pose; still alcohol, in the people of Europe, and opium, among the inhabitants of the east, are the magicians most generally employed to smother the dictates of the judgment, and to give unbounded licence to the dreams of an excursive and delighted fancy.

The effects produced by wine and spirit drinking on the temperament of individuals varies extremely; hardly producing any exhilaration in some, whilst in others it excites the fiercest paroxysms of insanity. It is not my object here to enter into any medical detail of the morbid phenomena which are the result of the intemperate or habitual use of alcoholic liquors of any kind; I shall, therefore, pass, in accordance with the nature of my subject, to their mental effects on what the late Dr. Currie, of Liverpool, has termed the temperament of sensibility, which Dr. Macnish, with equal truth, names the melancholy drunkard. To such men the bottle is a perfect witchery, and contains spells as powerful as Michael Scott's book of magic, filched, by the elfin page, from the vest of William of Deloraine. It clothes external nature with new forms of beauty-it adds whiteness to the lily, and perfume to the violetit conceals all moral evil. To the minds thus influenced, the men are all virtuous, the women all beautiful, and mankind all happy. The joyousness which it excites breaks in upon habitual gloom, like sunshine upon darkness. Above all, the sensations, at the moment when mirth begins with its magic to charm away care, are inexpressible. Pleasure falls, in showers of fragrance, upon the soul, and the imagination revels in a delirium of short-lived joy.

"Elysium opens round,

A pleasing frenzy buoys the lightened soul,
And sanguine hope dispels the fleeting care;
And what was difficult, and what was dire,
Yields to your prowess, and superior stars :
A deeper blue colours the cloudless sky,
A stiller calm deadens the sleeping wave,
No storm to ruffle, and no frost to chill,
No icy friendship here, no selfish love,—
But all is warm, and beautiful, and true."

Hafiz among the Persians, and Anacreon among the Greeks, have

sung, in glowing strains, the pleasures of wine-not its physical and animal pleasures, but the mental delights springing from its effects upon heated and poetic fancy

"Which bathes the drooping spirits in delight,

Beyond the bliss of dreams."

Such are the pleasures imagination derives from intoxication. Let us reverse the picture, and behold its pains. And now melancholy, in her "robe of darkest grain," fills the disordered fancy with images of a ten-fold deeper gloom. When the visions of pleasure begin to fade, ideas of the most distressing and painful character rise to occupy their place. The imagination is now a perfect tyrant; she shews her slave every species of imaginary evil, and accumulates all in one vortex upon his devoted head. The mind becomes a chaos of all that is dark, dreadful, and desponding. Phan. toms, grotesque and horrible, rise and gibber at the unfortunate being; and the conflict of contending fancies lashes him into a fit of excitation bordering on mania, or presses him down with the feelings of blank despair.

"His cares return

With ten-fold rage ;

And such a dim delirium, such a dream
Involves him, such a dastardly despair
Unmans his soul, as madd'ning Pentheus felt
When, baited round Citharon's cruel sides,

He saw two suns and double Thebes ascend.”

These effects are not very commonly the result of the habitual or excessive use of wine; but more than one instance has fallen under my own observation where it has produced visions of delight and forebodings of evil, equally vivid with those I have endeavoured to describe.

I now pass to the consideration of the influence of opium upon the imagination, and the modifications effected by it in the exercise of this class of mental operations. According to De Quincey, who styles himself the alpha and omega on all points connected with the use of opium; "its effects upon the human constitution differ materially from those produced by wine. Wine disorders the mental fa

culties; opium, on the contrary, if taken in a proper manner, introduces among them the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony. Wine robs a man of his self-possession; opium greatly invigorates it. Wine unsettles and clouds the judgment, and gives a preternatural brightness, and a vivid exaltation, to the contempts and the admirations, 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 or 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: Thus, for instance, opium, like wine, gives an expansion to the heart and benevolent affections, but with this remarkable difference that, on the sudden development of kind-heartedness which accompanies inebriation, there is always more or less of a maudlin character, which exposes it to the contempt of the bystander. Men shake hands, swear eternal friendship, and shed tears, no mortal knows why, and the sensual creature is clearly uppermost. But the expansion of the benigner feelings incident to opium, is no febrile ex cess, but a healthy restoration to that state which the mind would naturally recover, upon the removal of any deep-seated irritation or pain, that had disturbed and quarrelled with the impulses of a heart originally just and good. True it is that wine, up to a certain point, and with certain men, rather tends to exalt and steady the mind; but still, it constantly leads a man to the brink of absurdity and extravagance, and, beyond a certain point, it is sure to volatilize and disperse the intellectual faculties: whereas opium always seems to compose what had been agitated, and to concentrate what had been distracted. Under the influence of opium the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity, and over all is the great light of the majestic intellect."

