steadily together, and to bring them under a comprehensive or unifying act of the judging faculty, as there is in the efforts of a drunken man to follow a chain of reasoning. Opium is said to have some _specific_ effect of debilitation upon the memory: [Footnote: The technical memory, or that which depends upon purely arbitrary links of connection, and therefore more upon a _nisus_ or separate activity of the mind--that memory, for instance, which recalls names--is undoubtedly affected, and most powerfully, by opium. On the other hand, the _logical_ memory, or that which recalls facts that are connected by fixed relations, and where A being given, B must go before or after--historical memory, for instance--is not much affected by opium.] that is, not merely the general one which might be supposed to accompany its morbid effects upon the bodily system, but some other, more direct, subtle, and exclusive; and this, of whatever nature, may possibly extend to the faculty of judging. Such, however, over and above the more known and more obvious ill effects upon fhe spirits and the health, were some of the stronger and more subtle effects of opium in disturbing the intellectual system as well as the animal, the functions of the will also no less than those of the intellect, from which both Coleridge and myself were suffering at the period to which I now refer (1821-25); evils which found their fullest exemplification in the very act upon which circumstances had now thrown me as the _sine qua non_ of my extrication from difficulties-- viz., the act of literary composition. This necessity--the fact of its being my one sole resource for the present, and the established experience which I now had of the peculiar embarrassments and counteracting forces which I should find in opium, but still more in the train of consequences left behind by past opium--strongly co-operated with the mere physical despondency arising out of the liver: and the state of partial unhappiness, among other outward indications, expressed itself by one mark, which some people are apt greatly to misapprehend--as if it were some result of a sentimental turn of feeling--I mean perpetual sighs. But medical men must very well know that a certain state of the liver, _mechanically_ and without any co-operation of the will, expresses itself in sighs. I was much too firm-minded and too reasonable to murmur or complain. I certainly suffered deeply, as one who finds himself a banished man from all that he loves, and who had not the consolations of hope, but feared too profoundly that all my efforts--efforts poisoned so sadly by opium--might be unavailing for the end.