix to the "Confessions." In the "Life of Professor Wilson," by his daughter, Mrs. Gordon, a letter from De Quincey, under date of February, 1824, is given, which says: "As to myself--though I have written not as one who labors under much depression of mind--the fact is, I _do_ so. At this time calamity presses upon me with a heavy hand. I am quite free of opium, but it has left the liver, which is the Achilles heel of almost every human fabric, subject to affections which are tremendous for the weight of wretchedness attached to them. To fence with these with the one hand, and with the other to maintain the war with the wretched business of hack author, with all its horrible degradations, is more than I am able to bear. At this moment I have not a place to hide my head in. Something I meditate--I know not what--_'Itaque e conspectu omnium abiit_.' With a good publisher and leisure to premeditate what I write, I might yet liberate myself; after which, having paid everybody, I would slink into some dark comer, educate my children, and show my face in the world no more." To the statement of De Quincey that he was then free of opium, Mrs. Gordon adds in a note: "To the very last he asserted this, but the habit, although modified, was never abandoned." Referring to a protracted visit made by him in the year 1829-30 to Professor Wilson, Mrs. Gordon says:

"His tastes were very simple, though a little troublesome, at least to the servant who prepared his repast. Coffee, boiled rice and milk, and a piece of mutton from the loin were the materials that invariably formed his diet. The cook, who had an audience with him daily, received her instructions in silent awe, quite overpowered by his manner, for had he been addressing a duchess he could scarcely have spoken with more deference. He would couch his request in such terms as these: 'Owing to dyspepsia affecting my system, and the possibility of any additional disarrangement of the stomach taking place, consequences incalculably distressing would arise, so much so indeed as to increase nervous irritation, and prevent me from attending to matters of overwhelming importance, if you do not remember to cut the mutton in a diagonal rather than in a longitudinal form.' But these little meals were not the only indulgences that, when not properly attended to, brought trouble to Mr. De Quincey. Regularity in doses of opium was even of greater consequence. An ounce of laudanum per diem prostrated animal life in the early part of the day. It was no unfrequent sight to find him in his room, lying upon the rug in front of the fire, his head resting upon a book, his arms crossed over his breast, plunged in profound slumber. For several hours he would lie in this state, until the effects of the torpor had passed away. The time when he was most brilliant was generally toward the early morning hours; and then, more than once, in order to show him off, my father arranged his supper-parties so that, sitting till three or four in the morning, he brought Mr. De Quincey to that point at which in charm and power of conversation he was so truly wonderful."

* * * * *

In the "Suspiris de Profundis" of De Quincey, written in the year 1845, we have his own final record of the last chapter of his opium history. He says:

"In 1821, as a contribution to a periodical work--in 1822, as a separate volume--appeared the 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.' At the close of this little work the reader was instructed to believe, and _truly_ instructed, that I had mastered the tyranny of opium. The fact is, that _twice_ I mastered it, and by efforts even more prodigious in the second of these cases than in the first. But one error I committed in both. I did not connect with the abstinence from opium, so trying to the fortitude under _any_ circumstances, that enormity of exercise which (as I have since learned) is the one sole resource for making it endurable. I overlooked, in those days, the one _sine qua non_ for making the triumph permanent. Twice I sank, twice I rose again. A third time I sank; partly from the cause mentioned (the oversight as to exercise), partly from other causes, on which it avails not now to trouble the reader. I could moralize if I chose; and perhaps _he_ will moralize whether I choose it or not. But in the mean time neither of us is acquainted properly with the circumstances of the case; I, from natural bias of judgment, not altogether acquainted; and he (with his permission) not at all.

