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PSYCHOLOGY OF OPIUM AND HASHEESH.

OPIUM.

THAT in all the historic periods of which we have any written record, from the remotest antiquity to the present time, men have been addicted to the use of stimuli, is a very wonderful and significant fact. It is a custom which reaches all the way from the primeval night of barbarism to the burning noon of modern civilization, and there is no people without the marks of this frightful scourge upon its shoulders. Neither is it, nor has it ever been confined to any particular class in society or given order of intellect, but is common alike to the most ignorant and abject human herd in the South-Sea Islands, and to the proud and polished circles of Paris, London, and New York. An exposition of the various conditions and motives out of which so universal and so destructive a habit has grown would doubtless prove both interesting and profitable; but this would be foreign to our present purpose. We shall ignore for the most part another very important branch of the subject — the use of fermented liquors,— and confine ourselves to the use of narcotics, and mainly to the practice as it obtains among intellectual and cultivated men, and to its psychological manifestations.

Narcotic indulgence, in some form or other, is common to almost every people on the face of the globe. It is estimated that Tobacco is used among eight hundred millions of men - four-fifths of the human family; Opium among four hundred millions, chiefly in Turkey, India, and China; Hemp, or Hasheesh, among two to three hundred millions- this is the narcotic of all Africa, and is very extensively used in Persia, India, Turkey, and among the Indians of Brazil. The Betel-Nut is used in India, China, and the Eastern Archipelago, among, perhaps, one hundred millions. Coca, the narcotic of Peru and Bolivia, is probably used among ten millions. The Intoxicating Fungus, or common toad-stool, is used in Siberia; the Ava in the Polynesian Islands; the Thorn Apple in New Granada and among the Himalayas; Ledum and Sweet Gale in Northern Europe and America; the Emetic Holly by the Florida Indians; the Hop throughout England and Germany; the common Lettuce in France; and many other poisonous

substances in various parts of the world, as substitutes for some of those already mentioned. Out of this formidable array of narcotics we shall speak more particularly of two-opium and hasheesh

as most frequently resorted to by cultivated and highly susceptible minds, for that factitious exaltation and power, that marvelous insight into the profound mysteries of the humen soul, which they alone can give.

It is one of the sorrowfullest things in all literary history that so many really gifted and beautiful souls have sought inspiration, not at the immortal fountains which the Infinite God opened up "before time was, or man," but at enchanted pools whose waters set on fire the frail temple of the Holy Spirit, and turn the delightful incense of its altars into rank smoke, rising to pollute the courts of heaven. Ebenezer Elliott, or, as he loved to be called, the CornLaw Rhymer, genuine poet and high-souled reformer that he was, used sometimes to ask if genius might not, after all, be a disease. And this question recurs with mighty emphasis and meaning when we review the lives of many whom the world has dignified with that name. Though far removed from personal contact, do we not still contemplate with pain the excesses of Cowley, Otway, Prior, Addison, Parnell, Samuel Johnson, and the rest, the frightful debaucheries of Savage, Dermody, and Sterne? It is impossible to forget that Thomas Campbell was almost a sot; that Byron, at one period of his life, drank his pint Hollands nightly, and deluged us with infamous verse in consequence; that neither Burns, Hazlitt, Hartley Coleridge, nor Jerrold could resist the bottle. We can not but remember that Hoffman, the beautiful German, died of delirium tremens- that "the tavern was his study, his pulpit, and his throne," that there, in the language of Carlyle, "his wit flashed and flamed like an Aurora Borealis, and the table was forever in a roar; and [that] thus, amid tobacco smoke, and over coarse earthly liquor, [he wasted] the faculties which might have seasoned the Nectar of the gods." Did not Charles Lamb write, with tears trickling down his cheeks, of the "wet damnation through which alone reason seemed to visit him"? Were not Bulwer and Dr. Nichol almost destroyed by opium? Was not De Quincey confessedly its slave for nearly twenty years, and Coleridge for more than a quarter of a century? It were useless to remind the American reader of the sad career and melancholy end of Edgar Allan Poe. Nor need this catalogue of moral and intellectual

shipwrecks be extended to the hundred others, in all the learned professions, whose names are "familiar in our mouths as household words." There is a skeleton of this sort in every community.

