Word: quincey
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...Persian Practice. In some form, hemp has been smoked since long before the beginning of the Christian Era. It was familiar to the ancient Hindus and Persians. It is smoked widely by the Arabs. Eminent European vipers have included De Quincey, Baudelaire (who once, under the influence, sketched a self-portrait, with the Colonne Vendôme in hashish perspective), Dumas, Gautier. The U. S. vogue, precisely coincident with the vogue for hot jazz, began in New Orleans a generation ago, moved up the Mississippi to Chicago, thereafter spread east and west...
Opium dreams, as addicts know, sometimes approach a revelation of the ultimate truth. In its book reviews Punch recently plugged a book called A Modern De Quincey by Captain H. R. Robinson, onetime opium addict, who was commissioned in the British Indian Army in 1915. Said Punch's review...
...Quincey described his sensations when he had taken too much opium. He might also have been describing the sensations of many a U.S. citizen last week...
Every payday he bought more books. Du Maurier suggested Dumas, De Musset, Villon (he picked up French) ; De Quincey brought him toward Wordsworth; Hazlitt, by devious means, to the metaphysicians. He read The Origin of Species and a life of Buddha; he bought a Gray's Anatomy and set his hopes toward medicine. Those hopes were forgotten when he happened on Chaucer, Keats and Shelley, who opened "a world where incredible beauty was daily bread and breath of life...
...Mary Lamb threw a fork at a domestic, missed the girl, but harpooned her feeble-minded father. Then she killed her mother with a carving knife. Such behavior was considered extraordinary even in literary circles that included Cole ridge, Godwin, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt and De Quincey. While friends hushed up the tragic affair, Mary Lamb was sent away to a private asylum (Charles had already passed six weeks in the Hoxton mad house). Coleridge wrote her letters of metaphysical commiseration, which baffled Charles and may have enraged Mary. One day after her release she was quietly talking to Coleridge. Suddenly...