Kitabı oku: «Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885», sayfa 9

But this, like every other effect of opium, is in some measure uncertain; and hence arises one of its subtlest dangers. De Quincey would seem to have been less susceptible than most men to the worst influences of his favorite drug, seeing what work, excellent in quality as well as considerable in quantity he achieved after he had become a confirmed opium-eater. It took, no doubt, a tenfold greater amount of opium to reduce him to intellectual impotence than would suffice to destroy the minds of nine brain-workers in ten. But his own story clearly reveals how completely the enormous doses to which he had recourse at last overpowered a mind exceptionally energetic, and a temperament exceptionally capable of assimilating, perhaps, rather than resisting the power of opium. Here and there we find a constitution upon which it exerts few or none of its characteristic effects. As a few cannot take it at all, so a few can take it with apparent impunity. With them it will relieve pain and will not paralyse the nerves, will quell excitement without affecting mental energy; nay, while leaving physical activity little more impaired than age and temperament alone might have impaired it. Here and there we may find a confirmed opium-eater capable of taking and enjoying active exercise – a fairly fearless rider, a lover of nature tempted by taste, or it may be by restlessness, to walks beyond his muscular strength; with vivid imagination well under his own control; in whom even the will seems but little weakened, whose dread of pain and flinching from danger are not more marked after twenty years spent under the influence of opium than when they first drove him to its use. Such cases are, of course, wholly exceptional; but their very existence is a danger to others, misleads them into the idea that they may dally with the tempter, may profit by its pleasure-giving and pain-quelling powers without falling under its yoke, or may fall under that yoke and find it a light one. I doubt, however, whether the most fortunate of its victims would encourage the latter idea; whether there be any opium-eater who would not give a limb never to have known what opium can do to spare suffering, to give strength for protracted exertion, if he had never known what slavery to its influence means.

Dread of pain, dislike of excitement and worry, impatience of suffering and discomfort, of irritation, and sleeplessness, are all strong and increasingly-marked characteristics of our highly artificial life and perhaps almost overstrained civilization. Nature knows no influence that can relieve worry, mitigate pain, charm away restlessness, discomfort, and even sleeplessness, as opium can. Alcohol is at once too stupefying and too exciting for the tastes and temperaments that belong to cultivated natures and highly-developed brains. Beer suits the sluggish laborer, or the energetic navvy when his work is done, and his system, like that of a Scandinavian Viking or Scythian warrior in his hours of repose, craves first exhilaration and then stupid, thoughtless contentment. Wine suits less active and more passionate races, to whom excitement is an unmixed pleasure; brandy those who crave for stronger excitement to stimulate less susceptible nerves. But the physical stimulants of our fathers and grandfathers, as the moral excitements of remoter times, are far too violent for our generation. Champagne has succeeded port and sherry as the favorite wine of those who can afford it, being the lightest of all; and time was, not so long ago, when medical men were accused of recommending champagne with somewhat careless facility to those whose nerves, worn out by unhealthy pursuit of pleasure, by unnatural hours and unwholesome excitement, might have been effectually though more gradually restored by a change which to most of them at least was possible; by life in the country rather than in London, by the fresh air of the early morning instead of that of midnight in over-heated gas-lighted rooms and a poisoned atmosphere. There is a danger lest, as even champagne has proved too much of a stimulant and too little of a sedative, narcotics should take its place. The doctors will hardly recommend opium, but their patients, obliged for one reason or another to forego wine, might be driven upon it.

