EV. It is a slight fact embellished. The action of opium, however, is not uniform: it may produce deep sleep, or insensible stupor; or it may quiet some of the faculties; and when it does so, it excites a dream of irregular associations. The salts of morphia exert an especial influence over the organ of language; so that the orator in the fluency of his power of speech finds it difficult to stop. The _muriate_ is the best preparation to induce fluency and confidence in speaking, or the mind to luxuriate throughout a night in delightful reverie: and in the morning, after this phantasy, the body will even rise _refreshed_. In some cases, however, morphia will create a very strange illusion, _a spectral language_: so that, in reading or listening, we may feel or think that the words have lost their true meaning. This effect is, I am told, attended with severe headache. The poem of “Kubla Khan,” which Coleridge has termed a psychological curiosity, had its origin in the excitement of opium, a spinning out of a theme in “Purchas’ Pilgrim,” which he had been reading: it is an effort of the poet in recording the wild images which had been before presented to the mind’s eye of the enthusiast,—the impression, indeed, of the pleasures and the pains of memory. POETIC PHANTASY, OR FRENZY. “The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth—from earth to heaven. And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothings A local habitation, and a name.” MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM. ASTR. Is there so potent a charm in poppies, Evelyn? You will make us believe, soon, that opium can make a Shakspere, that genius can be imparted by a drug. The ghosts of fairyland, those bright emanations of a poet’s fancy, which are wafted through the air on the thistle-down, or swing to and fro on the filmy thread of the gossamer, sprang from a deeper source than this. The fairy mythology of Shakspere, the beautiful creations of the “Tempest” and the “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” are the very offspring of that _innate_ genius, that “exhausted worlds, and then _imagined new_.” Those exquisite and tricksy spirits, the mischievous Puck and the delicate Ariel, indeed, the whole train of ghosts which appeared to Macbeth, and Richard, and Clarence, and Brutus, and Hamlet, and the spirits of the “Midsummer Night,” the “Tempest,” and “Macbeth,” of Bolingbroke and Joan of Arc, could not have been so painted, unless they had stood before the mind of Shakspere as palpable as reality.