"During this third prostration before the dark idol, and after some years, new and monstrous phenomena began slowly to arise. For a time these were neglected as accidents, or palliated by such remedies as I knew of. But when I could no longer conceal from myself that these dreadful symptoms were moving forward forever, by a pace steadily, solemnly, and equably increasing, I endeavored, with some feeling of panic, for a third time to retrace my steps. But I had not reversed my motions for many weeks before I became profoundly aware that this was impossible. Or, in the imagery of my dreams, which translated every thing into their own language, I saw through vast avenues of gloom those towering gates of ingress, which hitherto had always seemed to stand open, now at last barred against my retreat, and hung with funeral crape.

"The sentiment which attends the sudden revelation that _all is lost!_ silently is gathered up into the heart; it is too deep for gestures or for words; and no part of it passes to the outside. Were the ruin conditional, or were it in any point doubtful, it would be natural to utter ejaculations, and to seek sympathy. But where the ruin is understood to be absolute, where sympathy can not be consolation, and counsel can not be hope, this is otherwise. The voice perishes; the gestures are frozen; and the spirit of man flies back upon its own centre. I, at least, upon seeing those awful gates closed and hung with draperies of woe, as for a death already past, spoke not, nor started, nor groaned. One profound sigh ascended from my heart, and I was silent for days." [Footnote: Mr. De Quincey died at Edinburgh, Dec. 8, 1859.]

OPIUM REMINISCENCES OF COLERIDGE.

Soon after the death of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a retired book-seller of Bristol by the name of Joseph Cottle felt called upon to make public what he knew or could gather respecting the opium habits of the philosopher and poet. His first publication was made in the year 1837, and was entitled "Recollections of Coleridge." Ten years later he elaborated this publication into "The Reminiscences of Coleridge and Southey." From the pages of the latter, from Gilman's "Life of Coleridge," from the poet's own correspondence, and from the miscellaneous writings of De Quincey, the following record has been chiefly compiled. From these sources the reader can obtain a pretty accurate knowledge of the circumstances under which Coleridge became an opium-eater; of the struggles he made to emancipate himself from the habit, and of the intellectual ruin which opium entailed upon one of the most marvellous-minded men the world has produced.

It seems certain that Coleridge became familiar with opium as early at least as the year 1796, though it is probable that its use did not become habitual till about 1802 or 1803. From this period to the year 1814, his consumption of laudanum appears to have been enormous. The efforts he made at self-reformation immediately previous to his admission in 1816 into the family of Dr. Gilman, were unsuccessful; and while the quantity of laudanum to which he had been so long accustomed, was subsequently reduced to a small daily allowance, the opium _habit_ ceased only with his life.

In justice to his memory, and in part mitigation of the censures of many of his personal friends, as well as to enable the reader to judge of the circumstances under which this distinguished man fell into his ruinous habit, the following extracts from his own letters and from other sources are given, nearly in chronological order, that it may be seen how far, from his childhood to his grave, Coleridge's constitutional infirmities furnish a partial apology for his excesses. Under date of Nov. 5, 1796, he writes to a friend:

"I wanted such a letter as yours, for I am very unwell. On Wednesday night I was seized with an intolerable pain from my temple to the tip of my right shoulder, including my right eye, cheek, jaw, and that side of the throat. I was nearly frantic, and ran about the house almost naked, endeavoring by every means to excite sensation in different parts of my body, and so to weaken the enemy by creating a diversion. It continued from one in the morning till half-past five, and left me pale and faint. It came on fitfully, but not so violently, several times on Thursday, and began severer threats toward night; but I took between sixty and seventy drops of laudanum, and sopped the Cerberus just as his mouth began to open. On Friday it only niggled, as if the chief had departed, as from a conquered place, and merely left a small garrison behind, or as if he had evacuated the Corsica, and a few straggling pains only remained. But this morning he returned in full force, and his name is Legion. Giant-fiend of a hundred hands, with a shower of arrowy death-pangs he transpierced me; and then he became a Wolf, and lay gnawing my bones! I am not mad, most noble Festus! but in sober sadness I have suffered this day more bodily pain than I had before a conception of. My right cheek has certainly been placed with admirable exactness under the focus of some invisible burning-glass, which concentrated all the rays of a Tartarean sun. My medical attendant decides it to be altogether nervous, and that it originates either in severe application or excessive anxiety. My beloved Poole, in excessive anxiety I believe it might originate. I have a blister under my right ear, and I take twenty-five drops of laudanum every five hours, the ease and spirits gained by which have enabled me to write to you this flighty but not exaggerating account."

