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Opium   Listen
noun
Opium  n.  (Chem.) The inspissated juice of the Papaver somniferum, or white poppy. Note: Opium is obtained from incisions made in the capsules of the plant, and the best flows from the first incision. It is imported into Europe and America chiefly from the Levant, and large quantities are sent to China from India, Persia, and other countries. It is of a brownish yellow color, has a faint smell, and bitter and acrid taste. It is a stimulant narcotic poison, which may produce hallicinations, profound sleep, or death. It is much used in medicine to soothe pain and inflammation, and is smoked as an intoxicant with baneful effects.
Opium joint, a low resort of opium smokers. (Slang)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Opium" Quotes from Famous Books



... sponge] Question is: How far are you to give rein to your disposition? When I was in Durban, Natal, I knew a man who had the biggest disposition I ever come across. 'E struck 'is wife, 'e smoked opium, 'e was a liar, 'e gave all the rein 'e could, and yet withal one of the pleasantest men ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... my design,—never woman had such a husband to provoke her, such a lover to allure her, or such a confessor to absolve her. Of what am I afraid, then? not my conscience, that's safe enough; my ghostly father has given it a dose of church-opium, to lull it. Well, for soothing sin, I'll say that for him, he's a chaplain for ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden

... his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white—a poor white of the very poorest. The half-caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait) told the missionaries that she was Kim's mother's sister; but his mother had been nursemaid in a Colonel's family and had married Kimball O'Hara, ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling

... denizen of the underworld, a victim of strong drink, cocaine, opium and morphine, ruined in body and soul, was redeemed and freed from these desperate vices, and made a successful soul-winner ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams

... possibly a physical force of considerable effect, and not thoroughly ascertained or understood nature, the experiments people practised and lent themselves to appeared to me exactly as wise and as becoming as if they had drunk so much brandy or eaten so much opium or hasheesh, by way of trying the effect of these drugs upon their constitution; with this important difference that the magnetic experiments severely tested the nervous system of both patient and operator, and had, besides, an indefinite element of moral importance, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... the tremendous and overwhelming SAHIB, to that most profoundly abject of human objects, the Hindoo PARIAH, (who approaches thee, O Awful Being! O Benign Protector of the Poor! O Writer in the Salt-and-Opium Office! on his hands and knees, and with a wisp of grass in his mouth, to denote that he is thy beast,)— from all those to this, the shortest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... on a casual examination to have been originally beds of rivers. Captain Matthie however tells me, that many of these have abrupt terminations and commencements, such may have been old jheels. Sursoo, opium, and sugar-cane are likewise cultivated, ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith

... removing the casket from the vehicle to carry it up-stairs. I stopped that procedure, for I did not want my mother to see the dead face, because one side of it was drawn and distorted by the effects of the opium. When I went up-stairs, there stood the two chairs—placed to receive the coffin—just as I had seen them in my dream; and if I had arrived two or three minutes later, the casket would have been resting upon them, precisely as in my ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain

... sitting posture, with the hammock of the deceased wrapped around him. The very old men are buried with the mouth downward. They make use of a narcotic drink called Ayahuasca, which produces effects similar to those of opium. The Zaparos are pacific and hospitable, but there is little social life among them; they never cluster into large villages, but inhabit isolated ranchos. Nomadic in their habits, they wander along the banks of the Napo, between the Andes and the Maranon. They manufacture, from ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... receptivity are various, and Will had sincerely tried many of them. He was not excessively fond of wine, but he had several times taken too much, simply as an experiment in that form of ecstasy; he had fasted till he was faint, and then supped on lobster; he had made himself ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly original had resulted from these measures; and the effects of the opium had convinced him that there was an entire dissimilarity between his constitution and De Quincey's. The superadded circumstance which would evolve the genius had not yet come; the universe had not yet beckoned. ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... minor and amusing, mostly. Crossing the Bay of Bengal on the Clan Alpine, one of England's opium steamers bound to China, a boiler blew up. The "priming" of the iron, the life of the metal, having been burned out in passing from fresh to salt water, was the cause of the trouble. Nineteen persons, eighteen natives and a Scotsman, were killed ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis

... Princhester to an immediate and complete abandonment of both drink and tobacco. At that time he was finding comfort for his nerves in Manila cheroots, and a particularly big and heavy type of Egyptian cigarette with a considerable amount of opium, and his disorganized system seized upon this sudden change as a grievance, and set all his jangling being crying aloud for ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells

... man embroidering, which is about as contemptible an accomplishment as an idler can have, than to hear him everlastingly smack his lips, and see him open his eyes and gloat like an anaconda before he takes down a bullock, horns, hair, and hoof, tank, shank, and flank, at one bolt, as if it was an opium pill to ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... were found to be in a state that held out no hope whatever of their recovery; that the general, being unwilling to leave them to the tender mercies of the Turks, conceived the notion of administering opium, and so procuring for them at least a speedy and an easy death; and that a number of men were accordingly taken off in this method by his command. The story, the circumstances of which were much varied in different accounts, especially as regards the numbers of the poisoned ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... keep pastels for my hours of idleness—cowardly hours, when I have no heart to struggle with nature, and may but smile and kiss my hand to her at a distance. For dreaming I know nothing like pastel; it is the painter's opium pipe.... Latour was the greatest pastellist of the eighteenth century, and he never attempted more than a drawing heightened with colour. But how suggestive, how elegant, ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore

... inquires who is the author of the following line, quoted by De Quincey in the Confessions of an English Opium Eater:— ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various

... friend, it might be thought, would have desired the suppression of this letter, but rather its most extended circulation; and that, among other cogent reasons, from the immense moral lesson, enforced by it, in perpetuity, on all consumers of opium; in which they will behold, as well as in some of the other letters, the "tremendous consequences," (to use Mr. Coleridge's own expressions) of such practices, exemplified in his own person; and to which terrible effects, he himself so often, and so impressively ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... pacification. measure, juste milieu[Fr], golden mean, <gr/ariston metron/gr>[Grk]. moderator; lullaby, sedative, lenitive, demulcent, antispasmodic, carminative, laudanum; rose water, balm, poppy, opiate, anodyne, milk, opium, "poppy or mandragora"; wet blanket; palliative. V. be -moderate &c. adj.; keep within bounds, keep within compass; sober down, settle down; keep the peace, remit, relent, take in sail. moderate, soften, mitigate, temper, accoy|; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... interest in things. And the person who has no interest in things is the person who once had a great deal of interest in things, who had too passionate an interest. The revulsion is always terrible. Too much romance is deadly. It is as false a stimulant as opium or alcohol, and leaves a corresponding mark. Well, I heard her history. She was married at fifteen—ran away to be married; and in spite of the fact that a railway accident nearly took her husband from her on the night of her marriage—one would have thought ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... mist, wherein he could at that moment discern nothing. And all the time his sensation of drowsiness was becoming stronger and still stronger, until he seemed to be in a state of semi-coma, very much like that induced by the use of opium. ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood

... Fish spawn Flax Flowers, select florist, by Mr. Edwards Fruits, names of —— to preserve Heating, by Mr. Lucas (with engravings) Horses and oxen, comparative merits of, for agricultural purposes Laudanum or opium Osiers Oxen and horses Pig feeding Plants, effect of the winter on, by Mr. Henderson Plums, American, by Mr. Rivers ——, Huling's superb, by Mr. Hogg Potato tubers Poultry Book, by Wingfield and Johnson, rev. Preserving fruits ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various

... same—they are given a wide berth by all who have discovered their power. The little lady-bird beetle, for example, sends out, when frightened, a tiny drop of a yellow fluid from the 'knee-joint,' which has a smell like opium. The Javanese 'violin-beetle' gives off a fluid which is said to paralyse ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various

... fresh and original. The villain is all that melodrama can desire, but what we do miss, I think, is the "atmosphere" of a small cathedral town. Here there is a lack of softness and delicacy of treatment: on the other hand, the opium den is ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang

... day's work and travelled out from Plymouth to get a sight of him; and I've a wife will pull my hair out when I get home and she finds I haven't been to the docks to-day; and I've had no breakfast but thirty grains of opium; but he's worth it." ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... ordered him a grain of Opium a day in the gum pill; and in three or four days the shaking had nearly left him." By pursuing this plan, the medicine proving a vermifuge, he could soon walk, and was restored ...
— An Essay on the Shaking Palsy • James Parkinson

... know," he said. "You stayed at the Bund Hotel. You spent a great deal of time in the native quarter, and you had rather an unpleasant experience as the result of making an experiment in opium smoking." ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace

... stock in trade, A mighty arsenal to subdue disease, Of various names, whereof I mention these Lancets and bougies, great and little squirt, Rhubarb and Senna, Snakeroot, Thoroughwort, Ant. Tart., Vin. Colch., Pil. Cochiae, and Black Drop, Tinctures of Opium, Gentian, Henbane, Hop, Pulv. Ipecacuanhae, which for lack Of breath to utter men call Ipecac, Camphor and Kino, Turpentine, Tolu, Cubebs, "Copeevy," Vitriol,—white and blue,— Fennel and Flaxseed, Slippery Elm and Squill, And roots ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... women the lure of levers, cranks, wheels and pinions is as seductive, as insidious, as heavenly in its promises, and as hellish in its performances, as the opium habit. The craving for opium, however, is an acquired taste, while the passion for machinery is born in thousands. We have seen children, while yet in their baby-cabs, fascinated by automobiles, sewing machines, and even ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb

... A traveller (Poeppig) noticed in the Foreign Quarterly Review, (No. 33,) expatiates on the malignant effects of the habitual use of the cuca, as very similar to those produced on the chewer of opium. Strange that such baneful properties should not be the subject of more frequent comment with other writers! I do not remember to have seen them even adverted ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott

