lectual pursuits, I could not fail to have that it was four o'clock. I went up to ing down the trunk alone, whilst I stood waiting at the foot of the last flight, in anxiety for the event. For some time I heard him descending with slow and firm 5 steps; but unfortunately, from his trepidation, as he drew near the dangerous quarter, within a few steps of the gallery, his foot slipped; and the mighty burden, falling from his shoulders, gained such in10 crease of impetus at each step of the descent, that, on reaching the bottom, it trundled, or rather leaped, right across, with the noise of twenty devils, against the very bed-room door of the archididas15 calus. My first thought was that all was lost, and that my only chance for executing a retreat was to sacrifice my baggage. However, on reflection, I determined to abide the issue. The groom was in the utmost alarm, both on his own account and on mine; but, in spite of this, so irresistibly had the sense of the ludicrous in this unhappy contretemps taken possession of his fancy, that 25 he sang out a long, loud and canorous peal of laughter, that might have wakened the Seven Sleepers. At the sound of this resonant merriment, within the very ears of insulted authority, I could not myself forbear joining in it; subdued to this, not so much by the unhappy étourderie of the trunk, as by the effect it had upon the groom. We both expected, as a matter of course, that Dr. would sally out of his room: for in general, if but a mouse stirred, he sprang out like a mastiff from the kennel. Strange to say, however, on this occasion, when the noise of laughter had ceased, no sound, or rustling even, was to be heard in the bed-room. Dr. had a painful complaint, which, sometimes keeping him awake, made his sleep perhaps, when it did come, the deeper. Gathering courage from the silence, the groom hoisted his burden again, and accomplished the remainder of his descent, without accident. I waited until I saw the trunk placed on a wheel-barrow, and So blended and intertwisted in this life are occasions of laughter and of tears, that I cannot yet recall, without smiling, an incident which occurred at that time, 30 and which had nearly put a stop to the immediate execution of my plan. I had a trunk of immense weight; for, besides my clothes, it contained nearly all my library. The difficulty was to get this re- 35 moved to a carrier's; my room was at an aërial elevation in the house, and (what was worse) the stair-case, which communicated with this angle of the building, was accessible only by a gal- 40 lery which passed the head-master's chamber door. I was a favorite with all the servants; and, knowing that any of them would screen me, and act confidentially, I communicated my embarrassment to a groom of the head-master's. The groom swore he would do anything I wished; and, when the time arrived, went upstairs to bring the trunk down. This I feared was beyond the strength 50 on its road to the carrier's; then, with of any one man; however, the groom was a man Of Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear 45 Providence my guide,' I set off on foot -carrying a small parcel, with some articles of dress, under my arm; a favorite English poet in one pocket, and 55 a small 12mo. volume, containing about nine plays of Euripides, in the other. 15 If any man, poor or rich, were to say that he would tell us what had been the happiest day in his life, and the why and the wherefore, I suppose that we should all cry out Hear him! hear him! As to the happiest day, that must be very difficult for any wise man to name; because any event that could occupy so distinguished a place in a man's retrospect of his life, or be entitled to have to shed a special felicity on any one day, ought to be of such an enduring character as that (accidents apart) it should have continued to shed the same felicity, or one not distinguishably less, on many years together. To the happiest lustrum, however, or even to the happiest year, it may be allowed to any man to point without discountenance from wisdom. This year, in my case, reader, was the 20 one which we have now reached; though it stood, I confess, as a parenthesis between years of a gloomier character. It was a year of brilliant water (to speak after the manner of jewelers), set as it 25 were, and insulated, in the gloom and cloudy melancholy of opium. Strange as it may sound, I had a little before this time descended suddenly, and without any considerable effort, from 320 grains of 30 opium (i. e., eight thousand drops of laudanum) per day to forty grains, or one-eighth part. Instantaneously, and as if by magic, the cloud of profoundest melancholy which rested upon my brain, 35 like some black vapors that I have seen roll away from the summits of mountains, drew off in one day (wwx0huepor); passed off with its murky banners as simultaneously as a ship that has been stranded, 40 and is floated off by a spring-tide That moveth altogether, if it move at all. Now, then, I was again happy; I now took only 1,000 drops of laudanum per 45 day; and what was that? A