That there are in some men constitutional tendencies to the protean vice of intemperance is an undeniable fact; perhaps it is equally undeniable that there are few who have not this tendency in some form or other, so frail and erring is poor human nature. There are men of such ardent and excitable temperament that their whole organisms, mental and physical, vibrate at the lightest breath of passion - men who are equally capable of being exalted into lyric raptures, or plunged into bottomless barathra of wretchedness and despair. These are they who, not satisfied with the beautiful and beneficent earth, with its grand unities and diversities, which God has placed under their feet, nor with the bediamonded curtains of immensity He has hung above their heads,-neither with the companionship of men, the ministry of angels, nor with the divine possibilities and promises of an endless life,-these are they who seek, through the mysterious thaumaturgy of narcotics, "To lift the veil of the unknown,

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The effects of stimuli are very various; greatly modified both by the nature of the stimulus and the peculiar constitution, mind, or temperament of the individual. The general effect of all such agents is greatly to exaggerate all the natural tendencies, and especially those which are most powerful. There seems, however, to be this marked and peculiar difference between narcotics and fermented liquors, that while the latter, when taken to excess, are essentially brutalizing, under all circumstances and in every instance, excesses in the use of the former are not followed by such gross and shocking consequents, except, indeed, among those who are by nature barbarous and brutal. Opium, hasheesh, coca, and the thorn apple bring divine enjoyments, occasionally at least, to the uncivilized and grossly ignorant. The forlorn and oppressed Peruvian, pausing in his toil, gives himself over to the influences of his beloved coca, and straightway bursts the bonds of time and sense,

and meeting face to face the spirits of his ancestors, tells over the woes of his captivity, and takes consolation and new hope from those who never bowed the neck to Spanish yoke. Nor, when the fantasia is over, does he less believe it real, but relates it to his neighbors, who listen with an equal faith. So that, while there is such a deep and unmitigated vulgarity in the use of strong drink that it is difficult to conceive how any cultivated man can descend to it, the great deeps of intellect and imagination which at least two of the narcotics have opened up, the illimitable capacities for pleasure and pain which they have revealed in the human soul, render it by no means difficult to account for the fact that many men of great natural gifts, and of the widest culture, have become the slaves of opium and hasheesh.

Of this class of minds was Thomas De Quincey, who was the High Priest of what he called the "one true church" of opiumeaters, and whose hierophantic expositions of the sublime mysteries of the "celestial drug" have rendered his name immortal. The marvelous witchery of his dreams, and the pomp and splendor of the style in which he relates them, have fired many already too ardent imaginations with the delights of opium indulgence, and with the absurd notion that they too might become De Quinceys, so

"That those eat now who never ate before,

And those who always ate now eat the more."

But there are few in cold Northern countries who are capable of reaching by this path the diviner heights and depths of imagination; we are of the earth far too earthy, and when the experimental dose has been taken, instead of being borne in Triton's pearly shallop along the "rivers of the rainbow, which course through the valleys of heaven," into a Mahomet's paradise, we are just suffered to hover over the region of horrible qualms in the stomach and frightful sick headaches, all of which is most likely to result in an oath, duly registered, never to "touch, taste, or handle" the accursed stuff again. For the humbler ends of quieting nervous irritation, and giving an artificial serenity to the mind amid the manifold perturbations and distresses of life, it will serve a much greater number, and, with these ends in view, there is a large and constantly increasing class of opium-eaters, both in this country and in Great Britain.

Much has been said and written on opium-eating, but, aside from

the personal experience which any one may have, we must accept De Quincey as the doxηdidάokaλoç, who, indeed, vehemently protests that he alone is authority. It is in his writings, and especially in the "Confessions," that we find the most wonderful psychological phenomena connected with this divine madness. We will take him as the highest type of the genus, and attempt in some way to account for him. It would be impossible to do this satisfactorily without taking some notice of the peculiarities of his organization. He was born with a highly nervous and susceptible temperament, which, coupled with a transcendant imagination and great powers of reflection, made him while yet a child an extraordinary being, living apart in a grand world of his own, peopled with the celestial creatures of his thought. A determination to reverie was an original element in his constitution - whence, in some measure, the habitual splendor of his dreams. But, aside from his peculiar temperament and the immense quantities of opium which he took, De Quincey refers the "vast clouds of gloomy grandeur," which overhung his dreams at all stages of the indulgence, in part to the experiences of his childhood. The solitude in which much of it was spent, and the preternatural development of his intellect and imagination, drove for him, as he says, a shaft into the worlds of death and darkness, which was never again closed, and through which he ascended and descended at will. The circumstance which made the greatest impression on his tender mind was the death of a sister, two years older than himself, when he was but six years of age. Once before death had snatched away a sister, but he was too young to understand the significance of the event; he was sad because of her absence, but "summer and winter came again crocuses and roses: why not little Jane?" Now it was far otherwise; little Jane had not returned; and it was God's thunderbolt launched at his heart when another was added to

"The loved, the lost, the distant, and the dead."

The day after her death he formed a plan for seeing her once more. It was high noon, the sun "showering down torrents of splendor," when he stole up into her chamber. The bed had been moved, and nothing met his eyes but a large open window, and, as he gazed through it upon a cloudless sky, to him "the blue depths seemed express types of infinity; and it was not possible for eye to behold or for heart to conceive any symbols more pathetic of life and the

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