As aforesaid, the craving for stimulation or tranquillization of the brain – in one word, for that whole class of nerve-agents to which tea, opium, and brandy alike belong – is so universal, has so prevailed in all ages, races and climates, that it must be considered, if not originally natural, yet as by this time an ingrained, all but ineradicable, human appetite. To baffle such an appetite by any coercive means, by domestic, social or legislative penalties, has ever proved impossible. Deprive it of its gratification in one form, and it is impelled or forced to find a substitute; and finds it, as all strong human cravings have ever found some kind of satisfaction. And here lies one of the worst, most certain and yet least considered dangers of the legislation eagerly demanded by a constantly increasing party. Maine liquor laws, prohibition, local option, every measure that threatens to deprive of their favorite stimulant those who are not willing or have not the resolve to abandon it, would probably fail in their primary object. If they succeeded in that, they would, in a majority of instances, force the drinker, not to be content with water or even with tea, but to find a subtler substitute of lesser bulk, more easily obtained and concealed. Opium is the most obvious, and, among sedatives powerful enough to be substituted for wine or spirits, the least mischievous resource. And opium, once adopted as a substitute for alcohol, would take hold with far greater tenacity, and its use would spread with terrible rapidity, because its evil influence is so subtle, so slowly perceptible; and because, if used in moderation and with fitting precautions, its worst effects may not be felt for many years; because women could use it without detection, and men without alarm or discredit. This peril is one of which wiser men than Sir Wilfrid Lawson will not make light, but which too many comparatively rational advocates of total abstinence seem to have totally overlooked. Without underrating the frightful evils of intoxication, its baneful influence upon the individual, upon large classes, and upon the country as a whole, no one who knows them both can doubt that narcotism is the more dangerous and more destructive habit. The opiatist will not brawl in the street, will not beat his wife or maltreat his children; but he is rendered as a rule, even more rapidly and certainly than the drunkard, a useless member of society, a worthless citizen, an indifferent husband, helpless as the bread-winner, impotent as the master and ruler of a household. And opium, to the same temperaments and to many others, is quite as seductive as alcohol; far more poisonous, and incomparably more difficult to shake off when once its tyranny has been established. To forbid it, as some have proposed to forbid the sale or manufacture of beer, wine, and spirits, is impossible; to exclude it from the country is out of the question; its legitimate uses are too important, and no restrictions whatever can put it out of the reach of those who desire it. Silks, spirits, tobacco were smuggled as long as it paid to smuggle them; opium, an article of incomparably less bulk and incomparably greater value, would bring still larger profit to the importer; while the customer would not merely be attracted by cheapness or fashion, but impelled by the most imperious and irresistible of acquired cravings. Any man could smuggle through any barriers enough to satisfy his appetite for a year, enough to poison a whole battalion. That opium can become the favorite indulgence with numerous classes, and apparently with a whole people, the experience of more than one Eastern nation clearly shows. As the Oriental tea and coffee have to so large an extent superseded beer as the daily drink of men as well as women and children, so opium is calculated under favoring circumstances to replace wine and spirits as a stimulant. It might well do so even while the competition was open. Every penalty placed on the use of wine or brandy is a premium on that of opium.

De Quincey is not the only opium-eater who has given his experience to the world. It is evident that the practice is spreading in America, and the records published by its victims are as terrible as the worst descriptions of the drunkard’s misery or even as the horrors of delirium tremens. It is noteworthy, however, how little any of these seem to know of other experiences than their own – for instance, of the numerous forms and methods in which the drug can be and is administered. Opium – the solidified juice of the poppy – is the natural product from which laudanum, the spirituous tincture of opium, and all the various forms of morphia, which may be called the chemical extract, the essential principle of opium, are obtained. Morphia, again, is sold by chemists and exhibited by doctors in many forms, the principal of which are the acetate, the sulphate and the muriate of morphia – the substance itself combined with acetic, sulphuric, or hydrochloric acid. Of these last the muriate is, we believe, the safest, the acetate and in a lesser degree the sulphate having more of the pleasurable, sedative, seductive influence of opium in proportion to their pain-quelling power. They act, in some way, more powerfully upon the spirits while exerting the same anæsthetic influence, and the injurious effects of each dose are more marked and less easily counteracted. Laudanum, containing proof spirit as well as morphine, and through the proof spirit diffusing the narcotic influence more rapidly and affecting the brain more quickly and decidedly, is perhaps the worst vehicle through which the essential drug can be taken. Again, morphine, in its liquid forms can be injected under the skin; as solid opium it can be smoked or eaten, as morphia it can be swallowed or injected. Of all modes of administration – speaking, of course, of the self-administered abuse, not of the strict medical use of the drug – subcutaneous injection is the worst. It acts the most speedily and apparently the most pleasurably; it passes off the most rapidly, and tempts, therefore the most frequent, re-application. Apart, moreover, from the poisonous influence itself, this mode of application has injurious effects of its own; produces callosities and sores of a painful and revolting character. Smoking seems to be the most stupefying manner in which solid opium can be consumed, the one which acts most powerfully and injuriously upon the brain. But opium-smoking is hardly likely to take a strong hold on English or European taste. A piece of opium no larger than a pea, chopped up and mixed with a large bowlful of tobacco, produces on the veteran tobacco-smoker a nauseating effect powerfully recalling that of the first pipe of his boyhood; while its flavor is incomparably more disagreeable to the palate accustomed to the best havanas or the worst shag or bird’s-eye than these were to the unvitiated taste. It is probable that the Englishman who makes his first acquaintance with opium in this form will be revolted rather than tempted, unless indeed the pipe be used to relieve a pain so intolerable that the nauseousness of the remedy is disregarded. Morphia in all its forms, liquid or solid, has a thoroughly unpleasant bitterness, but neither the nauseous taste of the pipe nor the intensely disgusting flavor of laudanum, a flavor so revolting to the unaccustomed palate that only when largely diluted by water can it possibly be swallowed. On the whole, the muriate, dissolved in a quantity of water large enough to render each drop the equivalent of a drop of laudanum, is probably the safest, and should be swallowed rather than injected. But rather than swallow even this, a wise man, unless more confident in his own constancy and self-command than wise men are wont to be, had better endure any temporary pain that nature may inflict or any remedial operation that surgery can offer. —Contemporary Review.