About the same time he writes to another friend, "A devil, a very devil, has got possession of my left temple, eye, cheek, jaw, throat, and shoulder. I can not see you this evening. I write in agony." Frequent reference is made in Coleridge's correspondence to his sufferings, from rheumatic or neuralgic affections, and the following letter, written in 1797, may possibly explain their origin:

"I had asked my mother one evening to cut my cheese entire, so that I might toast it. This was no easy matter, it being a _crumbly_ cheese. My mother, however, did it. I went into the garden for something or other, and in the mean time my brother Frank minced my cheese, to 'disappoint the favorite.' I returned, saw the exploit, and in an agony of passion flew at Frank. He pretended to have been seriously hurt by my blow, flung himself on the ground, and there lay with outstretched limbs. I hung over him mourning and in a great fright; he leaped up, and with a horse-laugh gave me a severe blow in the face. I seized a knife and was running at him, when my mother came in and took me by the arm. I expected a flogging, and struggling from her I ran away to a little hill or slope, at the bottom of which the Otter flows, about a mile from Ottery. There I stayed. My rage died away, but my obstinancy vanquished my fears, and taking out a shilling book, which had at the end morning and evening prayers, I very devoutly repeated them--thinking at the same time, with a gloomy inward satisfaction, how miserable my mother must be!.... It grew dark and I fell asleep. It was toward the end of October, and it proved a stormy night. I felt the cold in my sleep, and dreamed that I was pulling the blanket over me, and actually pulled over me a dry thorn-bush which lay on the ground near me. In my sleep I had rolled from the top of the hill till within three yards of the river, which flowed by the unfenced edge of the bottom. I awoke several times, and finding myself wet, and cold, and stiff, closed my eyes again that I might forget it.

"In the mean time my mother waited about half an hour, expecting my return when the _sulks_ had evaporated. I not returning, she sent into the church-yard and round the town. Not found! Several men and all the boys were sent out to ramble about and seek me. In vain! My mother was almost distracted, and at ten o'clock at night I was _cried_ by the crier in Ottery and in two villages near it, with a reward offered for me. No one went to bed; indeed I believe half the town were up all the night. To return to myself. About five in the morning, or a little after, I was broad awake and attempted to get up and walk, but I could not move. I saw the shepherds and workmen at a distance and cried, but so faintly that it was impossible to hear me thirty yards off, and there I might have lain and died--for I was now almost given over, the pond and even the river near which I was lying having been dragged--but providentially Sir Stafford Northcote, who had been out all night, resolved to make one other trial, and came so near that he heard me crying. He carried me in his arms for nearly a quarter of a mile, when we met my father and Sir Stafford Northcote's servants. I remember and never shall forget my father's face as he looked upon me while I lay in the servant's arms--so calm, and the tears stealing down his face, for I was the child of his old age. My mother, as you may suppose, was outrageous with joy. Meantime in rushed a young lady, crying out, 'I hope you'll whip him, Mr. Coleridge.' This woman still lives at Ottery, and neither philosophy nor religion has been able to conquer the antipathy which I feel toward her whenever I see her. I was put to bed and recovered in a day or so; but I was certainly injured, for I was weakly and subject to ague for many years after."

The next year he writes to two other friends: "I have been confined to my bed for some days through a fever occasioned by the stump of a tooth which baffled chirurgical efforts to eject, and which by affecting my eye affected my stomach, and through that my whole frame. I am better, but still weak in consequence of such long sleeplessness and wearying pains; weak, very weak.