... a rich field of poppies, and sow it with rice, or some other grain. The pretence was, to prevent a scarcity of provisions; but the real reason, to give the chief an opportunity of selling at a better price a large quantity of opium which he happened then to have upon hand. Upon other occasions, the order has been reversed; and a rich field of rice or other grain has been ploughed up, in order to make room for a plantation of poppies, when the chief foresaw that extraordinary profit was likely to be ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... foregathered nightly on the after-deck of the Negros during our stay at Jolo was a former soldier, John Jennings by name. He was an operative of the Philippine Secret Service, being engaged at the time in breaking up the running of opium from Borneo across the Sulu Sea to the Moro islands. Jennings is a short, thickset, powerfully-built man, all nerve and no nerves. Adventure is his middle name. He has lived more stories than I could invent. Shortly ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell

... is acute. When success—business or social or athletic or literary or artistic—comes to the untrained man under thirty-five, it comes pitifully near being his ruin. The adulation of the world is more intoxicating and more deadly than to drink absinthe out of a stein; more insidious than opium; more fatal than poison. It unsettles the steadiest brain and feeds the too-ravenous Ego with a food which at first he deemed nectar and ambrosia, but which he soon comes to feel is the staff of life, and no more than he deserves. With success should come the determination, be you ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell

... means of its State Prohibition Laws, America is setting an example to the world. In no other country are there such extensive tracts without alcohol as the "Dry States" of America. China, who is waging war on opium, recognizes in this fact a kindred, active moral force which is absent elsewhere, and, shaking hands with her sister republic across the seas, hopes that she will some day be as free of alcoholic poisons as China herself hopes to be of opium. ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang

... behind Parliament, behind the people, essentially selfish and commercial. This has controlled India for profit, while the benevolent people were anxious to christianize and uplift. It has befriended the Turk while England wept over the Turkish barbarities. It forced opium upon China while the Christian people sent missionaries. The people of England love freedom, yet the government has endeavored to crush it in the American colonies and everywhere throughout the world, when in ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott

... and smoked them slowly. We had plenty to think about, for rescuing an opium-fiend is no easy job, and reclaiming him afterwards is as hard again. But The Babe's blue eyes and his pink skin—what did they look like now?—were pleading on his behalf, and we remembered that he had played in his school eleven, and could run a quarter-mile ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell

... when they drive their ploughshares into fallows that don't belong to them. Indeed, whilst our most peaceful citizens were prosperous chiefly by means of cotton, of sugar, and of the rise and fall of the money-market (not to speak of such salable matters as opium, firearms, and "black ivory"), disturbances were apt to arise in India, Africa, and other outlandish parts, where the fathers of our domestic race were making fortunes for their families. And for that matter, even on the Green, we did not wish the military to leave us ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... over these movements, which it cannot stop, but can to some extent regulate, men are very apt to try to get at the machine by some indirect system of leverage or other. They clap on the brakes by means of opium; they change the maddening monotony of the rhythm by means of fermented liquors. It is because the brain is locked up and we cannot touch its movement directly, that we thrust these coarse tools in through any crevice, by which they may ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... illuminate De Quincey. It is with this intention, presumably, that the text is prescribed. There is little attractiveness, after all, in the idea of a style so colorless and so impersonal that the individuality of its victim is lost in its own perfection; this was certainly not the Opium-Eater's mind concerning literary form, nor does it appear to have been the aim of any of our masters. Indeed, it may be well in passing to point out to pupils how fatal to success in writing is the attempt ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey

... and valuable. They are fully noticed in Dr. Thornton's "Family Herbal." The subjoined plate is a copy of that in the title page to "Opiologia, ou traicte concernant le naturel proprietes, vraye preparation, et seur vsage de l'opium," a favourite volume with Dr. Darwin, printed at la Haye, 1614, 12mo. Dr. Darwin, in his Botanical Garden, thus speaks of opium: "the finest opium is procured by wounding the heads of large poppies with a three-edged knife, and tying muscle-shells to them, to ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton

... with two great glaring eyes set in the bows, came flying, rowed with forty paddles by an armed crew, whose shields hung on the gunwale and flashed fire in the sunbeams; the mandarin, in conical and buttoned hat, sitting on the top of his cabin calmly smoking Paradise, alias opium, while his gong boomed and his boat flew fourteen miles an hour, and all things scuttled out of his celestial way. And there, looking majestically down on all these water ants, the huge Agra, cynosure of so many loving eyes and loving hearts in England, ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various

... and returned to Jacques his kisses with delicious slowness. He led her, by a wooden stairway, into the vast hall which had served formerly as a workshop, where he designed and modelled his figures, and, above all, read; he liked reading as if it were opium. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... are scarcely likely to fire your romantic nature. I know a little about what they call this underneath world in New York. It will probably resolve itself into a visit to Chinatown, where we shall find the usual dummies taking opium and quite prepared to talk about it for the usual tip. After that we shall visit a few low dancing halls, be shown the scene of several murders, and the thing ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... country-sides. We find it maintaining itself even in large cities, among all sorts of very good people, even among the most exceptional men of business, of the professions and of the pulpits. Novel-reading, as a mental vice, according to this opinion, may be compared with opium-eating as a moral vice. It is thought to enervate and corrupt by means of a luxurious excitement, ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison

... Shortly after I became acquainted with Rita Irvin I learned that she was a victim of the drug habit, and I tried to cure her. I regret to say that I failed. At that time she had acquired a taste for opium." ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer

... into the china bowls by the hands of ladies long since dead, while the clock downstairs sent up, every now and then, its faint silvery tune of forgotten days, filled the room;—to do this is a special kind of voluptuousness, peculiar and complex and indescribable, like the half-drunkenness of opium or haschisch, and which, to be conveyed to others in any sense as I feel it, would require a genius, subtle and heady, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee

... enough. The North American Indians of the Great Red Pipe Stone Quarry and those who lived above the line where nicotiana grew, used the kinni-kinik or bark of the red willow and some seven other succedanea.[FN194] But tobacco proper, which soon superseded all materials except hemp and opium, was first adopted by the Spaniards of Santo Domingo in A.D. 1496 and reached England in 1565. Hence the word, which, amongst the so-called Red Men, denoted the pipe, the container, not the contained, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... opium dens, hundreds of people, of both sexes, of various ages, kinds and colors, were reclining in most horrible attitudes. One glimpse ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger

... 1844 was not an unhappy one with Balzac, though his health was bad, and he speaks of terrible neuralgia; so that he wrote "Les Paysans" with his head in opium, as he had written "Cesar Birotteau" with his feet in mustard. Apparently Madame Hanska held out hopes that in 1845 his long probation might come to and end, as he writes: "Days of illness are days of pleasure to me, for when I do not ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... widened her. Swiftly she was able to see that Louis, on his whisky chase, de Quincy on his opium chase, King David, Solomon, Nelson, Byron and Kraill on their woman chase were not perhaps so fortunate as to get a nail jabbed in their feet, pulling them up sharp and giving them time ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... the part of the Japanese surprised most of those who knew them best. In Japan itself opium-smoking is prohibited under the heaviest penalties, and elaborate precautions are taken to shut opium in any of its forms out of the country. Strict anti-opium laws were also enforced in Korea under the old administration. The Japanese, however, now permitted numbers of their people to travel ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie

... whom Manton called Huroki, took our hats and retreated with a certain emanating effluvium of subtlety such as I had known only once before, when the Oriental attendant left me on the occasion of my only visit to an opium den ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve

... of the household, and everything revolved about her. She was "intensely loved" by all her friends. Her father was a "very peculiar man." The son's account of her health differs radically from that written by the mother of E. C. Stedman, who said that Mrs. Browning was kept alive only by opium, which she had to take daily. This writer added, however, that in spite of Mrs. Browning's wretched health, she had never heard her speak ill of any one, though she talked ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps

... entreated, but it was of no avail, and she accordingly made the best of her case and got from him a liberal allowance. Hers was not of a nature to reform, however; she went from bad to worse, and finally took to smoking opium as a means to relieve her gnawing conscience, ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer

... shrubs, grass, mats, or straw, where they might die quietly, without having their bodies torn by birds and beasts before the breath had left them. Respectable families, who left home in search of the favoured land of Malwa, while yet a little property remained, finding all exhausted, took opium rather than beg, and husband, wife, and children died in each other's arms. Still more of such families lingered on in hope till all had been expended; then shut their doors, took poison and died all together, rather than expose their misery, and submit to the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... long before I had a ticker going in my quarters. There was no one to practice with me, so I just pounded away by myself for an hour or so each day, to keep my hand in. I have yet to see a man who has worked at the business for any length of time who could give it up entirely. It's like the opium habit—powerful hard to break off. I have never since tried ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady

... were in India five million more men than women, and there has been no change in that respect. The chief cause of this disparity is the habitual slaughter of girl babies. The unwelcome babes are killed with opium pills or exposed to wild beasts. The Pundita Ramabai Sarasvati, in her agonizing book, The High Caste Hindu Woman, writes ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... go and investigate the matter immediately, and if she has wronged me, by the blood of the Scratches, I'll bring the whole business before parliament, make a speech ten hours long, reduce the price of opium, and set the nation in a ...
— The Dramatist; or Stop Him Who Can! - A Comedy, in Five Acts • Frederick Reynolds

