Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind generally, increases, of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are ab… - Thomas de Quincey

I, having my previous impressions of awe deepened by these solemn trophies of chance and change amongst mighty nations, had suddenly been surprised by a dream, as profound as at present, in which a thought that often had persecuted me figured triumphantly. This thought turned upon the fatality that must often attend an evil choice. As an oracle of fear I remembered that great Roman warning, Nessit vox missa reverti (that a word once uttered is irrevocable), a freezing arrest upon the motions of hope too sanguine that haunted me in many shapes. Long before that fifteenth year of mine, I had noticed, as a worm lying at the heart of life and fleeting its security, the fact that innumerable acts of choice change countenance and are variously appraised at varying stage of life - shift with the shifting hours. Already at fifteen, I had become deeply ashamed of judgements which I had once pronounced, of idle hopes that I had once encouraged, false admirations or contempts with which once I had sympathized. And, as to the acts which I surveyed with any doubts at all, i never felt sure that after some succession of years I might not feel withering doubts about them, both as to principle and as to inevitable results.

In fact, every intricate and untried path in life, where it was from the first a matter of arbitrary choice to enter upon it or avoid it, is effectually a path through a vast Hercynian forest, unexplored and unmapped, where each several turn in your advance leaves you open to new anticipations of that is next to be expected, and consequently open to altered valuations of all that has been already traversed. Even the character of your own absolute experience, past and gone, which (if any thing in this world) you might surely answer for as sealed and settled for ever - even this you must submit to hold in suspense, as a thing conditional and contingent upon what is yet come - liable to have its provisional character affirmed or reversed, according to the new combinations into which it may enter with elements only yet perhaps in the earliest stages of development.

They wheeled in mazes; I spelled the steps. They telegraped from afar; I read the signals. They conspired together; and on the mirrors of darkness my eye traced the plots. Theirs were the symbols; mine are the words.