The effects of opium, like those of wine, are widely different upon different persons. I have known opium, taken with a view of removing melancholy and ennui, produce a state of delirium and watchfulness bordering upon insanity, instead of quieting the mind and producing those delightful sensations for which it has been so much extolled, and which, in a great majority of instances, it never January, 1836.-VOL. III., NO. XIV.

fails to excite.-Macnish, in his Anatomy of Drunkenness, observes, "The extacies of opium are more entrancing than those of wine; there is more poetry in its visions, more mental aggrandisement, more range of imagination. Opium, for hours after its use, gives a licence to the imagination, which is almost unbounded. It inspires the mind with a thousand delightful images, lifts the soul from earth, and casts a halo of poetic thought and feeling over the spirits of the most unimaginative. Under its influence, the mind wears no longer that blank, passionless aspect which, even in gifted natures, it is apt to assume: on the contrary, it is clothed with beauty as with a garment, and colours every thought that passes through it with the hues of wonder and romance."

So intellectual are the imaginations of the opium-eater, that it is necessary a mind should be highly cultivated and exquisitely tasteful to enjoy, in perfection, the extacies to which it gives rise; since the very structure of the mind, thus influenced, furnishes the proper nourishment on which the imagination feeds. An ear naturally unmusical, or badly cultivated, could take no enjoyment in the most perfect harmony, in the most melodious air, or in the most spirited or heart-stirring chorus,-neither would opium produce this faculty, in the ear or in the mind: but supposing the taste for music to be acquired, it would heighten its pleasures a thousandfold. One of the most delightful pictures ever drawn of the pleasures of an imagination heightened by opium, is that given by De Quincey, in his Confessions of an English Opium-eater: it relates to the pleasures imagination derives from music, when the mind is under the influence of opium; and to obtain these, he used to take his customary draught of laudanum-negus on the Tuesday or Saturday, which are the opera-nights, abstaining from it rigidly on the other evenings of the week, in order to increase his enjoyment on these. "At that time," says he, "Grassini sang at the opera; and her voice was delightful to me beyond all that I had ever heard. Five shillings admitted one to the gallery, which was subject to far less annoyance than the pit of the theatres; the orchestra was distinguished, by its sweet and melodious grandeur, from all English orchestras, the composition of which are not, I confess, acceptable to my ear, from the predomi

*

nance of the clangorous instruments, and the absolute tyranny of the violin. The chorusses were divine to hear; and when Grassini appeared in some interlude, as she often did, and poured forth her passionate soul as Andromache at the tomb of Hector, I question whether any Turk of all that ever entered the Paradise of opiumeaters, can have had half the pleasure I had. But, indeed, I honour the barbarians too much, by supposing them capable of any pleasures approaching to the intellectual ones of an Englishman: for music is an intellectual or a sensual pleasure, according to the temperament of him who hears it, and, with the exception of that fine extravaganza in The Twelfth Night, I do not recollect more than one thing said adequately on the subject of music in all literature; it is a passage in the Religio Medici of Sir Thomas Brown, and though chiefly remarkable for its sublimity, has also a philosophic value, inasmuch as it points to the true theory of musical effects. The mistake of some people is, to suppose that it is by the ear they communicate with music, and, therefore, that they are purely passive to its effects: but this is not so; it is by the re-action of the mind upon the notices of the ear, that the pleasure is constructed; and therefore it is that people, of equally good ear, differ so much on this point from each other. Now, opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind generally, increases, of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are enabled to construct, out of the raw material of organic sound, an elaborate intellectual pleasure. A chorus displays before me, as on a piece of arras, the whole of my past life;-not as though recalled by an act of memory,—but as if present and incarnate in the music; no

"That strain again ;-it had a dying fall:

O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing, and giving odour."

+ "Whatsoever is harmonically composed, delights in harmony: for even that vulgar and tavern music, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first composer. There is something in music of divinity, more than the ear discovers; it is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world and creatures of God,-such a melody to the ear, as the whole world well understood would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God. I will not say, with Plato, that the soul is a harmony;-but harmonical, and hath its nearest sympathy unto music."