The Opium Habit by Horace B. Day

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"The walk appears to have done me good, but I had a wretched night:
shocking pains in my head, occiput, and teeth, and found in the
morning that I had two bloodshot eyes. But almost immediately after
the receipt and perusal of your letter the pains left me, and I am
bettered to this hour; and am now indeed as well as usual saving that
my left eye is very much bloodshot. It is a sort of duty with me to be
particular respecting parts that relate to my health. I have retained
a good sound appetite through the whole of it, without any craving
after exhilarants or narcotics, and I have got well as in a
moment. Rapid recovery is constitutional with me; but the former
circumstances I can with certainty refer to the system of diet,
abstinence of vegetables, wine, spirits, and beer, which I have
adopted by your advice."

The same year he writes to a friend suffering from a chronic disorder,
and records the trial of Bang--"the powder of the leaves of a kind of
hemp that grows in the hot climates. It is prepared, and I believe
used, in all parts of the east, from Morocco to China. In Europe it is
found to act very differently on different constitutions. Some it
elevates in the extreme; others it renders torpid, and scarcely
observant of any evil that may befall them. In Barbary it is always
taken, if it can be procured, by criminals condemned to suffer
amputation, and it is said to enable those miserables to bear the
rough operations of an unfeeling executioner more than we Europeans
can the keen knife of our most skillful chirurgeons:

"We will have a fair trial of Bang. Do bring down some of the
Hyoscyamine pills, and I will give a fair trial to Opium, Henbane, and
Nepenthe. By the bye, I always considered Homer's account of the
Nepenthe as a _Banging_ lie."

In September, 1803, he gives a gloomy account of his condition. It
seems probable that at this time his use of opium must have become
habitual:

"For five months past my mind has been strangely shut up. I have
taken the paper with the intention to write to you many times, but it
has been one blank feeling--one blank idealess feeling. I had nothing
to say--could say nothing. How dearly I love you, my very dreams make
known to me. I will not trouble you with the gloomy tale of my
health. When I am awake, by patience, employment, effort of mind, and
walking, I can keep the fiend at arm's-length, but the night is my
Hell! sleep my tormenting Angel. Three nights out of four I fall
asleep, struggling to lie awake, and my frequent night-screams have
almost made me a nuisance in my own house. Dreams with me are no
shadows, but the very calamities of my life.

"In the hope of drawing the gout, if gout it should be, into my feet,
I walked, previously to my getting into the coach at Perth, 263 miles
in eight days, with no unpleasant fatigue. My head is equally strong;
but acid or not acid, gout or not gout, something there is in my
stomach.

"To diversify this dusky letter, I will write an _Epitaph_, which
I composed in my sleep for myself while dreaming that I was dying. To
the best of my recollection I have not altered a word:

"'Here sleeps at length poor Col. and without screaming,
Who died as he had always lived, a dreaming;
Shot dead, while sleeping, by the gout within,
Alone, and all unknown, at E'nbro' in an Inn'"

In the beginning of the next year, 1804, the state of his health is
thus indicated: "I stayed at Grasmere (Mr. Wordsworth's) a
month--three-fourths of the time bedridden--and deeply do I feel the
enthusiastic kindness of Wordsworth's wife and sister, who sat up by
me, one or the other, in order to awaken me at the first symptoms of
distressful feeling; and even when they went to rest, continued often
and often to weep and watch for me even in their dreams.

"Though my right hand is so much swollen that I can scarcely keep my
pen steady between my thumb and finger, yet my stomach is easy and my
breathing comfortable, and I am eager to hope all good things of my
health. That gained, I have a cheering and I trust prideless
confidence that I shall make an active and perseverant use of the
faculties and requirements that have been entrusted to my keeping, and
a fair trial of their height, depth, and width."

A few days later he writes to a friend who was suffering like himself:
"Have you ever thought of trying large doses of opium, a hot climate,
keeping your body open by grapes, and the fruits of the climate? Is it
possible that by drinking freely you might at last produce the gout,
and that a violent pain and inflammation in the extremities might
produce new trains of motion and feeling in your stomach, and the
organs connected with the stomach, known and unknown? I know by a
little what your sufferings are, and that to shut the eyes and stop up
the ears is to give one's self up to storm and darkness, and the lurid
forms and horrors of a dream."

