It is strange that our Continent, where the meaning of Rest is unknown, should have given to the world this great agent of Rest.  There is nothing more remarkable in history than the colonization of Tobacco over the whole Earth.  Not three centuries have elapsed since knightly Raleigh puffed its fumes into the astonished eyes of Spenser and Shakspeare; and now, find me any corner of the world, from Nova Zembla to the Mountains of the Moon, where the use of the plant is unknown!  Tarshish (if India was Tarshish) is less distinguished by its “apes, ivory, and peacocks,” than by its hookahs; the valleys of Luzon, beyond Ternate and Tidore, send us more cheroots than spices; the Gardens of Shiraz produce more velvety toombek than roses, and the only fountains which bubble in Samarcand are those of the narghilehs:  Lebanon is no longer “excellent with the Cedars,” as in the days of Solomon, but most excellent with its fields of Jebelee and Latakiyeh.  On the unvisited plains of Central Africa, the table-lands of Tartary, and in the valleys of Japan, the wonderful plant has found a home.  The naked negro, “panting at the Line,” inhales it under the palms, and the Lapp and Samoyed on the shores of the Frozen Sea.

It is idle for those who object to the use of Tobacco to attribute these phenomena wholly to a perverted taste.  The fact that the custom was at once adopted by all the races of men, whatever their geographical position and degree of civilization, proves that there must be a reason for it in the physical constitution of man.  Its effect, when habitually used, is slightly narcotic and sedative, not stimulating—­or if so, at times, it stimulates only the imagination and the social faculties.  It lulls to sleep the combative and destructive propensities, and hence—­so far as a material agent may operate—­it exercises a humanizing and refining influence.  A profound student of Man, whose name is well known to the world, once informed me that he saw in the eagerness with which savage tribes adopt the use of Tobacco, a spontaneous movement of Nature towards Civilization.

I will not pursue these speculations further, for the narghileh (bubbling softly at my elbow, as I write) is the promoter of repose and the begetter of agreeable reverie.  As I inhale its cool, fragrant breath, and partly yield myself to the sensation of healthy rest which wraps my limbs as with a velvet mantle, I marvel how the poets and artists and scholars of olden times nursed those dreams which the world calls indolence, but which are the seeds that germinate into great achievements.  How did Plato philosophize without the pipe?  How did gray Homer, sitting on the temple-steps in the Grecian twilights, drive from his heart the bitterness of beggary and blindness?  How did Phidias charm the Cerberus of his animal nature to sleep, while his soul entered the Elysian Fields and beheld the forms of heroes?  For, in the higher world of Art, Body and Soul are sworn enemies, and the pipe holds an opiate more potent than all the drowsy syrups of the East, to drug the former into submission.  Milton knew this, as he smoked his evening pipe at Chalfont, wandering, the while, among the palms of Paradise.