music; and the earth and sky seemed to throw back my curse… It was not the ecstasy of the drug which so much attracted me, as its power of disenthralment from an apathy which no human aid could utterly take away. He says in The Hasheesh Eater that through the drug, “I had caught a glimpse through the chinks of my earthly prison of the immeasurable sky which should one day overarch me with unconceived sublimity of view, and resound in my ear with unutterable music.” This glimpse would haunt him for the rest of his days. A poem, preserved in his sister's notebook, reads in part: “I stand as one who from a dungeon dream / Of open air and the free arch of stars / Waking to things that be from things that seem / Beats madly on the bars. // I am not yet quite used to be aware / That all my labor & my hope had birth / Only to freeze me with the coffined share / Of void & soulless earth.” The Hasheesh Eater was written on the advice of his physician during his withdrawal. Ludlow had difficulty in finding words to describe his experiences: “In the hasheesh-eater a virtual change of worlds has taken place… Truth has not become expanded, but his vision has grown telescopic; that which others see only as the dim nebula, or do not see at all, he looks into with a penetrating scrutiny which distance, to a great extent, can not evade… To his neighbor in the natural state he turns to give expression to his visions, but finds that to him the symbols which convey the apocalypse to his own mind are meaningless, because, in our ordinary life, the thoughts which they convey have no existence; their two planes are utterly different.” Still, he made the attempt, trying on the one hand to make a moral or practical point that “the soul withers and sinks from its growth toward the true end of its being beneath the dominance of any sensual indulgence” and on the other to map out the hashish high like an explorer of a new continent: “If I shall seem to have fixed the comparative positions of even a few outposts of a strange and rarely-visited realm, I shall think myself happy.” Entering the New York literary scene The Hasheesh Eater was published when