In reference to these statements regarding Coleridge's physical
condition, Cottle remarks: "I can testify that, during the four or
five years in which Mr. C. resided in or near Bristol, no young man
could enjoy more robust health. Dr. Carlyon also verbally stated that
Mr. C., both at Cambridge and at Gottingen, 'possessed sound health.'
From these premises the conclusion is fair that Mr. Coleridge's
unhappy use of narcotics, which commenced thus early, was the true
cause of all his maladies, his languor, his acute and chronic pains,
his indigestion, his swellings, the disturbances of his general
corporeal system, his sleepless nights, and his terrific dreams."

Scattered through Dr. Gilman's "Life of Coleridge" are indications of
this kind:

"In 1804, his rheumatic sufferings increasing, he determined on a
change of climate, and went in May to Malta. He seemed at this time,
in addition to his rheumatism, to have been oppressed in his
breathing, which oppression crept on him, imperceptibly to himself,
without suspicion of its cause. Yet so obvious was it that it was
noticed by others 'as laborious;' and continuing to increase, though
with little apparent advancement, at length terminated in death.

"At first he remarked that he was relieved by the climate of Malta,
but afterward speaks of his limbs 'as lifeless tools,' and of the
violent pain in his bowels, which neither opium, ether, nor
peppermint, separately or combined, could relieve.

"Coleridge _began_ the use of opium from bodily pain
(rheumatism), and for the same reason _continued_ it, till he had
acquired a habit too difficult uder his own management to control. To
him it was the thorn in the flesh, which will be seen in the following
note found in his pocket-book: 'I have never loved evil for its own
sake; no! nor ever sought pleasure for its own sake, but only as the
means of escaping from pains that coiled around my mental powers as a
serpent around the body and wings of an eagle! My sole sensuality was
_not_ to be in pain.'"

Little is known of Coleridge's opium habits during his residence at
Malta. On his return to England in 1807, he wrote to Mr. Cottle: "On
my return to Bristol, whenever that may be, I will certainly give you
the right hand of old fellowship; but, alas! you will find me the
wretched wreck of what you knew me, rolling, rudderless. My health is
extremely bad. Pain I have enough of, but that is indeed to me a mere
trifle, but the almost unceasing, overpowering sensations of
wretchedness--achings in my limbs, with an indescribable restlessness
that makes action to any available purpose almost impossible--and
worst of all the sense of blighted utility, regrets, not
remorseless. But enough; yea, more than enough, if these things
produce or deepen the conviction of the utter powerlessness of
ourselves, and that we either perish or find aid from something that
passes understanding."

A period of seven years here intervenes, during which no light is
thrown upon the opium life of Coleridge. The following extract from a
letter written by him during this period, sufficiently indicates,
however, both his consciousness of his great powers and his remorse
for their imperfect use:

"As to the letter you propose to write to a man who is unworthy even
of a rebuke from you, I might most unfeignedly object to some parts of
it from a pang of conscience forbidding me to allow, even from a dear
friend, words of admiration which are inapplicable in exact proportion
to the power given to me of having deserved them if I had done my
duty.

"It is not of comparative utility I speak; for as to what has been
actually done, and in relation to useful effects produced--whether on
the minds of individuals or of the public--I dare boldly stand
forward, and (let every man have his own, and that be counted mine
which but for and through me would not have existed) will challenge
the proudest of my literary contemporaries to compare proofs with me
of usefulness in the excitement of reflection, and the diffusion of
original or forgotten yet necessary and important truths and
knowledge; and this is not the less true because I have suffered
others to reap all the advantages. But, O dear friend, this
consciousness, raised by insult of enemies and alienated friends,
stands me in little stead to my own soul--in how little, then, before
the all-righteous Judge! who, requiring back the talents he had
entrusted, will, if the mercies of Christ do not intervene, not demand
of me what I have done, but why I did not do more; why, with powers
above so many, I had sunk in many things below most!"

In 1814 he returned to Bristol, and here the painful narrative of
Mr. Cottle comes in: "Is it expedient, is it lawful, to give publicity
to Mr. Coleridge's practice of inordinately taking opium; which to a
certain extent, at one part of his life, inflicted on a heart
naturally cheerful the stings of conscience, and sometimes almost the
horrors of despair?

