Men shake hands, swear eternal friendship,
and shed tears, no mortal knows why; and the sensual creature is clearly
uppermost. But the expansion of the benigner feelings incident to opium
is no febrile access, but a healthy restoration to that state which the
mind would naturally recover upon the removal of any deep-seated
irritation of pain that had disturbed and quarrelled with the impulses of
a heart originally just and good. True it is that even wine, up to a
certain point and with certain men, rather tends to exalt and to steady
the intellect; I myself, who have never been a great wine-drinker, used
to find that half-a-dozen glasses of wine advantageously affected the
faculties--brightened and intensified the consciousness, and gave to the
mind a feeling of being "ponderibus librata suis;" and certainly it is
most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man that he is
_disguised_ in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by
sobriety, and it is when they are drinking (as some old gentleman says in
Athenaeus), that men [Greek text]--display themselves in their true
complexion of character, which surely is not disguising themselves. But
still, wine constantly leads a man to the brink of absurdity and
extravagance, and beyond a certain point it is sure to volatilise and to
disperse the intellectual energies: whereas opium always seems to compose
what had been agitated, and to concentrate what had been distracted.
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