FOLK-LORE FOR SWEETHEARTS
BY REV. M. G. WATKINS, M.A

As marriage and death are the chief events in human life, an enormous mass of popular beliefs has in all nations crystallised round them. Perhaps the sterner and more gloomy character of Kelts, Saxons, and Northmen generally found vent in the greater prominence they have given to omens of death, second-sight, ghosts, and the like; whereas the lighter and sunnier disposition of Southern Europe has delighted more in love-spells, methods of divining a future partner, the whole pomp and circumstance attending Venus and her doves. The writhing of the wryneck so graphically portrayed in Theocritus, or the spells of the lover in his Latin imitator, with their refrain —

 
Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnim,⁴
 

may thus be profitably compared with the darker superstitions of St. Mark’s Eve, the Baal fires, and compacts with the evil one, which so constantly recur throughout the Northern mythologies. But there are times and festivities when the serious Northern temperament relaxes; and any one who has the least acquaintance with the wealth of folk-lore which recent years have shown the natives of Great Britain that they possess, well knows that the times of courtship and marriage are two occasions when this lighter vein of our composite nature is conspicuous. The collection of these old-world beliefs amongst our peasantry did not begin a moment too soon. Day by day the remnants of them are fast fading from the national memory. The disenchanting wand of the modern schoolmaster, the rationalistic influences of the press, the Procrustes-like system of standards in our parish schools – these act like the breath of morn or the crowing of a cock upon ghosts, and at once put charms, spells, and the like to flight. Before the nation assumes the sober hues of pure reason and unpitying logic, in lieu of the picturesque scraps of folk-lore and old-wifish beliefs in which imagination was wont to clothe it, no office can be more grateful to posterity than for enthusiastic inquirers to search out and put on record these notes of fairy music which our villagers used to listen to with such content. By way of giving a sample of their linked sweetnesses long drawn out through so many generations of country dwellers – of which the echoes still vibrate, especially in the north and west of the country – it is our purpose to quote something of the legendary lore connected with love and marriage. This must interest everybody. Even the most determined old bachelor probably fell once, at least, in love to enable him to discover the hollowness of the passion; and as for the other sex, they may very conveniently, if illogically, be classed here as they used to be at the Oxford Commemoration, the married, the unmarried, and those who wish to be married. Some of these spells and charms possess associations for each of these divisions, and we are consequently sure of the suffrages of the fair sex.

