In the latter part of June, 1840, I went to New York city to complete my third year of legal study. I was at the time weak in body and low-spirited, and my debility was increased by the extraordinary heat of the weather. I was disappointed too in several arrangements on which I had reckoned. The result of all this was a want of physical and moral energy which precluded the attempt at emancipation from opium which I had purposed to make on my arrival; and worse than this, I found myself rapidly getting into the way of adding brandy to opium to procure the desired amount of excitement, as had formerly been the case. I came to the conclusion that I could not achieve my freedom alone, but must have help. I had no home, and after casting about I could devise no better scheme than to enter the Insane Hospital at Bloomingdale. I accordingly went there and stayed thirteen weeks. I found on arriving, that neither myself nor the friends I had advised with had understood the conditions of a residence in that Institution; for to their disappointment and mine I was locked into the lunatic ward and at total abandonment of stimulus, in a state of intense nervous excitement, I was for several days, especially during nights, kept on the very verge of frenzy by the mutterings and gibberings, the howlings and horrid execrations of the mad creatures, my neighbors. Without occupation for mind or body—with all things disturbing about me—with deeply depressing remembrances, and the future showing black as midnight—I remained here three months, and it is marvellous that these causes alone did not utterly destroy me. But to fill up the measure, I was attacked with fever and ague, which kept me burning and freezing, shaking and aching, for several weeks, and reduced me to such a degree of feebleness that I kept my bed most of the time. Thus I left the Institution more shattered physically than when I entered—so shattered that it was full two years before I regained my customary measure of bodily strength.
It being now the first of December, 1840, I entered a law office in Wall Street, where I remained till the following July. For some months I enjoyed a glimpse of sunshine and had the hope of being established in business by my employer. But in the spring of 1841 his business fell off so largely that he dismissed three clerks who were there on my entering, and counselled me to seek some more promising sphere. Thus I was again afloat, knowing not whither to turn, and so discouraged as to care little what became of me. One thing only seemed stable and permanent, and that was the temptation to seek a temporary exhilaration in my depression, and a brief oblivion of my troubles, in alcohol.
By another change, in the fore part of July, 1841, I entered Judge Allen's office in Worcester, Mass., and continuing there until March, 1842, was formally admitted to the Bar and commissioned as Justice of the Peace for Essex County. My life in Worcester was pretty regular, though I was not perfectly abstinent, nor did I escape being once or twice overcome. In March, 1842, I went to Lynn, Mass., as editor of the Essex County Washingtonian. Here was the spot where, technically speaking, I had first entered life, and it was teeming with a thousand memories, now most painful and sad. Much as I had known before of mental suffering, I can remember none more intense than I experienced the first few months of my return to Lynn. At times I felt as if any thing were preferable to what I endured, and that to procure relief by any means whatever was perfectly justifiable, on the ground of that necessity which is above all laws. I therefore used morphine, first occasionally and at last habitually, and sometimes, though rarely, brandy. Some six months after settling in Lynn, being one day in Boston on, business, I was oppressed with deadly nausea, for which after trying two or three glasses of plain soda-water as a remedy, I tried a glass of brandy with the soda. I was made intoxicated by the means and badly so. I was perplexed as to what I ought to do under the circumstances, but by the advice of two Washingtonians, one of them the general agent of my paper, I still continued at my post of editor.
In the following winter I was up as one of three candidates for Congress from Essex County. In addition to the usual butting a candidate gets on such occasions—being the third, whose votes prevented a choice of either the other two candidates—I was exposed to a raking fire from the two great political parties. Out of old truths twisted and exaggerated out of all identity, and new lies coined for the occasion, a world of falsity as to my character and habits was bandied about; and although a caucus sitting in examination two long successive evenings pronounced the charges against me slanderous and wicked, and published a hand-bill to that effect, yet the proprietor of my paper, moved by a power behind the throne, chose that my connection with the paper should terminate. For some time previous, I had been getting interested in the Association doctrines of Fourier. I now became one of the editors of a monthly magazine devoted in part to the advocacy of these doctrines, which after issuing three numbers was compelled to stop for want of support. I then in September, 1843, went forth on a tour through Massachusetts to lecture on the subject. I thus spent five months, visiting twenty towns and delivering some ninety gratuitous lectures. During this time I used morphine habitually, and occasionally, though rarely, took brandy. I took enough, however, of the latter to partly intoxicate me three or four times, and sufficiently often to prevent the reputation of being intemperate from ever dying away.
