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Tom reminisces. (Sir John Wartson-Gordon.) |
The following is an extract from
Confessions of an Opium Eater, by
Thomas de Quincey.
"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 cardinal events
are not to be forgotten, and 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. From an early age I had been accustomed
to wash my head in cold water at least once a day: being suddenly seized
with toothache, I attributed it to some relaxation caused by an accidental
intermission of that practice, jumped out of bed, plunged my head into
a basin of cold water, and with hair thus wetted went to sleep.
The next morning, as I need hardly say, I awoke with excruciating rheumatic
pains of the head and face, from which I had hardly any respite for
about twenty days. On the twenty-first day I think it was, and
on a Sunday, that 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. How unmeaning
a sound was it at that time: what solemn chords does it now strike upon
my heart! what heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy remembrances!
Reverting for a moment to these, I feel a mystic importance attached
to the minutest circumstances connected with the place and the time
and the man (if man he was) that first laid open to me the Paradise
of Opium-eaters. It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless:
and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy
Sunday in London. My road homewards lay through Oxford Street;
and near “the stately Pantheon” (as Mr. Wordsworth has obligingly
called it) I saw a druggist’s shop. The druggist—unconscious
minister of celestial pleasures!—as if in sympathy with the rainy
Sunday, looked dull and stupid, just as any mortal druggist might be
expected to look on a Sunday; and when I asked for the tincture of opium,
he gave it to me as any other man might do, and furthermore, out of
my shilling returned me what seemed to be real copper halfpence, taken
out of a real wooden drawer. Nevertheless, in spite of such indications
of humanity, he has ever since existed in my mind as the beatific vision
of an immortal druggist, sent down to earth on a special mission to
myself. And it confirms me in this way of considering him, that
when I next came up to London I sought him near the stately Pantheon,
and found him not; and thus to me, who knew not his name (if indeed
he had one), he seemed rather to have vanished from Oxford Street than
to have removed in any bodily fashion. The reader may choose to
think of him as possibly no more than a sublunary druggist; it may be
so, but my faith is better—I believe him to have evanesced, or evaporated. So unwillingly would I connect any mortal remembrances
with that hour, and place, and creature, that first brought me acquainted
with the celestial drug."