Folk-lore, like Venus herself, has indeed specially flung her cestus over “the palmer in love’s eye.” She has more charms to soothe his melancholy than were ever prescribed by Burton. She is not above dabbling in spells and the unholy mysteries of the black art to inform him who shall be his partner for life. When sleep at length seals his eyes, she waits at his bedside next morning to tell him the meaning of his dreams. And most certainly the weaker sex has not been forgotten by folk-lore, which, in proportion to their easier powers of belief, provides them with infinite store of solace and prediction. Milkmaids, country lasses, and secluded dwellers in whitewashed farm or thick-walled ancestral grange are her particular charge. The Juliets and Amandas of higher rank already possess enough nurses, confidantes, and bosom friends, to say nothing of the poets and novelists. Perhaps it would be well for them if they never resorted to more dangerous mentors than do their rustic sisters when they listen to old wives’ wisdom at the chimney corner. Yet an exception must be made in favor of some lovers of rank, when we recall the ludicrously simple wooing of Mr. Carteret and Lady Jemima Montagu, and how mightily they were indebted to the good offices of the more skilled Samuel Pepys, who literally taught them when they ought to take each other’s hand, “make these and these compliments,” and the like; “he being the most awkerd man I ever met with in my life as to that business,” as the garrulous diarist adds. For ourselves, we do not profess to be love casuists, and the profusion of receipts which the subject possesses is so remarkable that we shall be unable to preserve much order in our prescriptions. Like those little books which possess wisdom for all who look within them, we can only promise our readers a peep into a budget fresh from fairy-land, and each may select what spell he or she chooses. Autolycus himself did not open a pack stuffed with greater attractions for his customers, especially for the fair sex.

Nothing is easier than to dream of a sweetheart. Only put a piece of wedding-cake under your pillow, and your wish will be gratified. If you are in doubt between two or three lovers, which you should choose, let a friend write their names on the paper in which the cake is wrapped, sleep on it yourself as before for three consecutive nights, and if you should then happen to dream of one of the names therein written, you are certain to marry him.⁵ In Hull, folk-lore somewhat varies the receipt. Take the blade-bone of a rabbit, stick nine pins in it, and then put it under your pillow, when you will be sure to see the object of your affections. At Burnley, during a marriage-feast, a wedding-ring is put into the posset, and after serving it out the unmarried person whose cup contains the ring will be the first of the company to be married. Sometimes, too, a cake is made into which a wedding-ring and a sixpence are put. When the company are about to retire, the cake is broken and distributed among the unmarried ladies. She who finds the ring in her portion of cake will shortly be married, but she who gets the sixpence will infallibly die an old maid.

Perhaps your affections are still disengaged, but you wish to bestow them on one who will return like for like. In this case there are plenty of wishing-chairs, wishing-gates, and so forth, scattered through the country. A wish breathed near them, and kept secret, will sooner or later have its fulfilment. But there is no need to travel to the Lake country or to Finchale Priory, near Durham (where is a wishing-chair); if you see a piece of old iron or a horseshoe on your path, take it up, spit on it, and throw it over your left shoulder, framing a wish at the same time. Keep this wish a secret, and it will come to pass in due time. If you meet a piebald horse, nothing can be more lucky; utter your wish, and whatever it may be you will have it before the week be out. In Cleveland, the following method of divining whether a girl will be married or not is resorted to. Take a tumbler of water from a stream which runs southward; borrow the wedding-ring of some gudewife and suspend it by a hair of your head over the glass of water, holding the hair between the finger and thumb. If the ring hit against the side of the glass, the holder will die an old maid; if it turn quickly round, she will be married once; if slowly, twice. Should the ring strike the side of the glass more than three times after the holder has pronounced the name of her lover, there will be a lengthy courtship and nothing more; “she will be courted to dead,” as they say in Lincolnshire; if less frequently, the affair will be broken off, and if there is no striking at all it will never come on.⁶ Or if you look at the first new moon of the year through a silk handkerchief which has never been washed, as many moons as you see through it (the threads multiplying the vision), so many years must pass before your marriage. Would you ascertain the color of your future husband’s hair? Follow the practice of the German girls. Between the hours of eleven and twelve at night on St. Andrew’s Eve a maiden must stand at the house door, take hold of the latch, and say three times, “Gentle love, if thou lovest me, show thyself,” She must then open the door quickly, and make a rapid grasp through it into the darkness, when she will find in her hand a lock of her future husband’s hair. The “Universal Fortune-teller” prescribes a still more fearsome receipt for obtaining an actual sight of him. The girl must take a willow branch in her left hand, and, without being observed, slip out of the house and run three times round it, whispering the while, “He that is to be my goodman, come and grip the end of it.” During the third circuit the likeness of the future husband will appear and grasp the other end of the wand. Would any one conciliate a lover’s affections? There is a charm of much simplicity, and yet of such potency that it will even reconcile man and wife. Inside a frog is a certain crooked bone, which when cleaned and dried over the fire on St. John’s Eve, and then ground fine and given in food to the lover, will at once win his love for the administerer.⁷ A timely hint may here be given to any one going courting: be sure when leaving home to spit in your right shoe would you speed in your wooing. If you accidentally put on your left stocking, too, inside out, nothing but good luck can ensue.

