De Quincey compares the two habits, not so much for the purpose of showing the tendency of either of them to crime, but for the proving that opium does not produce intoxication any more than would a rump steak. “The pleasure given by wine is always rapidly mounting, and tending to a crisis, after which as rapidly it declines; that from opium, when once generated, is stationary for eight or ten hours. The first—to borrow a technical distinction from medicine—is a case of acute, the second of chronic pleasure; the one is a flickering flame, the other a steady and equable glow. But the main distinction lies in this, that whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken in a proper manner) introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony. Wine robs a man of self-possession; opium sustains and reinforces it. Wine unsettles the judgment, and gives a preternatural brightness and a vivid exaltation to the contempts and the admirations, to the loves and the hatreds of the drinker; opium, on the contrary, communicates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties, active or passive, and with respect to the temper and moral feelings in general, it gives simply that sort of vital warmth which is approved by the judgment, and which would probably always accompany a bodily constitution of primeval or antediluvian health. Wine constantly leads a man to the brink of absurdity and extravagance, and beyond a certain point, it is sure to volatize and disperse the intellectual energies; whereas opium always seems to compose what had been agitated, and to concentrate what had been distracted. In short, to sum up all in one word, a man who is inebriated, or tending to inebriation is, and feels that he is in a condition which calls up into supremacy the merely human, too often the brutal part of his nature; but the opium-eater, simply as such, assuming that he is in a normal state of health, feels that the divine part of his nature is paramount, that is, the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity, and high over all, the great light of the majestic intellect.”