satisfaction to have ascertained it, that Coleridge first had
recourse to opium as an anodyne. It was Nature's revolt from pain, and
not her appetite for pleasure, which drove him to the drug; and though
De Quincey, with his almost comical malice, remarks that, though
Coleridge began in the desire to obtain relief "there is no proof that
he did not end in voluptuousness," there is on the other hand no proof
whatever that he did so end--_until the habit was formed_. It is
quite consistent with probability, and only accords with Coleridge's
own express affirmations, to believe that it was the medicinal efficacy
of opium, and this quality of it alone, which induced him to resort to
it again and again until his senses contracted that well-known and
insatiable craving for the peculiar excitement, "voluptuous" only to
the initiated, which opium-intoxication creates. But let Coleridge
speak on this point for himself. Writing in April 1826 he says:--

"I wrote a few stanzas three-and-twenty years ago, soon after my eyes
had been opened to the true nature of the habit into which I had been
ignorantly deluded by the seeming magic effects of opium, in the
sudden removal of a supposed rheumatic affection, attended with
swellings in my knees and palpitation of the heart and pains all over
me, by which I had been bed-ridden for nearly six months. Unhappily
among my neighbours' and landlord's books were a large number of
medical reviews and magazines. I had always a fondness (a common case,
but most mischievous turn with reading men who are at all dyspeptic)
for dabbling in medical writings; and in one of these reviews I met a
case which I fancied very like my own, in which a cure had been
effected by the Kendal Black Drop. In an evil hour I procured it: it
worked miracles--the swellings disappeared, the pains vanished. I was
all alive, and all around me being as ignorant as myself, nothing
could exceed my triumph. I talked of nothing else, prescribed the