Among natural objects, the folk lore of the north invariably assigns a speedy marriage to the sight of three magpies together. If a cricket sings on the hearth, it portends that riches will fall to the hearer’s lot. Catch a ladybird, and suffer it to fly out of your hands while repeating the following couplet —

 
Fly away east, or fly away west,
But show me where lies the one I like best,
 

and its flight will furnish some clue to the direction in which your sweetheart lies. Should a red rose bloom early in the garden, it is a sure token of an early marriage. In Scotch folk-lore the rose possesses much virtue. If a girl has several lovers, and wishes to know which of them will be her husband, she takes a rose-leaf for each of them, and naming each leaf after the name of one of her lovers, watches them float down a stream till one after another they sink, when the last to disappear will be her future husband.⁸ A four-leaved clover will preserve her from any deceit on his part, should she be fortunate enough to find that plant; while there is no end to the virtues of an even ash-leaf. We recount some of its merits from an old collection of northern superstitions,⁹ trusting they are better than the verses which detail them.

 
The even ash-leaf in my left hand,
The first man I meet shall be my husband.
The even ash-leaf in my glove,
The first I meet shall be my love.
The even ash-leaf in my breast,
The first man I meet’s whom I love best.
Even ash, even ash, I pluck thee,
This night my true love for to see.
Find even ash or four-leaved clover,
An’ you’ll see your true love before the day’s over.
 

The color in which a girl dresses is important, not only during courtship, but after marriage.

 
Those dressed in blue
Have lovers true;
In green and white
Forsaken quite.
 

Green, being sacred to the fairies, is a most unlucky hue. The “little folk” will undoubtedly resent the insult should any one dress in their color. Mr. Henderson¹⁰ has known mothers in the south of England absolutely forbid it to their daughters, and avoid it in the furniture of their houses. Peter Bell’s sixth wife could not have been more inauspiciously dressed when she —

 
Put on her gown of green,
To leave her mother at sixteen,
And follow Peter Bell.
 

And nothing green must make its appearance at a Scotch wedding. Kale and other green vegetables are rigidly excluded from the wedding-dinner. Jealousy has ever green eyes, and green grows the grass on Love’s grave.

Some omens may be obtained by the single at a wedding-feast. The bride in the North Country cuts a cheese (as in more fashionable regions she is the first to help the wedding-cake), and he who can secure the first piece that she cuts will insure happiness in his married life. If the “best man” does not secure the knife he will indeed be unfortunate. The maidens try to possess themselves of a “shaping” of the wedding-dress for use in certain divinations concerning their future husbands.¹¹

In all ages and all parts of our island maidens have resorted to omens drawn from flowers respecting their sweethearts. Holly, ribwort, plantain, black centaury, yarrow, and a multitude more possess a great reputation in love matters. The lover must generally sleep on some one of these and repeat a charm, when pleasant dreams and faithful indications of a suitor will follow. “The last summer, on the day of St. John the Baptist, 1694,” says Aubrey, “I accidentally was walking in the pasture behind Montague House; it was twelve o’clock. I saw there about two or three and twenty young women, most of them well habited, on their knees very busy, as if they had been weeding. I could not presently learn what the matter was; at last a young man told me that they were looking for a coal under the root of a plantain, to put under their head that night, and they should dream who would be their husbands. It was to be sought for that day and hour.”¹²

But the day of all others sacred to these mystic rites was ever the eve of St. Agnes (January 20), when maidens fasted and then watched for a sign. A passage in the office for St. Agnes’s Day in the Sarum Missal may have given rise to this custom: “Hæc est virgo sapiens quam Dominus vigilantem invenit;” and the Gospel is the Parable of the Virgins.¹³ Ben Jonson alludes to the custom: —

 
On sweet St. Agnes’ night
Please you with the promised sight,
Some of husbands, some of lovers,
Which an empty dream discovers.
 

