On the same principle, I tell my critic

that the whole course of this narrative resembles, and was meant to resemble, a caduceus wreathed about with meandering ornaments, or the shaft of a tree's stem hung round and surmounted with some vagrant parasitical plant. The mere medical subject of the opium answers to the dry withered pole, whcih shoots all the rings of the flowering plants, and seems to do so by some dexterity of its own; whereas, in fact, the plant and its tendrils have curled round the sullen cylinder by mere luxurience of theirs. Not the flowers are for the pole, but the pole is for the flowers. The true object in my "Opium Confessions" is not the naked physiological theme -- on the contrary, that is the ugly pole, the murderous spear, the halbert -- but those wandering musical variations upon the theme -- those parasitical thoughts, feelings, digression, which climb up with bells and blossoms round about the arid stock; ramble away from it at times with perhaps too rank a luxuriance; but at the same time, by the eternal interest attached to the subjects of these digressions, no matter what were the execution, spread a glory over incidents that for themselves would be -- less than nothing.