Sick and tired out with an existence so false and wretched, I determined again to achieve emancipation at whatever cost, and by the help of Providence, and the kind co-operation of inestimable friends, I succeeded. I suffered severely, but far less than might have been supposed. Cold water, under God, was the great instrument of my cure. Drinking copiously of it, and lying some hours per day swathed in a sheet dipped in it, for about one month, I found the painful symptoms mostly gone; and three or four months of rest completed the restoration of my strength.
And thus, after years of pain and sufferings in every kind, and errors many and great, I find myself, by God's blessing, free and healthy, and with a youthful life and feeling of which the very memory was almost extinct.
Within a few months from the time this autobiography closes, the writer again relapsed into the use of opium, and was received as a patient into the New York Hospital. While there he furnished the editor of the Medical Times, then on duty at the Hospital, with a brief history of his case, substantially agreeing with what has already been given. A portion of the paper is occupied with a comparison of the effects of opium and alcohol on the system, and is valuable as being the experience of one who was eminently familiar with both:
The difference between opium and alcohol in their effects on body and mind, is (judging from my own experience) very great. Alcohol, pushed to a certain extent, overthrows the balance of the faculties, and brings out some one or more into undue prominence and activity; and (sad indeed) these are most commonly our inferior and perhaps lowest faculties. A man who, sober, is a demi-god, is, when drunk, below even a beast. With opium (me judice) it is the reverse. Opium takes a man's mind where it finds it, and lifts it en masse on to a far higher platform of existence, the faculties all retaining their former relative positions—that is, taking the mind as it is, it intensifies and exalts all its capacities of thought and susceptibilities of emotion. Not even this, however, extravagant as it may sound, conveys the whole truth. Opium weakens or utterly paralyzes the lower propensities, while it invigorates and elevates the superior faculties, both intellectual and affectional. The opium-eater is without sexual appetite; anger, envy, malice, and the entire hell-brood claiming kin to these, seem dead within him, or at least asleep; while gentleness, kindness, benevolence, together with a sort of sentimental religionism, constitute his habitual frame of mind. If a man has a poetical gift, opium almost irresistibly stirs it into utterance. If his vocation be to write, it matters not how profound, how difficult, how knotty the theme to be handled, opium imparts a before unknown power of dealing with such a theme; and after completing his task a man reads his own composition with utter amazement at its depth, its grasp, its beauty, and force of expression, and wonders whence came the thoughts that stand on the page before him. If called to speak in public, opium gives him a copiousness of thought, a fluency of utterance, a fruitfulness of illustration, and a penetrating, thrilling eloquence, which often astounds and overmasters himself, not less than it kindles, melts, and sways the audience he addresses. I might dilate largely on this topic, but space and strength are alike lacking.
Taking up his personal story where his "Autobiography" leaves it, and where, as he imagined, hydropathic treatment had effected a cure, the writer explains how he became for the third time an opium-eater:
The time came at last when I must work, be the consequences what they would, and work, too, with my brain, my only implement; and that time found my brain impotent from a yet uninvigorated nervous system. If I would work, I must stimulate; and morphine, bad as it was, was better than alcohol. I took morphine once more, and lectured on literary topics for some months with triumphant success. While so lecturing in a country town, I was solicited to take a parish in the neighborhood. I did so, and there continued two years and a quarter, performing in that time as much literary labor as ever in three times the interval in any prior period of my life. In short, I had three happy, intellectually-vigorous, outpouring years, with bodily health uniformly sound and complete with the exceptions hereafter to be mentioned. And yet, through those years I never used less than a quarter of an ounce of morphine per week, and sometimes more. I attribute my retaining so much health, in spite of the morphine, to the rigorous salubrity of my habits, bodily and mental, in other respects. Once, and often twice a day, the year round, I laved the whole person in cold water with soap; I slept with open window the year through excepting stormy winter nights; I laid upon a hard bed, guiltless of feathers; I used a simple diet; and finally, I cherished all gentle and kindly, while rigidly excluding from my mind all bitter and perturbing, feelings. But not to dilate further on mere narrative, let me say that I have continued to use opium, for the most part habitually, from my last assumption of it up to the period of my admission into this Hospital. A year since, however, I dropped morphine, and have since used the opium pill in its stead, sometimes taking an ounce per week, but generally not overpassing a half ounce per week. And here I may make the general remark, proved true from my own experience, that for all the desirable effects opium is about the same as an ounce or any larger quantity of said gum, and nearly the same as a quarter-ounce of morphine or more—that is, half an ounce of opium stimulates and braces me at least nearly if not entirely as much as I can be stimulated and braced by this drug. All that is taken over this tends rather to clog, to stupefy, to nauseate, than to stimulate.