I have often been asked how I first came to be a regular opium-eater, and have suffered, very unjustly, in the opinion of my acquaintances, from being reputed to have brought upon myself all the sufferings which I shall have to record, by a long course of indulgence in this practice purely for the sake of creating an artificial state of pleasurable excitement. This, however, is a misrepresentation of my case. It was not for the purpose of creating pleasure, but of mitigating pain in the severest degree, that I first began to use opium as an article of daily diet.
The calamities of my novitiate in London, when, as a runaway from school, I made acquaintance with starvation and horror, had struck root so deeply in my bodily constitution that afterwards they shot up and flourished afresh, and grew into a noxious umbrage that has overshadowed and darkened my latter years.
It is so long since I first took opium that, if it had been a trifling incident in my life, I might have forgotten its date; but, from circumstances connected with it, I remember that it must be referred to the autumn of 1804. During that season I was in London, having come thither for the first time since my entrance at college. And my introduction to opium arose in the following way. One morning I awoke with excruciating rheumatic pains of the head and face, from which I had hardly any respite.
On the twenty-first day, I think it was, and on a Sunday, I went out into the streets, rather to run away, if possible, from my torments than with any distinct purpose. By accident, I met a college acquaintance, who recommended opium. Opium! dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain! I had heard of it as I had of manna or of ambrosia, but no further. My road homewards lay through Oxford Street; and near "the stately Pantheon" I saw a druggist's shop, where I first became possessed of the celestial drug.
Arrived at my lodgings, I took it, and in an hour--oh, heavens! what a revulsion! what an unheaving, from its lowest depths, of the 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 me, in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed.
II.--Effects of the Seductive Drug
First one word with respect to its bodily effects. It is not so much affirmed as taken for granted that opium does, or can, produce intoxication. Now, reader, assure yourself that no quantity of the drug ever did, or could, intoxicate. The pleasure given by wine is always mounting and tending to a crisis, after which it declines; that from opium, when once generated, is stationary for eight or ten hours; the one is a flame, the other a steady and equable glow.
Another error is that the elevation of spirits produced by opium is necessarily followed by a proportionate depression. This I shall content myself with simply denying; assuring my readers that for ten years, during which I took opium at intervals, the day succeeding to that on which I allowed myself this luxury was always a day of unusually good spirits.
With respect to the torpor supposed to accompany the practice of opium-eating, I deny that also. The primary effects of opium are always, and in the highest degree, to excite and stimulate the system. But, that the reader may judge of the degree in which opium is likely to stupefy the faculties of an Englishman, I shall mention the way in which I myself often passed an opium evening in London during the period between 1804 and 1812. I used to fix beforehand how often within a given time, and when, I would commit a debauch of opium. This was seldom more than once in three weeks, and it was usually on a Tuesday or a Saturday night; my reason for which was this: in those days Grassini sang at the opera, and her voice was delightful to me beyond all that I had ever heard. The choruses were divine to hear, and when Grassini appeared in some interlude, as she often did, and poured forth her passionate soul as Andromache at the tomb of Hector, etc., I question whether any Turk, of all that ever entered the paradise of opium-eaters, can have had half the pleasure I had.
Another pleasure I had which, as it could be had only on a Saturday night, occasionally struggled with my love of the opera. The pains of poverty I had lately seen too much of; but the pleasures of the poor, their consolations of spirit, and their reposes from bodily toil, can never become oppressive to contemplate. Now, Saturday night is the season for the chief, regular, and periodic return of rest for the poor. For the sake, therefore, of witnessing a spectacle with which my sympathy was so entire, I used often on Saturday nights, after I had taken opium, to wander forth, without much regarding the direction or the distance, to all the markets, and other parts of London to which the poor resort of a Saturday night for laying out their wages.