cles of more than earthly splendor, but as often painful as
pleasurable. He had no control now of the dreams which haunted him. He
learned now the awful tyranny of the human face.

"Upon the rocking waters of the ocean, the human face began to
appear: the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to
the heavens,--faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards
by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries; my
agitation was infinite, my mind tossed and surged with the ocean. .
. . I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with
mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal
pyramids. I was kissed with cancerous kisses by crocodiles; and
laid confounded with all unutterable slimy things, among reeds and
Nilotic mud. . . . The cursed crocodile became to me the object of
more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with
him for centuries."

The struggle was a long and hard one, and of it he says:--

"Jeremy Taylor conjectures that it may be as painful to be born as
to die. I think it probable; and during the whole period of my
diminishing opium I had the torments of a man passing out of one
mode of existence into another. . . . One memorial of my former
condition still remains; my dreams are not yet perfectly calm; the
dread swell and agitation of the storm have not wholly subsided.
My dreams are still tumultuous, and like the gates of Paradise to
our first parents when looking back from afar, it is still, in the
tremendous line of Milton,

'With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms.'"

It is sad to learn that after all his struggles he never really
succeeded in freeing himself from the spell of opium. We learn that
"after having at one time abstained wholly for sixty-one days, he was
compelled to return to its moderate use, as life was found to be
insupportable; and there is no record of any further attempt at total
abstinence." His indulgence was, however, very limited in his later
years. Weakly as he was, and with a stomach which could digest but the
smallest quantity of food, he lived in tolerable health until he was
seventy-four years old. His wife died over twenty years before he passed
away; and his daughters made a home for him during that time, and cared
for him, as his wife had done. He could never be trusted with any
practi