"In the year 1814, all this, I am afflicted to say, applied to
Mr. Coleridge. Once Mr. Coleridge expressed to me, with indescribable
emotion, the joy he should feel if he could collect around him all who
were 'beginning to tamper with the lulling but fatal draught,' so that
he might proclaim as with a trumpet, 'the worse than death that opium
entailed.'

"When it is considered, also, how many men of high mental endowments
have shrouded their lustre by a passion for this stimulus, would it not
be a criminal concession to unauthorized feelings to allow so
impressive an exhibition of this subtle species of intemperance to
escape from public notice? In the exhibition here made, the
inexperienced in future may learn a memorable lesson, and be taught to
shrink from opium as they would from a scorpion, which, before it
destroys, invariably expels peace from the mind, and excites the worst
species of conflict--that of setting a man at war with himself.

"I had often spoken to Hannah More of S. T. Coleridge, and proceeded
with him one morning to Barley Wood, her residence, eleven miles from
Bristol. The interview was mutually agreeable, nor was there any lack
of conversation; but I was struck with something singular in
Mr. Coleridge's eye. I expressed to a friend, the next day, my concern
at having beheld him during his visit to Hannah More so extremely
paralytic, his hands shaking to an alarming degree, so that he could
not take a glass of wine without spilling it, though one hand
supported the other! 'That,' said he, 'arises from the immoderate
quantity of OPIUM he takes.'

"It is remarkable that this was the first time the melancholy fact of
Mr. Coleridge's excessive indulgence in opium had come to my
knowledge. It astonished and afflicted me. Now the cause of his
ailments became manifest. On this subject Mr. C. may have been
communicative to others, but to me he was silent.

"I ruminated long upon this subject with indescribable sorrow; and
having ascertained from others not only the existence of the evil but
its extent, I determined to write to Mr. Coleridge. I addressed him
the following letter, under the full impression that it was a case of
'life and death,' and that if some strong effort were not made to
arouse him from his insensibility, speedy destruction must inevitably
follow.

"'BRISTOL, April 25,1814.

"'DEAR COLERIDGE:--I am conscious of being influenced by the purest
motives in addressing to you the following letter. Permit me to
remind you that I am the oldest friend you have in Bristol, that I was
such when my friendship was of more consequence to you than it is at
present, and that at that time you were neither insensible of my
kindnesses nor backward to acknowledge them. I bring these things to
your remembrance to impress on your mind that it is still a
_friend_ who is writing to you; one who ever has been such, and
who is now going to give you the most decisive evidence of his
sincerity.

"'When I think of Coleridge I wish to recall the image of him such as
he appeared in past years; now, how has the baneful use of opium
thrown a dark cloud over you and your prospects! I would not say any
thing needlessly harsh or unkind, but I must be _faithful_. It is
the irresistible voice of conscience. Others may still flatter you,
and hang upon your words, but I have another, though a less gracious
duty to perform. I see a brother sinning a sin unto death, and shall I
not warn him? I see him perhaps on the borders of eternity; in
effect, despising his Maker's law, and yet indifferent to his perilous
state!

"'In recalling what the expectations concerning you once were, and the
excellency with which seven years ago you wrote and spoke on religious
truth, my heart bleeds to see how you are now fallen, and thus to
notice how many exhilarating hopes are almost blasted by your present
habits. This is said, not to wound, but to arouse you to reflection.

"'I know full well the evidences of the pernicious drug! You can not
be unconscious of the effects, though you may wish to forget the
cause. All around you behold the wild eye, the sallow countenance, the
tottering step, the trembling hand, the disordered frame! and yet will
you not be awakened to a sense of your danger, and I must add, your
guilt? Is it a small thing, that one of the finest of human
understandings should be lost? That your talents should be buried?
That most of the influences to be derived from your present example
should be in direct opposition to right and virtue? It is true you
still talk of religion, and profess the warmest admiration of the
Church and her doctrines, in which it would not be lawful to doubt
your sincerity; but can you be unaware that by your unguarded and
inconsistent conduct you are furnishing arguments to the infidel;
giving occasion for the enemy to blaspheme; and (among those who
imperfectly know you) throwing suspicion over your religious
profession? Is not the great test in some measure against you, "By
their fruits ye shall know them?" Are there never any calm moments,
when you impartially judge of your own actions by their consequences?