latter spring had come to close up the season I here reckon twenty-five drops of laudanum as equivalent to one grain of opium, which, I believe, is the common estimate. However, as both may 50 be considered variable quantities (the crude opium varying much in strength, and the tincture still more), I suppose that no infinitesimal accuracy can be bad in such a calculation. Teaspoons vary as much in size as opium in strength. Small ones hold about 100 drops; so that 8,000 drops are about 55 eighty times a teaspoonful. The reader sees how much I kept within Dr. Buchan's indulgent allow. ance. of youth; my brain performed its functions as healthily as ever before; I read Kant again, and again I understood him, or fancied that I did. Again my feel5 ings of pleasure expanded themselves to all around me; and if any man from Oxford or Cambridge, or from neither, had been announced to me in my unpretending cottage, I should have welcomed him with as sumptuous a reception as so poor a man could offer. Whatever else was wanting to a wise man's happiness, of laudanum I would have given him as much as he wished, and in a golden cup. And, by the way, now that I speak of giving laudanum away, I remember, about this time, a little incident, which I mention, because, trifling as it was, the reader will soon meet it again in my dreams, which it influenced more fearfully than could be imagined. day a Malay knocked at my door. What business a Malay could have to transact amongst English mountains, I cannot conjecture; but possibly he was on his road to a seaport about forty miles distant. One The servant who opened the door to him was a young girl born and bred amongst the mountains, who had never seen an Asiatic dress of any sort; his turban, therefore, confounded her not a little; and, as it turned out, that his attainments in English were exactly of the same extent as hers in the Malay, there seemed to be an impassable gulf fixed between all communication of ideas, if either party had happened to possess any. In this dilemma, the girl, recollecting the reputed learning of her master (and, doubtless, giving me credit for a knowledge of all the languages of the earth, few of the lunar besides, perhaps, a ones), came and gave me to understand that there was a sort of demon below, whom she clearly imagined that my art could exorcise from the house. I did not immediately go down; but, when I did, the group which presented itself, arranged as it was by accident, though not very elaborate, took hold of my fancy and my eye in a way that none of the statuesque attitudes exhibited in the ballets at the Opera House, though so ostentatiously complex, had ever done. In a cottage kitchen, but paneled on the wall with dark wood that from age and rubbing resembled oak, and looking more like a rustic hall of entrance than a three dragoons and their horses; and I kitchen, stood the Malay - his turban and felt some alarm for the poor creature; loose trousers of dingy white relieved but what could be done? I had given upon the dark paneling; he had placed. him the opium in compassion for his himself nearer to the girl than she seemed 5 solitary life, on recollecting that if he to relish; though her native spirit of had traveled on foot from London, it mountain intrepidity contended with the must be nearly three weeks since he could feeling of simple awe which her coun- have exchanged a thought with any human tenance expressed as she gazed upon the being. I could not think of violating the tiger-cat before her. And a more strik- laws of hospitality, by having him seized ing picture there could not be imagined, and drenched with an emetic, and thus than the beautiful English face of the frightening him into a notion that we girl, and its exquisite fairness, together were going to sacrifice him to some Engwith mahogany, by marine air, his small, lish idol. No: there was clearly no help contrasted with the sallow and bilious 15 for it; he took his leave, and for some skin of the Malay, enameled or veneered days I felt anxious; but as I never heard with her erect and independent attitude, of any Malay being found dead, I became fierce, restless eyes, thin lips, slavish convinced that he was used1 to opium: gestures and adorations. Half-hidden by and that I must have done him the servthe ferocious-looking Malay, was a little 20 ice I designed, by giving him one night child from a neighboring cottage who of respite from the pains of wandering. had crept in after him, and was now in the act of reverting its head, and gazing upwards at the turban and the fiery eyes beneath it, whilst with one hand he caught at the dress of the young woman for protection. My knowledge of the Oriental tongues is not remarkably extensive, being indeed confined to two words the Arabic word for barley, and 30 the Turkish for opium (madjoon), which I have learned from Anastasius. And, as I had neither a Malay dictionary, nor even Adelung's Mithridates, which might have helped me to a few words, I addressed him in some lines from the Iliad; considering that, of such languages as I