To the happiest _lustrum_,
however, or even to the happiest _year_, it may be allowed to any man to
point without discountenance from wisdom. This year, in my case, reader,
was the one which we have now reached; though it stood, I confess, as a
parenthesis between years of a gloomier character. It was a year of
brilliant water (to speak after the manner of jewellers), set as it were,
and insulated, in the gloom and cloudy melancholy of opium. Strange as
it may sound, I had a little before this time descended suddenly, and
without any considerable effort, from 320 grains of opium (_i.e_. eight
{16} thousand drops of laudanum) per day, to forty grains, or one-eighth
part. Instantaneously, and as if by magic, the cloud of profoundest
melancholy which rested upon my brain, like some black vapours that I
have seen roll away from the summits of mountains, drew off in one day
([Greek text]); passed off with its murky banners as simultaneously as a
ship that has been stranded, and is floated off by a spring tide--
That moveth altogether, if it move at all.
Now, then, I was again happy; I now took only 1000 drops of laudanum per
day; and what was that? A latter spring had come to close up the season
of youth; my brain performed its functions as healthily as ever before; I
read Kant again, and again I understood him, or fancied that I did.
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