"'Not to reflect on you-not to give you a moment's _needless_
pain, but in the spirit of friendship, suffer me to bring to your
recollection some of the sad effects of your undeniable intemperance.

"'I know you have a correct love of honest independence, without which
there can be no true nobility of mind; and yet for opium you will sell
this treasure, and expose yourself to the liability of arrest by some
"dirty fellow" to whom you choose to be indebted for "ten pounds!" You
had, and still have, an acute sense of moral right and wrong, but is
not the feeling sometimes overpowered by self-indulgence? Permit me
to remind you that you are not more suffering in your mind than you
are in your body, while you are squandering largely your money in the
purchase of opium, which, in the strictest equity, should receive a
_different direction_.

"I will not again refer to the mournful effects produced on your own
health from this indulgence in opium, by which you have undermined
your strong constitution; but I must notice the injurious consequences
which this passion for the narcotic drug has on your literary
efforts. What you have already done, excellent as it is, is considered
by your friends and the world as the bloom, the mere promise of the
harvest. Will you suffer the fatal draught, which is ever accompanied
by sloth, to rob you of your fame, and, what to you is a higher
motive, of your power of doing good; of giving fragrance to your
memory, among the worthies of future years, when you are numbered with
the dead?

"'And now let me conjure you, alike by the voice of friendship and the
duty you owe yourself and family; above all, by the reverence you feel
for the cause of Christianity; by the fear of God and the awfulness of
eternity, to renounce from this moment opium and spirits as your bane!
Frustrate not the great end of your existence. Exert the ample
abilities which God has given you, as a faithful steward. So will you
secure your rightful pre-eminence among the sons of genius; recover
your cheerfulness, your health--I trust it is not too late--become
reconciled to yourself; and, through the merits of that Saviour in
whom you profess to trust, obtain at last the approbation of your
Maker, My dear Coleridge, be wise before it be too late. I do hope to
see you a renovated man; and that you will still burst your inglorious
fetters and justify the best hopes of your friends.

"'Excuse the freedom with which I write. If at the first moment it
should offend, on reflection you will approve at least of the motive,
and perhaps, in a better state of mind, thank and bless me. If all the
good which I have prayed for should not be effected by this letter, I
have at least dis charged an imperious sense of duty. I wish my
manner were less exceptionable, as I do that the advice through the
blessing of the Almighty might prove effectual. The tear which bedims
my eye is an evidence of the sincerity with which I subscribe myself
your affectionate friend,

"'JOSEPH CUTTLE.'

"The following is Mr. Coleridge's reply:

"'April 26,1814.

"'You have poured oil in the raw and festering wound of an old
friend's conscience Cottle, but it is _oil of vitriol!_ I but
barely glanced at the middle of the first page of your letter, and
have seen no more of it-not from resentment, God forbid! but from the
state of my bodily and mental sufferings, that scarcely permitted
human fortitude to let in a new visitor of affliction.

"'The object of my present reply is to state the case just as it
is--first, that for ten years the anguish of my spirit has been
indescribable, the sense of my danger staring, but the consciousness
of my GUILT worse--far worse than all! I have prayed, with drops of
agony on my brow; trembling not only before the justice of my Maker,
but even before the mercy of my Redeemer. "I gave thee so many
talents, what hast thou done with them?" Secondly, overwhelmed as I am
with a sense of my direful infirmity, I have never attempted to
disguise or conceal the cause. On the contrary, not only to friends
have I stated the whole case with tears and the very bitterness of
shame, but in two instances I have warned young men--mere
acquaintances, who had spoken of having taken laudanum--of the direful
consequences, by an awful exposition of its tremendous effects on
myself.

"'Thirdly, though before God I can not lift up my eyelids, and only do
not despair of his mercy because to despair would be adding crime to
crime, yet to my fellow-men I may say that I was seduced into the
ACCURSED habit ignorantly. I had been almost bedridden for many
months with swellings in my knees. In a medical journal I unhappily
met with an account of a cure performed in a similar case, or what
appeared to me so, by rubbing in of laudanum, at the same time taking
a given dose internally. It acted like a charm, like a miracle! I
recovered the use of my limbs, of my appetite, of my spirits, and this
continued for near a fortnight. At length the unusual stimulus
subsided, the complaint returned--the supposed remedy was recurred
to--but I can not go through the dreary history.

