How much of that which glorified De Quincey was due to opium?  Very little as to quality, but very much as to the degree and the peculiar manner in which original qualities and dispositions are developed, for here it is that the only field of influence open to abnormal agencies lies.  Coleridge, as an opium-eater, is the only individual worthy of notice in the same connection.  Had he also confessed, it is uncertain what new revelations might have been made.  It is certain that opium exercised a very potent effect upon him; for it was generally after his dose that his remarkable intellectual displays occurred.  These displays were mostly confined to his conversations, which were usually long-winded metaphysical epics, evolving a continued series of abstractions and analyses, and, for their movement, depending upon a sort of poetic construction.  A pity it is that we must content ourselves with empty descriptions of this nature.  Here, doubtless, if anywhere, opium was an auxiliary to Coleridge.  For a laudanum negus, whatever there may be about it that is pernicious, will, to a mind that is metaphysically predisposed, open up thoroughfares of thought which are raised above the level of the gross material, and which lead into the region of the shadowy.  Show us the man who habitually carries pills of any sort in his waistcoat-pocket, be they opium or whatever else, and we can assure you that that man is an aerobat,—­that somehow, in one sense or another, he walks in the air above other men’s heads.  Whatever disturbs the healthful isolation of the nervous system is prosperous to metaphysics, because it attracts the mental attention to the organism through which thought is carried on.  Numerous are the instances of men who would never have been heard of as thinkers or as reflective poets, if they had had sufficient muscular ballast to pull against their teeming brains.  The consequence of the disproportion has been that the superfluous brain has exhaled, as a mere necessity.[A] If Tacitus had fared in any sort like his brother,—­if there had been anything like an equitable division between them of muscle and brain, it is more than probable that we should have lost the illustrious historian.

[Footnote A:  It has been adduced as an important proof of the soul’s immortality, that frequently, as physical power declines, the mind exhibits unusual activity.  But the argument moves in the opposite direction.  For of what sort is this unusual activity?  That which results from unbalanced nerves; and the indications are that not only are the physical harmonies disturbed, but that the same disturbing cause has impaired the delicate adjustments of thought itself.  Sometimes there is manifested, towards the near approach of death, an almost insane brilliancy; as, for instance, in the case of a noted theologian, who occupied the last minutes of his ebbing life with a very subtile mathematical discourse concerning the exceeding, the excruciating smallness of nothing divided into infinitesimal parts.  And strange as it may seem, I once heard this identical instance cited as a triumphant vindication of the most sublime article of either Pagan or Christian faith.  Nay, from the lips of a theological professor, the fragmentary glimmerings of a maniac’s mind have been adduced for precisely the same purpose.]