... the less the author was understood, the more the demonologists, fanatics, and philosopher's-stone hunters seemed to appreciate him. His fame as a physician kept pace with that which he enjoyed as an alchymist, owing to his having effected some happy cures by means of mercury and opium,—drugs unceremoniously condemned by his professional brethren. In the year 1526, he was chosen professor of physics and natural philosophy in the University of Basle, where his lectures attracted vast numbers of students. He denounced the writings of all former physicians as tending ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... "coqueros;" and it is alleged that, without coca, they would be unable to undergo the painful toil to which their calling subjects them. When used to excess, the coca produces deleterious effects on the human system; but, if moderately taken, it is far more innocent in its results than either opium or tobacco. ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... Seminal Disease. There are a few that we have not mentioned: Blows on the Head, Loins (Small of the Back), Testicles, &c.; Weakness caused by prolonged illness, fevers, &c.; Malaria, Consumption, &c.; the abuse of Tobacco, Opium, Alcohol and Chloral, &c., &c.; but these are less common and less important. There is one condition, however, that we have only referred to incidentally, and that is the failure of Sexual Power in men past middle age. No ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown

... much towards awakening in his own countrymen an interest in these subjects. He had never been strong, and from the age of thirty-four he suffered seriously from ill-health and from his practice of using opium—a habit begun by his taking the dangerous drug to relieve acute pain. No doubt his powers were impaired by these causes. In 1804, hoping to benefit by change of climate, he went to Malta, and before his return spent some months in Italy. With the ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various

... fons et origo mali. First general debility, that concealed but ubiquitous leader of innumerable armies of weakness and ill, laid siege to her, and captured her. Then came insomnia, that worried her nights for month after month, and made her beg for opium, alcohol, chloral, bromides, any thing that would bring sleep. Neuralgia in every conceivable form tormented her, most frequently in her back, but often, also, in her head, sometimes in her sciatic nerves, sometimes setting up a tic douloureux, sometimes causing a fearful dysmenorrhoea ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke

... plastered neither himself nor his trade with thick coatings of whitewash. He knew what he was, and faced the offensive title with perfect equanimity. He was a smuggler, probably the largest operator in the illicit traffic of opium smuggling, and the most successful importer of Chinese along the whole extent of the American border. He knew that the penitentiary was yearning for him; and he knew that every moment of his life was shadowed by the threat of penal servitude. And in the meantime he was storing up his wealth, not ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum

... quite irrelevant. The subjective state is always real, whether it belongs to a saint in ecstasy or a drunkard in delirium tremens. There are no states of mind more "real" while they last than those due to opium or hashish. But it is never suggested that this is evidence of their veracity. In such cases the testimony of a skilled outsider is of far greater value than the conviction of the visionary. We are bound to appeal to Paul, and Loyola, and Fox, and Wesley to know what their feelings ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... wit owes to beauty. And we know that beauty is more queen than ever in this material age. It is long since our grandfathers first found the folly of dreams and banished art and poetry from England—with opium ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.

... of its healing properties. In chronic colitis, for example, when the child is suffering with malnutrition, irregular bowel action with an odor, and mucous or bloody stools, a combination of castor oil and salol, in emulsion, in small doses,—to which a small quantity of opium may be added or withheld according to the frequency of the movements,—with an occasional ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... irritability peculiar to some diseases. Better far put such patients at the top of the house, even with the additional fatigue of stairs, if you cannot secure the room above them being untenanted; you may otherwise bring on a state of restlessness which no opium will subdue. Do not neglect the warning, when a patient tells you that he "Feels every step above him to cross his heart." Remember that every noise a patient cannot see partakes of the character of suddenness to him; and I am persuaded that patients with these peculiarly irritable ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale

... o' massey," he cried. "I ain't lef' him more'n a minit. He sent me down hisself. One o' his cunnin' ways to get rid o' me when he's at de wust. Opium 'n whiskey, dats what gets him dis way. Bof togedder a-gwine ter kill him some dese days, 'n de opium am de wustest. For de Lord's sake some o' you gen'men cum 'n hep me till I git him ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... Dodd. For the Malvolio story,—the thing is become in verity a sad task, and I eke it out with anything. If I could slip out of it I should be happy; but our chief-reputed assistants have forsaken us. The Opium-Eater crossed us once with a dazzling path, and hath as suddenly left us darkling; and, in short, I shall go on from dull to worse, because I cannot resist the booksellers' importunity,—the old plea, you know, of authors; ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... forced hostility itself to accept what they have done as good, honest pieces of work, the talk in these clubs will be that of harsh criticism, sneering contempt, and prophecy of failure. Guard against that habit night and day. You would better become an opium-eater than to permit this paralysis of mind ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

... nothing for memory or resignation to cling to; nothing before that last journey, as nothing after; unless it be mournful vigils by the side of the brother she nursed—the almost demented brother, whose life was wrecked by his idleness and a great unfortunate passion; who became an incurable opium-eater and drunkard. Then, shortly before her twenty-ninth birthday, on a December afternoon, as she sat in the little whitewashed parlour combing her long black hair, the comb slipped from the fingers that were too weak to retain ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck

... may have been selected for quotation: in passing it may be observed that Henry Beechtree had, in this matter, no luck), and all kinds of documents dealing with every kind of matter—the Traffic in Women, Children, and Opium, the admission of a new State to the League, international disputes, disagreeable telegrams from one country about another, the cost of living in Geneva, the organisation of International Statistics, International Health, or International Education, the Economic Weapon of the League, the ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay

... well be surprised, Mr. PUNCHINELLO, but we are here for the public good. We have reason to suspect, that, following the example of the Chinese Opium-smugglers, the vile traitors who are trying to break down our iron interests have smuggled quantities of scrap—iron into this country, and it is our belief that these sunken logs have been bored and are ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various

... treading the elephant track which still went due east straight as an arrow to the blue horizon. The frightful tiredness they had felt before the noonday halt had passed, giving place to a dull, dreamy feeling, such as comes after taking opium. The column marched mechanically and without thought, knowing only two things, the feel of the hard ground and grass beneath their feet, and the smiting of ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... contra Comitem Ludovicum Souches pugnantes, opio exaltati turpiter cæsi, et octo mille numero occisi, mentulas rigidas tulere. Christen. Opium Hist. ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport

... different plants, and different parts of plants, should be able to extract or produce substances so very different from each other in composition and in all of their properties. From the seed-vessels of one (the poppy) we collect a juice which dries up into our commercial opium; from the bark of another (cinchona) we extract the quinine with which we assuage the raging fever; from the leaves of others, like those of hemlock and tobacco, we distil deadly poisons, often of rare value for their ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne

... dream to fill the golden sheath of a remembered day.... (Air heavy and massed and blue as the vapor of opium... domes fired in sulphurous mist... sea quiescent as a gray seal... and the emerging sun spurting up gold over Sydney, smoke-pale, rising out of the bay....) But the day is an up-turned cup and its sun a ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge

... really been directed towards my feet? Yet, surely, even Amulya had seen the passion that flamed out of his eyes, his face. But Sandip is such an adept in setting music to his chant of praise that I cannot argue; I lose my power of seeing truth; my sight is clouded over like an opium-eater's eyes. And so, after all, he gave me back twice as much in return for the blow I had dealt him—the wound on his head ended by making me bleed at heart. When I had received Sandip's obeisance my theft seemed to gain a dignity, and the gold glittering on the table to smile away all fear ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore

... Brousson, who is now his physician, has forbidden that remedy, declaring that the trouble is a nervous affection, an inflammation of the nerves, for which leeches should be applied to the neck, and opium to the head. As a result, the attacks are not so frequent; they appear now only about once a year, and always late in the autumn. When he recovers, Taillefer says repeatedly that he would far rather ...
— The Red Inn • Honore de Balzac

... and Colliver for ever fleeing before me. In every crowd I seemed to watch for his face alone, at every street-corner to listen for his voice—that face, that voice, which I should know among thousands. I had read De Quincey's "Opium-Eater," and the picture of his unresting search for his lost Ann somehow seized upon my imagination. Night after night it was to Oxford Street that my devil drove me: night after night I paced the "never-ending terraces," as ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... great China, John Bull, Where you smeared yourself blacker with sin? Where the Emperor tried to keep opium out, And you fought to force opium in? It was Government opium from India, too, Which poisons both body and soul; You have fought against freedom with steel, Johnny Bull; With the steel and the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... and rebellious and down on the Juvenile Court records for truancy, petty trafficking in burned-out opium, ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst

... only 14 to the next depot. Mr. Evans is still suffering from the same complaint: have come to the conclusion to stop his pemmican, as I feel that it have got something to do with him being out of sorts. Anyhow we are going to try it. Gave him a little brandy and he is taking some chalk and opium pills to try and stop it. His legs are getting worse and we are quite certain he is suffering from scurvy, at least he is turning black and blue and several ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... can do without you; and so long as you leave me alone I shan't interfere with you." It's a kind of slackness. They want waking up. They want rousing. They want a good shaking. It seems as if they have fallen into a deep slumber—opium-eaters!' ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton

... and stood at the head of her couch. She knew all about it. Such were her peculiar gifts. It was her nature to see that he required charming, and it was her province to charm him. As the Eastern idler swallows his dose of opium, as the London reprobate swallows his dose of gin, so with similar desires and for similar reasons did Mr. Arabin prepare to swallow the charms of the ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... they do with us. There is a tremendous run on patent medicines, perfume, glue and nitric acid. It has been found that Shears' soap contains alcohol, and one sees people everywhere eating cakes of it. The upper classes have taken to chewing tobacco very considerably, and the use of opium in the House of Lords has ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock

... to touch with the hand—and the mystery is made plain. The room with its tightly-closed shutters and smoke-blackened walls is filled with recumbent men, in various stages of deshabille, all sunk in the sleep which the bamboo-pipe and the little black pellets of opium ensure. The room is not a large one, for the habitual smoker prefers a small apartment, in which the fumes of the drug hang about easily; and its reeking walls are unadorned save with a chromo plan of the ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.

