It exorcises one demon to give
place to a dozen others.
'With other ministrations, thou, O Nature!
Healest thy wandering and distempered child.'"
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, "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 world has
now no enticements for me; society no charms. Love, fame, wealth,
honor, may engross the attention of the multitude; to me they are all
shadows; and why should I grasp at them? In the solitude of my own
thoughts, looking on but not mingling in them, I have taken the full
gauge of their hollow vanities. No, leave me to myself, or rather to
that new existence which I have entered upon, to the strange world to
which my daily opiate invites me.
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