many seem to suppose. Yet even where it is most triumphant, there is,
nevertheless, a goal to be reached--a goal which will finally be
reached, despite interminable zigzags and 'harsh angles.' This
peculiarity was, doubtless, in a great degree occasioned by the use of
opium. Opium, even amid the very delirium of rapture it produces, nay,
in consequence of that delirium, is hostile to strictly logical thought;
the excitation approaches the character of an intuition; the glance,
however keen and farsighted, is not steady; it is restless, fitful,
veering forever with the movements of an unnatural stimulation; but when
the exaltation has subsided, and the dread reaction and nervous
depression succeeded, this result is intensified a hundred fold, and
gradually shapes itself into a confirmed habit. Even if the use of opium
was positively beneficial to the intellect, still its dreadful havoc
with the physical system would far more than outweigh its contributions
in that direction. But, so far is that from being the truth in the case,
that opium, at best, has only a revealing, a disclosing power; it
cannot, even in the lowest sense of the term, be called a creative
lower. Let a man dream dreams as gorgeous as De Quincey's, it does not
at all follow that he can write like De Quincey; as related to
literature, the grandeur of dreams depends absolutely upon the dreamer's
mastery of the narrative art, which the dreaming faculty itself does not
either presuppose or bestow. But, over and above all this, universal
experience has declared that the use of opium is fatally hostile to any
very protracted mental power. It ravages the mind no less fearfully than
it does the body--precipitates both in one common ruin; by it ordinary
men are speedily degraded to hopeless impotence, and the most mighty
shorn of half their power--a swift-pursuing shadow closes suddenly and
forever over the transient gleam of unnatural splendor. These
considerations account in part for De Quincey's discursiveness, but
perhaps not wholly. Discursiveness is not without its beauties. We
believe in logic, but still it is pleasant, at times, to see a writer
sport with his subject, to see him gallop at will, unconfined by the
ring circle of strict severity. Nor is this all. Possibly the apparent
discursiveness may be only the preliminary journeying by which we are to
secure some new and startling view of the subject. Perhaps you may
consider these initial movements ne