No interest in anything of human production, renders him primarily unable and unfit for the details necessary to be gone through with in the achievement of any great purpose. The pangs of disappointment he feels as deeply as any one. He becomes morbidly sorrowful over his lack of success, his inability to do anything. Unlike Coleridge, but like De Quincey, he may have gotten into the power of opium while his mind was yet undeveloped and immature, thus being deprived of the possibility of enjoying that "blessed interval" which was given to Coleridge, and to which he alludes with such thankfulness. As to poetry, in Coleridge's case, the beautiful language of Keats was fulfilled: "As though a rose should shut and be a bud again." In the case of De Quincey, cruel winter came on and nipped the flower in the bud ere yet it had time to bloom, so that when it came to flower forth, in a later season, it was found that the stalk itself had been stunted in its growth, and the beauty of the flower impaired. He may have been afflicted with sickness in his early youth which prevented the development of his mind, the pain of which threw him into opium, as in my own case. He may have in this state felt the "stirrings" of genius, without the power of expression, and when at length his pain was so relieved, and his strength so increased, as to allow him to attempt something, the withering blight of opium had blasted his perceptions, exterminated his feelings, and enfeebled his intellect. Verily, the lines of Byron apply with special significance to the state of the opium eater: "We wither from our youth, we gasp away-- Sick--sick; unfound the boon--unslaked the thirst, Though to the last, in verge of our decay, Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first-- But all too late,--so we are doubly curst."