But these pleasures would soon leave me, and I would grow very restless. My only resource was another piece of opium. Sometimes I awoke much excited, paced my cell rapidly and felt like tearing down the door. Sometimes a book would quiet me. The best soother I had was the most beautiful poem in the English language--Walt Whitman's _Ode To Death_. When I read this poem, I often imagined I was at the North Pole, and that strange shapes in the clouds beckoned me to come to them. I used to forget myself, and read aloud and was entirely oblivious to my surroundings, until I was brought to myself by the night guard shouting, "What in ---- is the matter with you?" After getting excited in this way I usually needed another dose of hop. I have noticed that the difference between opium and alcohol is that the latter is a disintegrator and tears apart, while the opium is a subtle underminer. Opium, for a long time anyway, stimulates the intelligence; while the reverse is true of alcohol. It was under the influence of opium that I began to read philosophy. I read Hume and Locke, and partly understood them, I think, though I did not know that Locke is pronounced in only one syllable till many years after I had read and re-read parts of _The Human Understanding_. It was not only the opium, but my experience on the outside, that made me eager for philosophy and the deeper poetry; for a grafters wits, if they don't get away from him altogether, become keen through his business, since he lives by them. It was philosophy, and the spectacle of men going suddenly and violently insane all about me, that led me first to think of self-control, though I did not muster enough to throw off the opium habit till many years afterwards. I began to think of will-power about this time, and I knew it was an acquired virtue, like truth and honesty. I think, from a moral standpoint, that I lived as good a life in prison as anybody on the outside, for at least I tried to overcome myself. It was life or death, or, a thousand times worse, an insane asylum. Opium led me to books besides those on philosophy, which eventually helped to cure me. At this time I was reading Balzac, Shakespeare, Huxley, Tyndall and Lavater. One poem of Shakespeare's touched me more than any other poem I ever read--_The Rape of Lucrece_. It was reading such as this that gave me a broader view, and I began to think that this was a terrible life I was leading. But, as the reader will see, I did not know what hell was until several years later.