Coleridge was indolent from temperament, a disposition which was increased by opium.  Hence De Quincey was of the opinion that it injured Coleridge’s poetic faculties; which probably was the case, since in genuine poetry the mind is prominently realistic, its motions are all outward, and therefore excessive indolence must of necessity be fatal.

De Quincey’s physical system, on the contrary, seemed preconformed to opium:  it demanded it, and would be satisfied with nothing else.  No temptation so strong could have been presented to Coleridge.  De Quincey really craved the drug.  His stomach was deranged, and was still suffering from the sad results of his youthful wanderings in London.  It seems almost as if fate had compelled the unfortunate course into which he finally drifted.  The craving first appeared in the shape of a horrid gnawing at the stomach; afterwards this indefinite yearning gave place to a specific one, which was unmistakable in its demands.  Daily, like the daughters of the horse-leech, it cried, “Give, give!” Toward the last, this craving became, in De Quincey’s solemn belief, an animal incarnate, and the opium-eater reasoned after the following fashion:—­It is not I that eat, it is not I that am responsible either for the fact of eating or the amount; am I the keeper of this horrid monster’s conscience?  He even carried the conceit so far as to consider a portion of each meal as especially devoted to this insane stomachic reveller, just as a voracious Greek or Roman would have attributed no small part of his outrageous appetite to the gods, as eating by proxy through the mouths of mortals.  This is almost as bad as the case reported of Stonewall Jackson, who, it is said, religiously believed that whatever he ate was, by some mysterious physiological economy, conveyed into his left leg.

No less was De Quincey psychologically preconformed to opium.  The prodigious mental activity so early awakened in him counteracted the narcotic despotism of the drug, and made it a sort of ally.  The reader sees from this how much depends upon predispositions as to the effect of opium.  De Quincey himself says that the man whose daily talk is of oxen will pursue his bovine speculations into dreams.  Opium originates nothing; but, given activity of a certain type and moving in a certain direction, and there will be perhaps through opium a multiplication of energies and velocities.  What was De Quincey without opium? is, therefore, the question preliminary to any proper estimate as to what in him was due to opium.  This question has already been answered in the remarks made concerning his childhood.  His meditative tendencies were especially noticed as most characteristic.  There was besides this a natural leaning toward the mysterious,—­the mysterious, I mean, as depending, not upon the terrible or ghostly, or upon anything which excites gloom or fear, but upon operations that are simply inscrutable as moving in darkness.