"'Suffice it to say that effects were produced which acted on me by
terror and cowardice of pain and sudden death, not (so help me God!)
by any temptation of pleasure, or expectation or desire of exciting
pleasurable senstations. On the very contrary, Mrs. Morgan and her
sister will bear witness so far as to say that the longer I abstained
the higher my spirits were, the keener my enjoyments, till the moment,
the direful moment arrived when my pulse began to fluctuate, my heart
to palpitate, and such falling abroad as it were of my whole frame,
such intolerable restlessness and incipient bewilderment, that in the
last of my several attempts to abandon the dire poison I exclaimed in
agony, which I now repeat in seriousness and solemnity, "I am too poor
to hazard this!" Had I but a few hundred pounds--but L200--half to
send to Mrs. Coleridge, and half to place myself in a private
mad-house, where I could procure nothing but what a physician thought
proper, and where a medical attendant could be constantly with me for
two or three months (in less than that time life or death would be
determined), then there might be hope. Now there is none!! O God! how
willingly would I place myself under Dr. Fox in his establishment; for
my case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement, an
utter impotence of the volition and not of the intellectual
faculties. You bid me rouse myself. Go bid a man paralytic in both
arms to rub them briskly together and that will cure him. "Alas!" he
would reply, "that I can not move my arms is my complaint and my
mysery." May God bless you, and your affectionate but most afflicted

S. T. COLERIDGE.'

"On receiving this full and mournful disclosure I felt the deepest
compassion for Mr. C.'s state, and sent him a letter to which I
received the following reply:

"'O, dear friend! I have too much to be forgiven to feel any
difficulty in forgiving the cruellest enemy that ever trampled on me:
and you I have only to _thank!_ You have no conception of the
dreadful hell of my mind, and conscience, and body. You bid me
pray. Oh, I do pray inwardly to be able to pray; but indeed to pray,
to pray with a faith to which a blessing is promised, this is the
reward of faith, this is the gift of God to the elect. Oh! if to feel
how infinitely worthless I am, how poor a wretch, with just free-will
enough to be deserving of wrath and of my own contempt, and of none to
merit a moment's peace, can make a part of a Christian's creed--so far
I am a Christian,

S. T. C.'

"'April 26, 1814.

"At this time Mr. Coleridge was indeed in a pitiable condition. His
passion for opium had so completely subdued his _will_ that he
seemed carried away, without resistance, by an overwhelming flood. The
impression was fixed on his mind that he should inevitably die unless
he were placed under _constraint_, and that constraint he thought
could be alone effected in an asylum. Dr. Fox, who presided over an
establishment of this description in the neighborhood of Bristol,
appeared to Mr. C. the individual to whose subjection he would most
like to submit. This idea still impressing his imagination, he
addressed to me the following letter:

"'DEAR COTTLE:--I have resolved to place myself in any situation in
which I can remain for a month or two as a child, wholly in the power
of others. But, alas! I have no money. Will you invite Mr. Hood, a
most dear and affectionate friend to worthless me, and Mr. Le Breton,
my old school-fellow and likewise a most affectionate friend, and
Mr. Wade, who will return in a few days; desire them to call on you,
any evening after seven o'clock that they can make convenient, and
consult with them whether any thing of this kind can be done. Do you
know Dr. Fox? Affectionately,

"'S. T. C.'

"I _did_ know the late Dr. Fox, who was an opulent and
liberal-minded man, and if I had applied to him, or any friend had so
done, I can not doubt but that he would instantly have received
Mr. Coleridge gratuitously; but nothing could have induced me to make
the application but that extreme case which did not then appear fully
to exist.

"The years 1814 and 1815 were the darkest periods in Mr. Coleridge's
life. However painful the detail, it is presumed that the reader would
desire a knowledge of the undisguised truth. This can not be obtained
without introducing the following letters of Mr. Southey, received
from him after having sent him copies of the letters which passed
between Mr. Coleridge and myself.

"'KESWICK, April, 1814.

"'MY DEAR COTTLE:--You may imagine with what feelings I have read your
correspondence with Coleridge. Shocking as his letters are, perhaps
the most mournful thing they discover is, that while acknowledging the
guilt of the habit he imputes it still to morbid bodily causes,
whereas after every possible allowance is made for these, every person
who has witnessed his habits knows that for the greater, infinitely
the greater part, inclination and indulgence are its motives.

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