If any man, poor or rich, were to say that he would tell us what had been
the happiest day in his life, and the why and the wherefore, I suppose
that we should all cry out--Hear him! Hear him! As to the happiest
_day_, that must be very difficult for any wise man to name, because any
event that could occupy so distinguished a place in a man's retrospect of
his life, or be entitled to have shed a special felicity on any one day,
ought to be of such an enduring character as that (accidents apart) it
should have continued to shed the same felicity, or one not
distinguishably less, on many years together. 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. Again