of emotions seemed to have suddenly been opened in the depths of my being, and began to usurp the places of the old ones.
Some years subsequent to the events now detailed, I read the wonderful experiences of several persons, who had taken the oriental drug known as hasheesh, and a few years thereafter was induced to make an experiment upon myself with a little of the powerful stimulant. I became fully conversant with its influence, but in no instance was there the least similarity between the condition it brought on and the state in which I was when reclining beneath the bower in the wood. I have known the fullest, deepest, most intense effect of that singular drug;[1] but nothing I ever experienced from it—nothing I ever read of as having been experienced by others who had foolishly taken it—at all resembled the sensations to which I awoke under the trees near that eastern city. Gradually the sense of lostness, which for a time possessed me, passed away, and was succeeded by a consciousness altogether distinct from that of either the dream or the ordinary wakeful condition. Not a sensation ever previously experienced—not even in the very soul-vaults of my being—now swept the nerve-harp within, to solace, actuate or annoy; but, instead, there came an indefinable pleasure-sense a sort of hyper-sensual ecstasy, by no means organic, but diffused over the entire being. I have every reason to believe that this feeling is always experienced by the newly dead. Persons who have been resuscitated after drowning, suspension by the neck, and asphyxia all unite in testifying, that so far as their experience went,
- ↑ Nothing on earth could ever induce me to take a drachm of this accursed drug again.
