Opium Eating: An Autobiographical Sketch by an HabituateAnonymous
History
Opium Eating: An Autobiographical Sketch by an Habituate
Anonymous
Opium abuse -- United States; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Prisoners and prisons
He says: "Did he" (the reader) "ever amuse himself by searching the pocket
of a child--three years old, suppose--when buried in slumber, after a long
summer's day of out-a-doors intense activity? I have done this; and, for
the amusement of the child's mother, have analyzed the contents and drawn
up a formal register of the whole. Philosophy is puzzled, conjecture and
hypothesis are confounded, in the attempt to explain the law of selection
which _can_ have presided in the child's labors: stones, remarkable only
for weight, old rusty hinges, nails, crooked skewers stolen when the cook
had turned her back, rags, broken glass, tea-cups having the bottom
knocked out, and loads of similar jewels, were the prevailing articles in
this _proces verbal_. Yet, doubtless, much labor had been incurred, some
sense of danger, perhaps, had been faced, and the anxieties of a conscious
robber endured, in order to amass this splendid treasure. Such, in value,
were the robberies of Coleridge; such their usefulness to himself or
anybody else; and such the circumstances of uneasiness under which he had
committed them. I return to my narrative." "So much for Buckingham." Pity
he wandered from his "narrative" at all. But he also says, and previous to
the foregoing extract, in giving his reason for noticing the subject at
all: "Dismissing, however, this subject, which I have at all noticed only
that I might anticipate and (in old English) that I might _prevent_ the
uncandid interpreter of its meaning."... Then it is that he goes on to
state that he believes him to have been as original in his capital
pretensions as any man that ever lived, as before noticed. Being such a
small matter, it is "really too bad" that he should thus waste his labor
of love. Had he read Coleridge more faithfully, he would have found that
he had made over to Shelling everything which the reader might think
resembled the doctrines of the latter. And this was, perhaps, the best,
and about the only thing he could have done, for undoubtedly the ideas of
the two men were so similar, having taken the same course in their
philosophical studies, that it must have been perplexing, and may have
been impossible, for Coleridge to tell "which was whose."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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