‘ [280] for real ones. I cannot but confess, however, that the relief which it has afforded has been produced by the counteraction of one pain by another; very much like that of the Russian criminal, who “gnaws his own flesh while undergoing the punishment of the knout.” ’ ‘For Heaven's sake,’ said I,
try to dispossess your mind of such horrid images. There are many, very many resources yet left you. Try the effect of society; and let it call into exercise those fine talents which all admit are so well calculated to be its ornament and pride. At least, leave this hypochondriacal atmosphere, and look out more frequently upon nature. Your opium, if it be an alleviator, is, by your own confession, a most melancholy one. It exorcises one demon to give place to a dozen others.He smiled bitterly; it was a heartless, melancholy relaxation of features, a mere muscular movement, with which the eye had no sympathy; for its wild and dreamy expression, the preternatural lustre, without transparency, remained unaltered, as if rebuking, with its cold, strange glare, the mockery around it. He sat before me like a statue, whose eye alone retained its stony and stolid rigidity, while the other features were moved by some secret machinery into ‘a ghastly smile.’ ‘I am not desirous, even were it practicable,’ he said,With other ministrations, thou, O Nature!
Healest thy wandering and distempered child.
to defend the use of opium, or rather the abuse of it. I can only say, that the substitutes you propose are not suited to my condition. The
