The Opium Habit

“But of the stimulus of drugs, of potions, beware. For the sake of that very majesty with which you justly wish to aggrandize your soul, beware. Their fountains will be presently exhausted, and then you shall helplessly beat your breast, as without possibility of arising from the brink you draw in their foul, their maddening lees, and curse yourself for slaying those noble powers which it was your longing to strengthen, to nourish, and to clarify.””

— Horace B. Day

“It is this process of symbolization which, in certain hasheesh states, gives every tree and house, every pebble and leaf, every footprint, feature, and gesture, a significance beyond mere matter or form, which possesses an inconceivable force of tortures or of happiness.””

— Horace B. Day

“Hasheesh is indeed an accursed drug, and the soul at last pays a most bitter price for all its ecstasies; moreover, the use of it is not the proper means of gaining any insight, yet who shall say that at that season of exaltation I did not know things as they are more truly than ever in the ordinary state? Let us not assert that the half-careless and uninterested way in which we generally look on nature is the normal mode of the soul's power of vision. There is a fathomless meaning, an intensity of delight in all our surroundings, which our eyes must be unsealed to see. In the jubilance of hasheesh, we have only arrived by an improper pathway at the secret of that infinity of beauty which shall be beheld in heaven and earth when the veil of the corporeal drops off, and we know as we are known.””

— Horace B. Day

“Yet if there be one voice which can speak from the gateway of a dangerous avenue to its satisfaction, that can say, “Ho there! pass by; I have tried this way; it leads at last into poisonous wildernesses,” in the name of Heaven let it be raised.””

— Horace B. Day

“I am about to reveal to you," I commenced, "something which I would not for my life allow to come to other ears. Do you pledge me your eternal silence?" "I do; what is the matter?" "I have been taking hasheesh”

— Horace B. Day

“In absolute incommunicableness it stood apart, a thought, a system of thought which as yet had no symbol in spoken language””

— Horace B. Day

“There is reason to fear that men love better to investigate how muslins, hay-rakes, and, above all and inclusive of all, money may be made, than how their own minds are constructed””

— Horace B. Day

“In a good library how swiftly time melts away! Not merely in the sense of its rapid passage through our absorption in other interests, but as an element in any consideration, it becomes entirely neglected. In practical business the present is our only actuality; the past has been cast down like a ladder whose rounds have helped us up to a height whence we never again expect to descend. Among books, all temporal successions are obliterated; Plato and Coleridge walk arm-in-arm; genial Chaucer and loving Elia shake hands; with them, with all, we stand enraptured upon the same plane of time, in one age, the ceaseless age of the communion of souls. Well did Ileinsius say, as he locked himself into the library of Leyden, Nunc sum in gremio sceculorum!”

— Horace B. Day

“The man of visionary mind may sit down before one solitary cabbage, and find food for his thought, if not for his palate, in the reflection, "Truly thou mightest have been my brother.””

— Horace B. Day