" Thou only
givest these gifts to man; and thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just,
subtle, and mighty opium!
INTRODUCTION TO THE PAINS OF OPIUM
Courteous, and I hope indulgent, reader (for all _my_ readers must be
indulgent ones, or else I fear I shall shock them too much to count on
their courtesy), having accompanied me thus far, now let me request you
to move onwards for about eight years; that is to say, from 1804 (when I
have said that my acquaintance with opium first began) to 1812. The
years of academic life are now over and gone--almost forgotten; the
student's cap no longer presses my temples; if my cap exist at all, it
presses those of some youthful scholar, I trust, as happy as myself, and
as passionate a lover of knowledge. My gown is by this time, I dare say,
in the same condition with many thousand excellent books in the Bodleian,
viz., diligently perused by certain studious moths and worms; or
departed, however (which is all that I know of his fate), to that great
reservoir of _somewhere_ to which all the tea-cups, tea-caddies,
tea-pots, tea-kettles, &c., have departed (not to speak of still frailer
vessels, such as glasses, decanters, bed-makers, &c.), which occasional
resemblances in the present generation of tea-cups, &c., remind me of
having once possessed, but of whose departure and final fate I, in common
with most gownsmen of either university, could give, I suspect, but an
obscure and conjectural history.
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