The natural effects of opium were concurrent with preexisting tendencies of De Quincey’s mind.  If, instead of having his restless intellect, he had been indolent,—­if, instead of loving the mysterious, because it invited a Titanic energy to reduce its anarchy to order, he had loved it as simply dark or obscure,—­if his natural subtilty of reflection had been less, or if he had been endowed with inferior powers in the sublime architecture of impassioned expression,—­then might he as well have smoked a meerschaum, taken snuff or grog or any other stimulant, as to have gone out of his way for the more refined pleasures of opium.

The reader will indulge us in a single philosophical distinction, at this point, by which we mean to classify the effects of opium under two heads:  first, the external, and, secondly, the internal.  Properly speaking, all the positive effects of opium must be internal; for all its movements are inward in their direction, being refluent upon the focal centres of life.  Thus, one of the most noticeable phenomena connected with opium-eating is the burden of life resting back upon the heart, which deliberately pulsates the moments of existence, as if the most momentous issues depended upon each separate throb.  But this very reflux of sensibility will produce great effects at the surface, which are purely negative.  This latter class of effects Homer has indicated with considerable accuracy, in the ninth Odyssey, (82-105,) where he notices specifically an air of carelessness regarding external things,—­carelessness as to the mutual interchange of conversation by question and answer, and as to the ordinary pursuits of life as disturbing an inward peace.  The same characteristics are more fully developed in Tennyson’s “Lotos-Eaters":—­

  “Branches they bore of that enchanted stem,
  Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave
  To each; but whoso did receive of them,
  And taste, to him the gushing of the wave,
  Far, far away, did seem to mourn and rave
  On alien shores; and if his fellows spake,
  His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;
  And deaf-asleep he seemed, yet all awake,
  And music in his ears his beating heart did make.”

By causing the life to flow inward upon a more ideal centre, opium deepens the consciousness, and compels it to give testimony to processes and connections that in ordinary moments escape unrecorded.  It is as if new materials were found for a history of the individual life,—­materials which, like freshly discovered records, sound the deepest meanings of the present and measure the abysses of the past.  Thus it is that the fugitive imagery of sense is interpreted as a scroll which hides infinite truths under the most fleeting of symbols,—­symbols which are not sufficiently enduring to call them words, or even syllables of words, since the most trivial hint or whisper of them has hardly reached us ere they have perished.  Thus it is that even the still more intangible record of memory, where are preserved only images and echoes of that which undeniably has perished, is revivified and enlarged.