SOURCE: "Consolations in Opium: The Expanding Universe of Coleridge, Humphrey Davy and 'The Recluse'," in The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. XVII, No. 2, Spring, 1986, pp. 51-59.

In the following essay, Lefebure explores the experimentations of the English Romantics with opium.

The Romantics experimented with many drugs, within the respective contexts of pharmacy and picturesque experience. Opium was the best known and most used because it was the most accessible and the most effective. Throughout history it has been the most valuable medicinal drug known to man; also throughout history opium has been resorted to for purposes other than the purely medicinal: "It is in the faculty of mental vision, it is in the increased power of dealing with the shadowy and the dark, that the characteristic virtue of opium lies," De Quincey assures us in his essay, Coleridge and Opium. While Coleridge himself says that opium has the power, "To...