" In the
necessity of this conclusion I do not altogether concur; but upon that
point I shall have occasion to speak at the close of my Confessions,
where I shall present the reader with the _moral_ of my narrative.
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS
These preliminary confessions, or introductory narrative of the youthful
adventures which laid the foundation of the writer's habit of
opium-eating in after-life, it has been judged proper to premise, for
three several reasons:
1. As forestalling that question, and giving it a satisfactory answer,
which else would painfully obtrude itself in the course of the Opium
Confessions--"How came any reasonable being to subject himself to such a
yoke of misery; voluntarily to incur a captivity so servile, and
knowingly to fetter himself with such a sevenfold chain?"--a question
which, if not somewhere plausibly resolved, could hardly fail, by the
indignation which it would be apt to raise as against an act of wanton
folly, to interfere with that degree of sympathy which is necessary in
any case to an author's purposes.
2. As furnishing a key to some parts of that tremendous scenery which
afterwards peopled the dreams of the Opium-eater.
3. As creating some previous interest of a personal sort in the
confessing subject, apart from the matter of the confessions, which
cannot fail to render the confessions themselves more interesting.
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