I took a small dose of morphia, thinking I might thus stay the violent cravings of the appetite, and be thereafter clear of it. The time was in the midst of a political campaign; I was in a public office as a clerk; my employer was rendering his fealty to the party that gave him his place, and I was compelled to remain in the office and work. I was suffering in secret, my employer knowing nothing of my thraldom, and I could not work with the accursed appetite raging within me.
The affinity between the brain and the stomach is most plainly demonstrated by the disease of the opium habit; the appetite feeds as much on the brain as on the stomach. I could not work; I could do nothing but look, and that in a blank and dazed way; and being compelled to work, I took a small dose, thinking that would quiet the enemy and give me peace, and that thereafter I could probably worry it through. Cruel illusion! My unhappy fate willed differently, and the peculiar effects of opium can only be learned by bitter experience. I fell prostrate as before, with this difference, that I was less hopeful.
Oh, the melancholy years that have intervened between then and now! Hopeless upon a dark and boundless sea, drifting farther and farther from land! Oh, the youthful aspirations that have been wrecked by, and gone down forever in, this all-swallowing deep!--the mortifications, disappointments, and humiliations that stand out upon this black ocean of despair, and like huge and abortive figures of deformity mock me in my dreams, and taunt me in my waking hours! For I sing only the "pains" of opium; its "pleasures" I have yet to see. For that cannot be accounted a pleasure which is attended with sadness, and that stimulation will not be considered a benefit which is followed by reaction and collapse.
De Quincey says that he never experienced the collapse and depression consequent upon indulgence in opium. The first doses I took, though they stimulated me to the skies, sickened me at the same time, and left me in such a collapsed condition that it required twenty-four hours to completely recover. I do admit that, when one's sensibilities have become deadened and hardened by long use of opium, when all the fervor is burnt out of one, and it no longer stimulates, or its stimulation is barely perceptible,--that then, indeed, there is not much reaction. But what eater of opium, after taking much of the drug the day previous, ever arose in the morning without feeling unutterably miserable? What would you call this, unless reaction?