And a character in “Cupid’s Whirligig” (1616) says, “I could find in my heart to pray nine times to the moone, and fast three St. Agnes’s Eves, so that I might bee sure to have him to my husband.” Aubrey gives two receipts to the ladies for that eve, which may still be useful. Take a row of pins and pull out every one, one after another, saying a Paternoster, and sticking a pin in your sleeve, and you will dream of him you shall marry. Again, “you must lie in another country, and knit the left garter about the right-legged stocking (let the other garter and stocking alone), and as you rehearse these following verses, at every comma knit a knot: —

 
This knot I knit,
To know the thing, I know not yet,
That I may see,
The man that shall my husband be,
How he goes, and what he wears,
And what he does, all days and years.
 

Accordingly in your dream you will see him; if a musician, with a lute or other instrument; if a scholar, with a book or papers;” and he adds a little encouragement to use this device in the following anecdote. “A gentlewoman that I knew, confessed in my hearing that she used this method, and dreamt of her husband whom she had never seen. About two or three years after, as she was on Sunday at church (at our Lady’s Church in Sarum), up pops a young Oxonian in the pulpit; she cries out presently to her sister, ‘This is the very face of the man that I saw in my dream. Sir William Soame’s lady did the like.’” It is hardly needful to remind readers of Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes,” and the story of Madeline, —

 
Whose heart had brooded, all that wintry day,
On love, and wing’d St. Agnes’ saintly care,
As she had heard old dames full many times declare.
 

Our ancestors made merry in a similar fashion on St. Valentine’s Day. So Herrick, speaking of a bride, says, —

 
She must no more a-maying,
Or by rosebuds divine
Who’ll be her Valentine.
 

Brand, who helps us to this quotation, gives an amusing extract from the Connoisseur to the same effect. “Last Friday was Valentine’s Day, and the night before I got five bay leaves, and pinned four of them to the four corners of my pillow, and the fifth to the middle; and then, if I dreamt of my sweetheart, Betty said we should be married before the year was out. But to make it more sure, I boiled an egg hard, and took out the yolk and filled it with salt, and when I went to bed, eat it, shell and all, without speaking or drinking after it. We also wrote our lovers’ names upon bits of paper, and rolled them up in clay, and put them into water, and the first that rose up was to be our Valentine. Would you think it? Mr. Blossom was my man. I lay abed and shut my eyes all the morning till he came to our house; for I would not have seen another man before him for all the world.” The moon, “the lady moon,” has frequently been called into council about husbands from the time when she first lost her own heart to Endymion, the beautiful shepherd of Mount Latmos. Go out when the first new moon of the year first appears, and standing over the spars of a gate or stile, look on the moon and repeat as follows: —

 
All hail to thee, moon! all hail to thee!
Prythee, good moon, reveal to me
This night who my husband shall be.
 

You will certainly dream that night of your future husband. It is very important, too, that if you have a cat in the house, it should be a black one. A North Country rhyme says —

 
Whenever the cat or the house is black,
The lasses o’ lovers will have no lack.
 

And an old woman in the north, adds Mr. Henderson,¹⁴ said lately in accordance with this belief to a lady, “It’s na wonder Jock – ’s lasses marry off so fast, ye ken what a braw black cat they’ve got.” It is still more lucky if such a cat comes of its own accord, and takes up its residence in any house. The same gentleman gives an excellent receipt to bring lovers to the house, which was communicated to him by Canon Raine, and was gathered from the conversation of two maid-servants. One of them, it seems, peeped out of curiosity into the box of her fellow servant, and was astonished to find there the end of a tallow candle stuck through and through with pins. “What’s that, Molly,” said Bessie, “that I seed i’ thy box?” “Oh,” said Molly, “it’s to bring my sweetheart. Thou seest, sometimes he’s slow a coming, and if I stick a candle case full o’ pins it always fetches him.” A member of the family certified that John was thus duly fetched from his abode, a distance of six miles, and pretty often too.