... to close their doors "under circumstances over which they have no control," with a "by your leave"; and large landed estates to be bought by men who have made their money by going with armed steamers up and down the China Seas, selling opium at the cannon's mouth, and altering, for the benefit of the foreign nation, the common highwayman's demand of "your money or your life," into that of "your money and your life." Neither does a great nation allow the lives of its ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... privilege. Unless indeed," he had rambled on, "it's only I to whom, fantastically, it says so much. That's all I mean, at any rate—that it's sort of soothing; as if we were sitting about on divans, with pigtails, smoking opium and seeing visions. 'Let us then be up and doing'—what is it Longfellow says? That seems sometimes to ring out; like the police breaking in—into our opium den—to give us a shake. But the beauty of it is, at the same time, that we ARE doing; we're doing, that is, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James

... board vessels of every description. I've been on board slavers, and merchant vessels, and men-of-war of several nations. I've served with Lord Cochrane both in the Pacific and Atlantic; and for a long time I was in an opium clipper in the China Seas; but, as you know, lads, a rolling stone gathers no moss, and here I am, as poor as I was when I first began life. However, there are plenty of ways by which a man may make his fortune if he chooses, ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston

... me, not singing at my work ruddy with health vivid with cheerfulness; but pale and dejected, sitting on the ground, and chewing opium." ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... He remained through life an omnivorous, though unsystematic, reader. He was helpless in practical affairs, and his native indolence and procrastination were increased by his indulgence in the opium habit. On his return to England, in 1800, he went to reside at Keswick, in the Lake Country, with his brother-in-law, Southey, whose industry supported both families. During his last nineteen {235} years Coleridge ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... to congenital epilepsy, in which after alcoholic poisoning, the individual is incited to raise his hand against himself or others without any due cause. But besides the crimes of violence committed during a drunken fit, the prolonged abuse of alcohol, opium, morphia, coca, and other nervines may give rise to chronic perturbation of the mind, and without other causes, congenital or educative, will transform an honest, well-bred, and industrious man into an idle, violent, and apathetic fellow,—into an ignoble being, capable ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... sleeping draught which dulled the pain of the blows dealt out to the unfortunate Jewish populace by the Russian Government. But in the long run the popular organism was injuriously affected by this mystic opium. The poison rendered its consumers insensible to every progressive movement, and planted them firmly at the extreme pole of obscurantism, at a time when the Russian ghetto resounded with the first appeals calling its inmates toward the ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... usefulness? He may have made it to hold flowers. He may have intended it for a water-jug. He may have considered it a suitable receptacle in which its future favored owner might keep his tobacco, or his opium, or any one of the thousand and one things that you can put in a vase with a hope of getting it ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs

... institutions of the country. The revolution which overturned the dynasty of her ancient sovereigns was the indirect consequence of the discontent provoked by reforms which the government had sought to impose with a view to ameliorating the condition of China. The suppression of opium and gaming, the reform of the army, and the creation of schools, involved an increase of taxation which, as well as the reforms themselves, greatly indisposed the ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon

... the effect of opium," were Dr. May's first words, breaking on all with startling suddenness; but, before any one could speak, he added, "We must try some stimulant directly;" then looking round the room, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... nearly a hundred years before to the pirates of Algiers begging for time to consider whether they would cease preying upon American merchantmen. Was it not as early as 1844 that the American commissioner, Caleb Cushing, taking advantage of the British Opium War on China, negotiated with the Celestial Empire a successful commercial treaty? Did he not then exultantly exclaim: "The laws of the Union follow its citizens and its banner protects them even within the domain of the Chinese Empire"? Was it ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... passing ship or harbor gained, or rich repast, or festival, or clustered grapes and sparkling wines, like other sufferers from shipwreck, fevered with famine, frenzied with despair; but hasheesh or opium never bestowed so fair, so strange a vision as that which, in my extremity, was mercifully accorded ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield

... vision of a dream, I could not now tell. And yet its lineaments were still before me, so plainly visible to the eye of my mind, so clearly outlined, that, had I been an artist, I could have portrayed them! The face alone I could remember nothing else. I remembered it as the opium-eater his dream, or as one remembers a beautiful face seen during an hour of intoxication, when all else is forgotten! Strange to say, I did not associate this face with my companion of the night; and my remembrance painted it not at all like ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid

... fear of the Manchester school finally led him to run away to London, where, without money or friends, his life was even more extraordinary than his gypsy wanderings. The details of this vagrancy are best learned in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, where we meet not simply the facts of his life, but also the confusion of dreams and fancies in the midst of which he wandered like a man lost on the mountains, with storm clouds under his feet hiding the familiar earth. After ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... establishment where agreeable fellows might play a game or so, take a shot of opium, or find other varieties of Oriental delight. The far glooms were struck by low-toned lanterns. Couches lay about the walls; strange men decorated them and three young girls in socks, idiotically ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... lines of smoke, this blue and happy sky, nor all the other good things that were given to him in such abundance, which steeped his heart in Sabbath rest. Although he sought no inspiration from such drugs, and, indeed, was a stranger to them, rather was his joy the joy of the opium-eater while the poison works; the joy of him who after suffering long nights of pain has found their antidote, and perhaps for the first time appreciates the worth of peace, however empty. His troubled heart had ceased its striving, his wrecked nerves were still, his questionings ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard

... the causes of all common facts are, we think, perfectly well known to us; and it is very probable, fifty or a hundred years hence, we shall as well know why the Metallic Tractors should in a few minutes remove violent pains, as we now know why cantharides and opium will produce opposite effects, namely, we shall know very little about either excepting facts." Fifty or a hundred years hence! if he could have looked forward forty years, he would have seen the descendants of the "Perkinistic" philosophers swallowing ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... licentiam dat dominus praeses, Et tanti docti doctores, Et assistantes illustres, Tres savanti bacheliero, Quem estimo et honoro, Domandabo causam et rationom quare Opium facit dormire. ...
— The Imaginary Invalid - Le Malade Imaginaire • Moliere

... "white man's plant," associate it with the Jamestown settlement—a plausible connection, for Raleigh's colonists would have been likely to carry with them to the New World the seeds of an herb yielding an alkaloid more esteemed in the England of their day than the alkaloid of opium known as morphine. Daturina, the narcotic, and another product, known in medicine as stramonium, smoked by asthmatics, are by no means despised by up-to-date practitioners. Were it not for the rank odor of its leaves, the vigorous weed, coarse as it is, would be welcome in men's ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... that is United States District Attorney Roger Elverson, tell him that it is A. V. R. Jones who wants to know, and remind him of the missing letter opium advertisement." ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... late Elias Whitney, D.D., Principal of the Theological College of St. George's, was much addicted to opium. The habit grew upon him, as I understand, from some foolish freak when he was at college; for having read De Quincey's description of his dreams and sensations, he had drenched his tobacco with laudanum in an attempt to produce the same effects. ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... could master it. Beside these a number of minor remedies were kept in the medicine room. Among them were tinctures of lobelia, myrrh, and capsicum. There was also a pill box containing a substance which, from its narcotic odor, I correctly inferred to be opium. This drug being prohibited by the Botanic School I could not but feel that Dr. Foshay's orthodoxy was painfully ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb

... Martin have just received from Philadelphia and Baltimore: Opium, Mercury, Jolap, Ipecacoanha, Nitre, Glanker Salts, Gum Kino, Columbo root, assorted vials, carts, etc. Red and ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker

... information along to a fellow bricktop. Beware of Hogan! What's the fellow doing with that boat of his? Some say he's smuggling arms into Lower California, for the use of the revolutionists, and some say he's running chinks and opium—both contraband goods—into the United States. Cap'n Hogan is not in these waters for any good, take it ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish

... from China it sounds the "call for prayer," and lo, the Book of Dividends opens at the right text. Were Bull ever caught in the act, and put from the trade of international opium-dosing to that of picking oakum and the treadmill we should hear him exclaim, as he went out of sight, "Behold me weaving the threads of democratic destiny as I climb ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement

... The opium which had been given to Jolter, together with the wine he had drunk, produced such a perturbation in his fancy, that he was visited with horrible dreams; and, among other miserable situations, imagined ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... the objections raised against this revenue on the score of its being opposed to justice and morality, many other sources of revenue in the colonial budget might be condemned (such as the poll-tax, gaming and opium licenses, the brandy trade, and the sale of indulgences); yet none is so invidious and pernicious ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.

... his liberality, I offer him three thou- sand dollars if he will heal one single case of opium-eating [20] where the patient is very low and taking morphine powder in its most concentrated form, at the rate of one ounce in two weeks,—having taken it twenty years; and he is to cure that habit in three days, leaving the patient well. I cured precisely ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy

... our political system—and is there one who will deny it?—the question of the licensed saloon must quickly be settled as the world in its advancement has settled the questions of constitutional government for the masses, of the opium traffic, of the serf, and of the slave—not as matters of economic and political expediency but as ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... restless bird kept appearing first at one cell door with a conundrum, then at the other with a joke, or insisted on telling funny stories in her den, till the exhausted victims implored her to take an opium pill and subside before they became furious. She obeyed, and after a few relapses into wandering and ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott

... languid from the opium and smiling with such simple happiness, reassured her. She drew nearer to him and lifted his hand to her knee. He looked at her with his clear, shallow blue eyes. How he loved everything about that face and head! How many nights in his cupola, looking up the track, he had seen that face in the ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather

... neighbour.' So Shemseddin made the round of the bazaar, till he had asked every one; but they all laughed at him and he returned to his shop and sat down, troubled. Now there was in the market a man called Sheikh Mohammed Semsem, who was syndic of the brokers and was given to the use of opium and bang and hashish. He was poor and used to wish Shemseddin good morrow every day; so he came to him according to his wont and saluted him. The merchant returned his salute, and the other, seeing him vexed, ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous



Words linked to "Opium" :   tincture of opium, opiate, narcotic, opium addict, opium taker



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