"I have even now returned from a little excursion that I have taken for the confirmation of my health, which has suffered a rude assault from the anguish of the stump of a tooth which had baffled the attempts of our surgeon here, and which confined' me to my bed. I suffered much from the disease, and more from the doctor. Rather than again put my mouth into his hands, I would put my hands into a lion's mouth."

His nephew says of him: "He was naturally of a joyous temperament, and in one amusement, swimming, he excelled and took singular delight. Indeed he believed, and probably with truth, that his health was singularly injured by his excess in bathing, coupled with such tricks as swimming across the New River in his clothes, and drying them on his back, and the like."

In the biography of the poet by his friend Dr. Gilman, in whose family he resided for the last twenty years of his life, the subjoined statements are found:

"From his own account, as well as from Lamb and others who knew him when at school, he must have been a delicate and suffering boy. His principal ailments he owed much to the state of his stomach, which was at that time so delicate that when compelled to go to a large closet containing shoes, to pick out a pair easy to his feet, which were always tender, the smell from the number in this place used to make him so sick that I have often seen him shudder, even in late life, when he gave an account of it.

"'Conceive,' says Coleridge, 'what I must have been at fourteen. I was in a continual low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner and read, read, read; fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's Island, finding a mountain of plum-cake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the shapes of tables and chairs--hunger and fancy!'

"Full half the time from seventeen to eighteen was passed in the sick-ward of Christ's Hospital, afflicted with jaundice and rheumatic fever. From these indiscretions and their consequences may be dated all his bodily sufferings in future life--in short, rheumatism sadly afflicting him, while the remedies only slightly alleviated his sufferings, without hope of a permanent cure. Medical men are too often called upon to witness the effects of acute rheumatism in the young subject. In some the attack is on the heart, and its consequences are immediate; in others it leaves behind bodily suffering, which may indeed be palliated, but terminates only in a lingering dissolution.

"In early life he was remarkably joyous. Nature had blessed him with a buoyancy of spirits, and even when suffering he deceived the partial observer.

"At this time (while a soldier) he frequently complained of a pain at the pit of his stomach, accompanied with sickness, which totally prevented his stooping, and in consequence he could never arrive at the power of bending his body to rub the heels of his horse. During the latter part of his life he became nearly crippled by the rheumatism."

Under date of July 24, 1800, Coleridge writes: "I have been more unwell than I have ever been since I left school. For many days was forced to keep my bed, and when released from that incarceration I suffered most grievously from a brace of swollen eyelids and a head into which, on the least agitation, the blood was felt as rushing in and flowing back again, like the raking of the tide on a coast of loose stones."

In January, 1803, he says: "I write with difficulty, with all the fingers but one of my right hand very much swollen. Before I was half up the _Kirkstone mountain_, the storm had wetted me through and through. In spite of the wet and the cold I should have had some pleasure in it, but for two vexations; first, an almost intolerable pain came into my right eye, a smarting and burning pain; and secondly, in consequence of riding with such cold water under my seat, extremely uneasy and burdensome feelings attacked my groin, so that, what with the pain from the one, and the alarm from the other, I had no enjoyment at all!

"I went on to Grasmere. I was not at all unwell when I arrived there, though wet of course to the skin. My right eye had nothing the matter with it, either to the sight of others or to my own feelings, but I had a bad night with distressful dreams, chiefly about my eye; and waking often in the dark, I thought it was the effect of mere recollection, but it appeared in the morning that my right eye was bloodshot and the lid swollen. That morning, however, I walked home, and before I reached Keswick my eye was quite well, but _I felt unwell all over_. Yesterday I continued unusually unwell all over me till eight o'clock in the evening. I took no _laudanum or opium_, but at eight o'clock, unable to bear the stomach uneasiness and aching of my limbs, I took two large tea-spoons full of ether in a wine-glass of camphorated gum-water, and a third tea-spoon full at ten o'clock, and I received complete relief, my body calmed, my sleep placid; but when I awoke in the morning my right hand, with three of the fingers, were swollen and inflamed. The swelling in the hand is gone down, and of two of the fingers somewhat abated, but the middle finger is still twice its natural size, so that I write with difficulty."

