every man who ever attempted to write under the influence of an
alcoholic stimulant knows to be false. Drugs--including alcohol--which
are supposed to stimulate what we might term a rational imagination,
only stimulate an irrational fancy. They seem to the person affected to
cause a play of imagination, but they really produce only a state of
nervous action which causes their subject to feel appreciation of
otherwise trifling mental pictures that in themselves are flimsy
nothings. Let a man so affected try to impart to another his fancies,
and--well, who has not been bored by a drunken man? Did De Quincey, with
that superb mind, succeed in fancying anything that even he could tell?
He speaks of glowing drug-born fancies, but he describes nothings. Now
Milton, the old Puritan--the cold-water man--he had fancies which he was
able to transmit, and which are worthy to be forever treasured. The
early Greeks were exceedingly temperate, and the men who composed the
'Nostoi' were not drunkards--Homer sang the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey'
with a sober tongue, and a sober brain back of his utterances. The man
who gets drunk to write poetry, will find it easier to write his poetry
on the following morning, spite of headache, blue-devils, and all." He
paused for a moment; and then this peculiar man continued:

"And I know! Why, sir, I have drunk barrels of whiskey--barrels of the
stuff. I have seen whiskey-snakes in squirming masses three feet deep. I
have gone into a parlor, and had a lady say when she saw me fumbling in
my pockets: 'Doctor, your handkerchief is in your back pocket.' Bless
her! I was only putting back into my pockets the jim-jam snake-heads as
the snakes _would_ try to emerge! I pity a weak devil that goes home and
to bed because of a mild attack of delirium tremens. I brush the vipers
away with a sweep of my hand, and go about my business. But I myself
draw the line at roosters. A man who may laugh at snakes will quail
before roosters. A fellow may shut his eyes to snakes, but he can't shut