Of the pleasures and pains of opium much has been written. The ecstasies and horrors of De Quincey and the paradis artificiels of Baudelaire are preserved and interpreted with an art which makes them immortal, and the world knows well the beauty, the terror and the mystery of those obscure realms into which the inspired dreamer is transported. But much as has been told, no man has yet dared intimate the nature of the phantasms thus unfolded to the mind, or hint at the direction of the unheard-of roads along whose ornate and exotic course the partaker of the drug is so irresistibly borne.

Man's respect for the imponderables varies according to his mental constitution and environment. Through certain modes of thought and training it can be elevat…

I took opium but once - in the year of the plague, when doctors sought to deaden the agonies they could not cure. There was an overdose - my physician was worn…

We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must…

And as I played, a child came thro' the gate, A boy who looked at me without a word, As tho' he saw stretch far behind my head Long lines of radiant angels, ro…

I cannot reach it, and my striving eye Dazzles at it, as at eternity.

Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh just, subtle, and mighty opium!