A few days later, he writes to the same friend: "On Monday night I had an attack in my stomach and right side, which in pain, and the length of its continuance, appeared to me by far the severest I ever had. About one o'clock the pain passed out of my stomach, like lightning from a cloud, into the extremities of my right foot. My toe swelled and throbbed, and I was in a state of delicious ease which the pain in my toe did not seem at all to interfere with. On Wednesday I was well, and after dinner wrapped myself up warm and walked to Lodore.

"The walk appears to have done me good, but I had a wretched night: shocking pains in my head, occiput, and teeth, and found in the morning that I had two bloodshot eyes. But almost immediately after the receipt and perusal of your letter the pains left me, and I am bettered to this hour; and am now indeed as well as usual saving that my left eye is very much bloodshot. It is a sort of duty with me to be particular respecting parts that relate to my health. I have retained a good sound appetite through the whole of it, without any craving after exhilarants or narcotics, and I have got well as in a moment. Rapid recovery is constitutional with me; but the former circumstances I can with certainty refer to the system of diet, abstinence of vegetables, wine, spirits, and beer, which I have adopted by your advice."

The same year he writes to a friend suffering from a chronic disorder, and records the trial of Bang--"the powder of the leaves of a kind of hemp that grows in the hot climates. It is prepared, and I believe used, in all parts of the east, from Morocco to China. In Europe it is found to act very differently on different constitutions. Some it elevates in the extreme; others it renders torpid, and scarcely observant of any evil that may befall them. In Barbary it is always taken, if it can be procured, by criminals condemned to suffer amputation, and it is said to enable those miserables to bear the rough operations of an unfeeling executioner more than we Europeans can the keen knife of our most skillful chirurgeons:

"We will have a fair trial of Bang. Do bring down some of the Hyoscyamine pills, and I will give a fair trial to Opium, Henbane, and Nepenthe. By the bye, I always considered Homer's account of the Nepenthe as a _Banging_ lie."

In September, 1803, he gives a gloomy account of his condition. It seems probable that at this time his use of opium must have become habitual:

"For five months past my mind has been strangely shut up. I have taken the paper with the intention to write to you many times, but it has been one blank feeling--one blank idealess feeling. I had nothing to say--could say nothing. How dearly I love you, my very dreams make known to me. I will not trouble you with the gloomy tale of my health. When I am awake, by patience, employment, effort of mind, and walking, I can keep the fiend at arm's-length, but the night is my Hell! sleep my tormenting Angel. Three nights out of four I fall asleep, struggling to lie awake, and my frequent night-screams have almost made me a nuisance in my own house. Dreams with me are no shadows, but the very calamities of my life.

"In the hope of drawing the gout, if gout it should be, into my feet, I walked, previously to my getting into the coach at Perth, 263 miles in eight days, with no unpleasant fatigue. My head is equally strong; but acid or not acid, gout or not gout, something there is in my stomach.

"To diversify this dusky letter, I will write an _Epitaph_, which I composed in my sleep for myself while dreaming that I was dying. To the best of my recollection I have not altered a word:

"'Here sleeps at length poor Col. and without screaming,
Who died as he had always lived, a dreaming;
Shot dead, while sleeping, by the gout within,
Alone, and all unknown, at E'nbro' in an Inn'"

In the beginning of the next year, 1804, the state of his health is thus indicated: "I stayed at Grasmere (Mr. Wordsworth's) a month--three-fourths of the time bedridden--and deeply do I feel the enthusiastic kindness of Wordsworth's wife and sister, who sat up by me, one or the other, in order to awaken me at the first symptoms of distressful feeling; and even when they went to rest, continued often and often to weep and watch for me even in their dreams.