As when some great painter dips His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.
 
SHELLEY’S Revolt of Islam.
 
Reader, who have thus far accompanied me, I must request your attention to a brief explanatory note on three points:
 
1.  For several reasons I have not been able to compose the notes for this part of my narrative into any regular and connected shape.  I give the notes disjointed as I find them, or have now drawn them up from memory.  Some of them point to their own date, some I have dated, and some are undated.  Whenever it could answer my purpose to transplant them from the natural or chronological order, I have not scrupled to do so.  Sometimes I speak in the present, sometimes in the past tense.  Few of the notes, perhaps, were written exactly at the period of time to which they relate; but this can little affect their accuracy, as the impressions were such that they can never fade from my mind.  Much has been omitted.  I could not, without effort, constrain myself to the task of either recalling, or constructing into a regular narrative, the whole burthen of horrors which lies upon my brain.  This feeling partly I plead in excuse, and partly that I am now in London, and am a helpless sort of person, who cannot even arrange his own papers without assistance; and I am separated from the hands which are wont to perform for me the offices of an amanuensis.
 
2.  You will think perhaps that I am too confidential and communicative of my own private history.  It may be so.  But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.  The fact is, I place myself at a distance of fifteen or twenty years ahead of this time, and suppose myself writing to those who will be interested about me hereafter; and wishing to have some record of time, the entire history of which no one can know but myself, I do it as fully as I am able with the efforts I am now capable of making, because I know not whether I can ever find time to do it again.
 
3.  It will occur to you often to ask, why did I not release myself from the horrors of opium by leaving it off or diminishing it?  To this I must answer briefly: it might be supposed that I yielded to the fascinations of opium too easily; it cannot be supposed that any man can be charmed by its terrors.  The reader may be sure, therefore, that I made attempts innumerable to reduce the quantity.  I add, that those who witnessed the agonies of those attempts, and not myself, were the first to beg me to desist.  But could not have I reduced it a drop a day, or, by adding water, have bisected or trisected a drop?  A thousand drops bisected would thus have taken nearly six years to reduce, and that way would certainly not have answered.  But this is a common mistake of those who know nothing of opium experimentally; I appeal to those who do, whether it is not always found that down to a certain point it can be reduced with ease and even pleasure, but that after that point further reduction causes intense suffering.  Yes, say many thoughtless persons, who know not what they are talking of, you will suffer a little low spirits and dejection for a few days.  I answer, no; there is nothing like low spirits; on the contrary, the mere animal spirits are uncommonly raised: the pulse is improved: the health is better.  It is not there that the suffering lies.  It has no resemblance to the sufferings caused by renouncing wine.  It is a state of unutterable irritation of stomach (which surely is not much like dejection), accompanied by intense perspirations, and feelings such as I shall not attempt to describe without more space at my command.
 
I shall now enter in medias res, and shall anticipate, from a time when my opium pains might be said to be at their acmé, an account of their palsying effects on the intellectual faculties.
 
* * * * *
 
My studies have now been long interrupted.  I cannot read to myself with any pleasure, hardly with a moment’s endurance.  Yet I read aloud sometimes for the pleasure of others, because reading is an accomplishment of mine, and, in the slang use of the word “accomplishment” as a superficial and ornamental attainment, almost the only one I possess; and formerly, if I had any vanity at all connected with any endowment or attainment of mine, it was with this, for I had observed that no accomplishment was so rare.  Players are the worst readers of all:—reads vilely; and Mrs. ---, who is so celebrated, can read nothing well but dramatic compositions: Milton she cannot read sufferably.  People in general either read poetry without any passion at all, or else overstep the modesty of nature, and read not like scholars.  Of late, if I have felt moved by anything it has been by the grand lamentations of Samson Agonistes, or the great harmonies of the Satanic speeches in Paradise Regained, when read aloud by myself.  A young lady sometimes comes and drinks tea with us: at her request and M.’s, I now and then read W-’s poems to them.  (W., by-the-bye is the only poet I ever met who could read his own verses: often indeed he reads admirably.)
 
