Not see him, Harry, d——e, I see two!”
For the effects of alcohol and opium are alike: the first degree is excitement; the second, reverie; the third, sleep, or stupor. “Ben Jonson,” writes Aubrey, “would many times exceede in drink; Canarie was his beloved liquor: then he would tumble home to bed, and when he had thoroughly perspired, then to studie.”
The second visions of that moral delinquent, the practised opium-eater, like the cordial julep of Comus,
“Will bathe the drooping spirits in delight,
Beyond the bliss of dreams.”
The phantoms of the third stage are often of unutterable anguish: visions of bright forms dabbled in blood, and scenes of crime and horror which are at once loathed and revelled in. The awful curse of Lord Byron’s infidel—a vampyre—who, haunting the graveyard with gouls and afrits, sucks the blood of his race:
“ ’Till they with horror shrink away
From spectre more accurs’d than they.”
Thus for a moment of delirious joy, he yields up his mind to the agonies of remorse, his body to a slow poison, perhaps to a sinful dissolution.
Ida. The scenes which I gazed on among the opium-houses of Constantinople, ever excited my wonder and my pity. These slaves of pleasure, when they assemble and take their seats, are the perfect pictures of either apathetic melancholy or despair. As the potent poison creeps through the blood, they are lighted with unholy fires, until, these being exhausted, the vulture of Prometheus again gnaws their vitals, although the fire is not stolen from heaven.