“At last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the
features that were all the world to me, and clasped hands, and
heart-breaking partings, and then everlasting farewells, and with a sigh
such as the caves of hell sighed, when the incestuous mother uttered the
abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated—Everlasting
farewells.”
“Whatsoever things capable of being visually represented I did but think
of in the darkness, immediately shaped themselves into phantoms of the
eye; and, by a process no less inevitable, when thus once traced in
faint and visionary colours, they were drawn out by the fierce chemistry
of my dreams, with insufferable splendour that fretted my heart.”
Is there any earthly pleasure which will compensate the victim of this
voluntary condemnation?
EV. And yet a visionary once thought of renting the Hummums in Covent
Garden, and purchasing a large stock of opium, for the purpose of
supplying us with visions. He would have succeeded, perhaps, if he had
hired a second Helen to serve up this nepenthe to the guests.
The intense effect of opium is insensibility or death. Thus the Natches
give narcotics to their victims, and the Brahmins to the suttee women,
ere they ascend the pile, for the purpose of producing insensibility.
Its mildest effects will be, if long continued, especially in early
life, idiocy; and Oppenheim states that it is sometimes administered to
adults by design, to substantiate a statute of lunacy.
ASTR. I cannot disprove your facts, Evelyn, nor do _they_ yet disprove
the rationality of my own faith. And is there not one illusion from
opium-eating which seems to reverse your laws? From the tales of the
Opium-Eater we learn, that the healthy thoughts of the mind seem to be
frozen up in the brain, like the notes in the frozen horn of Munchausen,
or the Irish echo which was so long in giving its answers, that if you
had a concert, you should play and sing the airs _the day before_ the
assemblage of your company. And then, when the effect was wearing off,
these thoughts followed so copiously and fast, as that not one in a
hundred could be recorded. Is this true?
EV. It is a slight fact embellished. The action of opium, however, is
not uniform: it may produce deep sleep, or insensible stupor; or it may
quiet some of the faculties; and when it does so, it excites a dream of
irregular associations.
The salts of morphia exert an especial influence over the organ of
language; so that the orator in the fluency of his power of speech finds
it difficult to stop. The _muriate_ is the best preparation to induce
fluency and confidence in speaking, or the mind to luxuriate throughout
a night in delightful reverie: and in the morning, after this phantasy,
the body will even rise _refreshed_.
In some cases, however, morphia will create a very strange illusion, _a
spectral language_: so that, in reading or listening, we may feel or
think that the words have lost their true meaning. This effect is, I am
told, attended with severe headache.
The poem of “Kubla Khan,” which Coleridge has termed a psychological
curiosity, had its origin in the excitement of opium, a spinning out of
a theme in “Purchas’ Pilgrim,” which he had been reading: it is an
effort of the poet in recording the wild images which had been before
presented to the mind’s eye of the enthusiast,—the impression, indeed,
of the pleasures and the pains of memory.