For nearly two years I believe that I read no book, but one; and I owe it to the author, in discharge of a great debt of gratitude, to mention what that was.  The sublimer and more passionate poets I still read, as I have said, by snatches, and occasionally.  But my proper vocation, as I well know, was the exercise of the analytic understanding.  Now, for the most part analytic studies are continuous, and not to be pursued by fits and starts, or fragmentary efforts.  Mathematics, for instance, intellectual philosophy, &c, were all become insupportable to me; I shrunk from them with a sense of powerless and infantine feebleness that gave me an anguish the greater from remembering the time when I grappled with them to my own hourly delight; and for this further reason, because I had devoted the labour of my whole life, and had dedicated my intellect, blossoms and fruits, to the slow and elaborate toil of constructing one single work, to which I had presumed to give the title of an unfinished work of Spinosa’s—viz., De Emendatione Humani Intellectus.  This was now lying locked up, as by frost, like any Spanish bridge or aqueduct, begun upon too great a scale for the resources of the architect; and instead of reviving me as a monument of wishes at least, and aspirations, and a life of labour dedicated to the exaltation of human nature in that way in which God had best fitted me to promote so great an object, it was likely to stand a memorial to my children of hopes defeated, of baffled efforts, of materials uselessly accumulated, of foundations laid that were never to support a super-structure—of the grief and the ruin of the architect.  In this state of imbecility I had, for amusement, turned my attention to political economy; my understanding, which formerly had been as active and restless as a hy?na, could not, I suppose (so long as I lived at all) sink into utter lethargy; and political economy offers this advantage to a person in my state, that though it is eminently an organic science (no part, that is to say, but what acts on the whole as the whole again reacts on each part), yet the several parts may be detached and contemplated singly.  Great as was the prostration of my powers at this time, yet I could not forget my knowledge; and my understanding had been for too many years intimate with severe thinkers, with logic, and the great masters of knowledge, not to be aware of the utter feebleness of the main herd of modern economists.  I had been led in 1811 to look into loads of books and pamphlets on many branches of economy; and, at my desire, M. sometimes read to me chapters from more recent works, or parts of parliamentary debates.  I saw that these were generally the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect; and that any man of sound head, and practised in wielding logic with a scholastic adroitness, might take up the whole academy of modern economists, and throttle them between heaven and earth with his finger and thumb, or bray their fungus-heads to powder with a lady’s fan.  At length, in 1819, a friend in Edinburgh sent me down Mr. Ricardo’s book; and recurring to my own prophetic anticipation of the advent of some legislator for this science, I said, before I had finished the first chapter, “Thou art the man!”  Wonder and curiosity were emotions that had long been dead in me.  Yet I wondered once more: I wondered at myself that I could once again be stimulated to the effort of reading, and much more I wondered at the book.  Had this profound work been really written in England during the nineteenth century?  Was it possible?  I supposed thinking {19} had been extinct in England.  Could it be that an Englishman, and he not in academic bowers, but oppressed by mercantile and senatorial cares, had accomplished what all the universities of Europe and a century of thought had failed even to advance by one hair’s breadth?  All other writers had been crushed and overlaid by the enormous weight of facts and documents.  Mr. Ricardo had deduced à priori from the understanding itself laws which first gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had constructed what had been but a collection of tentative discussions into a science of regular proportions, now first standing on an eternal basis.
 
Thus did one single work of a profound understanding avail to give me a pleasure and an activity which I had not known for years.  It roused me even to write, or at least to dictate what M. wrote for me.  It seemed to me that some important truths had escaped even “the inevitable eye” of Mr. Ricardo; and as these were for the most part of such a nature that I could express or illustrate them more briefly and elegantly by algebraic symbols than in the usual clumsy and loitering diction of economists, the whole would not have filled a pocket-book; and being so brief, with M. for my amanuensis, even at this time, incapable as I was of all general exertion, I drew up my Prolegomena to all future Systems of Political Economy.  I hope it will not be found redolent of opium; though, indeed, to most people the subject is a sufficient opiate.
 
This exertion, however, was but a temporary flash, as the sequel showed; for I designed to publish my work.  Arrangements were made at a provincial press, about eighteen miles distant, for printing it.  An additional compositor was retained for some days on this account.  The work was even twice advertised, and I was in a manner pledged to the fulfilment of my intention.  But I had a preface to write, and a dedication, which I wished to make a splendid one, to Mr. Ricardo.  I found myself quite unable to accomplish all this.  The arrangements were countermanded, the compositor dismissed, and my “Prolegomena” rested peacefully by the side of its elder and more dignified brother.
 
I have thus described and illustrated my intellectual torpor in terms that apply more or less to every part of the four years during which I was under the Circean spells of opium.  But for misery and suffering, I might indeed be said to have existed in a dormant state.  I seldom could prevail on myself to write a letter; an answer of a few words to any that I received was the utmost that I could accomplish, and often that not until the letter had lain weeks or even months on my writing-table.  Without the aid of M. all records of bills paid or to be paid must have perished, and my whole domestic economy, whatever became of Political Economy, must have gone into irretrievable confusion.  I shall not afterwards allude to this part of the case.  It is one, however, which the opium-eater will find, in the end, as oppressive and tormenting as any other, from the sense of incapacity and feebleness, from the direct embarrassments incident to the neglect or procrastination of each day’s appropriate duties, and from the remorse which must often exasperate the stings of these evils to a reflective and conscientious mind.  The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities or aspirations.  He wishes and longs as earnestly as ever to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power to attempt.  He lies under the weight of incubus and nightmare; he lies in sight of all that he would fain perform, just as a man forcibly confined to his bed by the mortal languor of a relaxing disease, who is compelled to witness injury or outrage offered to some object of his tenderest love: he curses the spells which chain him down from motion; he would lay down his life if he might b............