Confessions of an English Opium-eater: And Analects from John Paul Richter

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A. T. Crocker, 1867 - 123 pages
 

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Page 48 - ... within me ! That my pains had vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes : — this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me — in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea — a ^UMO-/ nviyStt for all human woes: here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered : happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket : portable...
Page 88 - I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the summit, or in secret rooms. I was the idol ; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia.
Page 48 - But I took it; and in an hour, — oh heavens ! what a revulsion ! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me ! That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes; this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me, in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed.
Page 81 - And the four following facts may be mentioned as noticeable at this time : 1. That, as the creative state of the eye increased, a sympathy seemed to arise between the waking and the dreaming states of the brain in one point, — that whatsoever I happened to call up and to trace by a voluntary act upon the darkness was very apt to transfer itself to my dreams...
Page 81 - I seemed every night to descend, not metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever reascend.
Page 80 - The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities or aspirations ; he wishes and longs as earnestly as ever to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension •i what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power to attempt.
Page 87 - ... overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed. Even Englishmen, though not bred in any knowledge of such institutions, cannot but shudder at the mystic sublimity of castes that have flowed apart, and refused to mix, through such immemorial tracts of time ; nor can any man fail to be awed by the names of the Ganges or the Euphrates.
Page 42 - This, amongst such troubles as most men meet with in this life, has been my heaviest affliction. If she lived, doubtless we must have been sometimes in search of each other, at the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths of London; perhaps even within a few feet of each other — a barrier no wider, in a London street, often amounting in the end to a separation for eternity!
Page 91 - Alpine height, and there was interspace far larger between them of meadows and forest lawns; the hedges were rich with white roses; and no living creature was to be seen, excepting that in the green churchyard there were cattle tranquilly reposing upon the verdant graves, and particularly round about the grave of a child whom I had tenderly loved, just as I had really beheld them, a little before sunrise in the same summer, when that child died.
Page 86 - The waters now changed their character, — from translucent lakes, shining like mirrors, they now became seas and oceans. And now came a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly liKe a scroll, through many months, promised an abiding torment ; and, in fact, it never left me until the winding up of my case.

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