I, as is usual in dreams—­where, of necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement—­had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it.  I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it, and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt.  “Deeper than ever plummet sounded,” I lay inactive.  Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened.  Some greater interest was at stake, some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed.  Then came sudden alarms, hurryings to and fro, trepidations of innumerable fugitives—­I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad—­darkness and lights, tempest and human faces, and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed—­and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then—­everlasting farewells!  And with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of death, the sound was reverberated—­everlasting farewells!  And again and yet again reverberated—­everlasting farewells!  And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud, “I will sleep no more.”

* * * * *

It now remains that I should say something of the way in which this conflict of horrors was finally brought to a crisis.  I saw that I must die if I continued the opium.  I determined, therefore, if that should be required, to die in throwing it off.  I triumphed.  But, reader, think of me as one, even when four months had passed, still agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating, shattered.  During the whole period of diminishing the opium I had the torments of a man passing out of one mode of existence into another.  The issue was not death, but a sort of physical regeneration.

One memorial of my former condition still remains—­my dreams are not yet perfectly calm; the dread swell and agitation of the storm have not wholly subsided; the legions that encamped in them are drawing off, but not all departed; my sleep is still tumultuous, and, like the gates of Paradise to our first parents when looking back from afar, it is still—­in Milton’s tremendous line—­“With dreadful faces throng’d and fiery arms.”

* * * * *

ALEXANDRE DUMAS

Memoirs

Alexandre Dumas pere, the great French novelist and dramatist, who here tells the story of his youth, was born on July 24, 1802, and died on December 5, 1870.  He was a man of prodigious vitality, virility, and invention; abounding in enjoyment, gaiety, vanity, and kindness; the richness, force, and celerity of his nature was amazing.  In regard to this peculiar vivacity of his, it is interesting to remember that one of his grandparents was a full-blooded negress.  Dumas’ literary work is essentially romantic;