possessed, Greek, in point of longitude, came geographically nearest to an Oriental one. He worshipped me in a most 40 devout manner, and replied in what I suppose was Malay. In this way I saved my reputation with my neighbors; for the Malay had no means of betraying the secret. He lay down upon the floor for 45 about an hour, and then pursued his journey. On his departure I presented him with a piece of opium. To him, as an Orientalist, I concluded that opium must be familiar; and the expression of 50 his face convinced me that it was. This incident I have digressed to mention, because this Malay (partly from the picturesque exhibition he assisted to 25 frame, partly from the anxiety I connected with his image for some days) fastened afterwards upon my dreams, and brought other Malays with him worse than himself, that ran 'a-muck'2 at me, and led me into a world of troubles. But to quit this episode, and to return to my intercalary year of happiness. I have said already, that on a subject so important to us all as happiness, we 35 should listen with pleasure to any man's experience or experiments, even though he were but a plowboy, who cannot be supposed to have plowed very deep into such an intractable soil as that of human pains and pleasures, or to have conducted Nevertheless, I was struck with some 1 This, however, is not a necessary conclusion; the varieties of effect produced by opium on different constitutions are infinite. A London Magistrate (Harriott's Struggles through Life, vol. iii, p. 391, Third Edition), has recorded that, on the first occa sion of his trying laudanum for the gout, he took forty drops, the next night sixty, and on the fifth night eighty, without any effect whatever; and this at an advanced age. I have an anecdote from a country surgeon, however, which sinks Mr. Harriott's case into a trifle; and in my projected medical treatise on opium, which I will publish, provided the College of Surgeons will pay me for enlightening their benighted understandings upon this subject, I will relate it; but it is far too good a story to be published gratis. 2 See the common accounts in any Eastern traveler or voyager of the frantic excesses committed by Malays who have taken opium, or are reduced to desperation by ill luck at gambling. his researches upon any very enlightened it matter of congratulation that winter is going, or, if coming, is not likely to be a severe one. On the contrary, I put up a petition annually, for as much snow, principles. But I, who have taken happiness, both in a solid and a liquid shape, both boiled and unboiled, both East India and Turkey-who have conducted 5 hail, frost, or storm, of one kind or other, my experiments upon this interesting subject with a sort of galvanic batteryand have, for the general benefit of the world, inoculated myself, as it were, with the poison of 8,000 drops of laudanum per 10 day (just, for the same reason, as a French surgeon inoculated himself lately with cancer an English one, twenty years ago, with plague and a third, as the skies can possibly afford us. Surely everybody is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a winter fireside; candles at four o'clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without, mell; Yet the least entrance find they none at all; Whence sweeter grows our rest secure in massy hall. -Castle of Indolence. I know not of what nation, with hydro- 15 And at the doors and windows seem to call, phobia), I (it will be admitted) must As heaven and earth they would together surely know what happiness is, if anybody does. And, therefore, I will here lay down an analysis of happiness; and. as the most interesting mode of com- 20 municating it, I will give it, not didactically, but wrapped up and involved in a picture of one evening, as I spent every evening during the intercalary year when. laudanum, though taken daily, was to me 25 no more than the elixir of pleasure. This done, I shall quit the subject of happiness altogether, and pass to a very different one the pains of opium. 30 Let there be a cottage, standing in a valley, eighteen miles from any town. no spacious valley, but about two miles long, by three quarters of a mile in average width; the benefit of which provision is, that all the families resident 35 within its circuit will compose, as it were, one larger household personally familiar to your eye, and more or less interesting to your affections. Let the mountains be real mountains, between 40 three and four thousand feet high; and the cottage a real cottage, not (as a witty author has it) a cottage with a double coach-house'; let it be, in fact (for I must abide by the actual scene), a 45 white cottage, embowered with flowering shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession of flowers upon the walls, and clustering round the windows through all the months of spring, summer, and 50 autumn--beginning, in fact, with May roses, and ending with jasmine. Let it, however, not be spring, nor summer, nor autumn but winter in his sternest shape. This is a most important point in 55 the science of happiness. And I am surprised to see people overlook it, and think All these are items in the description of a winter evening, which must surely be familiar to everybody born in a high latitude. And it is evident that most of these delicacies, like ice-cream, require a very low temperature of the atmosphere to produce them: they are fruits which cannot be ripened without weather stormy or inclement, in some way or other. I not particular,' as people say, whether it be snow, or black frost, or wind so strong, that (as Mr. says) am you may_lean your back against it like a post.' I can put up even with rain, provided it rains cats and dogs; but something of the sort I must have; and, if I have it not, I think myself in a manner ill-used; for why am I called on to pay so heavily for winter, in coals, and candles, and various privations that will occur even to gentlemen, if I am not to have the article good of its kind? No: a Canadian winter for my money; or a Russian one, where every man is but a co-proprietor with the north wind in the fee-simple of his own ears. Indeed, so great an epicure am I in this matter, that I cannot relish a winter night fully if it be much past St. Thomas's day, and have degenerated into disgusting tendencies to vernal appearances; no, it must be divided by a thick wall of dark nights from all return of light and sunshine. From the latter weeks of October to Christmas Eve, therefore, is the period during which happiness is in season, which, in my a beauty; or that the witchcraft of angelic smiles lies within the empire of any earthly pencil. Pass, then, my good painter, to something more within its 5 power; and the next article brought forward should naturally be myself-a picture of the Opium-eater, with his little golden receptacle of the pernicious drug' lying beside him on the table. As to the opium, I have no objection to see a picture of that, though I would rather see the original: you may paint it if you choose; but I apprise you, that no 'little' receptacle would, even in 1816, answer my purpose, who was at a distance from the stately Pantheon,' and all druggists (mortal or otherwise). No; you may as well paint the real receptacle, which was not of gold, but of glass, and as much like a wine-decanter as possible. Into this you may put a quart of ruby-colored laudanum: that, and a book of German Metaphysics placed by its side, will sufficiently attest my being in the neighborhood; but, as to myself,- there I demur. I admit that, naturally, I ought to occupy the foreground of the picture; that being the hero of the piece, or (if you choose) the criminal at the bar, my body should be had into court. This seems reasonable; but why should I confess, on this point, to a painter? or why confess at all? If the public (into whose private ear I am confidentially whispering my confessions, and not into any painter's) should chance to have framed some agreeable picture for itself, of the Opiumeater's exterior - should have ascribed to him, romantically, an elegant person, or a handsome face, why should I barbarously tear from it so pleasing a delusion - pleasing both to the public and to me? No: paint me, if at all, according to your own fancy; and, as a painter's fancy should teem with beautiful creations, I cannot fail, in that way, to be a gainer. And now, reader, we have run through all the ten categories of my condition as it stood about 1816-17; up to the middle of which latter year I judge myself to have been a happy man; and the elements of that happiness I have endeavored to place before you, in the above sketch of the interior of a scholar's library, in a cottage among the mountains, on a stormy winter evening. Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, and not more than seven and a half feet high. This, reader, is some- 25 what ambitiously styled, in my family, the drawing-room; but, being contrived double debt to pay,' it is also, and more justly, termed the library; for it happens that books are the only article of prop- 30 erty in which I am richer than my neighbors. Of these I have about five thousand, collected gradually since my eighteenth year. Therefore, painter, put as many as you can into this room. 35 Make it populous with books; and, furthermore, paint me a good fire; and furniture plain and modest, befitting the unpretending cottage of a scholar. And, near the fire paint me a tea-table; and 40 (as it is clear that no creature can come to see one such a stormy night), place only two cups and saucers on the teatray; and, if you know how to paint such a thing symbolically, or otherwise, paint 45 an eternal tea-pot- eternal à parte ante, and à parte post; for I usually drink tea from eight o'clock at night to four o'clock in the morning. And, as it is very unpleasant to make tea, or to 50 pour it out for oneself, paint me a lovely young woman, sitting at the table. Paint her arms like Aurora's, and her smiles like Hebe's. But no, dear M-, not even in jest let me insinuate that thy 55 power to illuminate my cottage rests upon a tenure so perishable as mere personal me (1821) |