grounds / Gleams bright as the Delphic water…” most probably do not realize that they may be commemorating drug-induced states of vision, in which this bounding brook became alternatingly the Nile and the Styx. Early in his college years, probably during the spring of 1854 while Ludlow was still at Princeton, his medical curiosity drew him to visit his “friend Anderson the apothecary” regularly. During these visits, Ludlow “made upon myself the trial of the effects of every strange drug and chemical which the laboratory could produce.” A few months before, Bayard Taylor’s Putnam’s Magazine article The Vision of Hasheesh had been devoured by Ludlow, and so when the cannabis-based tetanus remedy called Tilden’s extract came out he had to try some. Ludlow became a “hasheesh eater,” ingesting large doses of this cannabis extract regularly throughout his college years. Just as in his youth he found to his delight that he could from the comfort of his couch adventure along with the words of authors, he found that with hasheesh “[t]he whole East, from Greece to farthest China, lay within the compass of a township; no outlay was necessary for the journey. For the humble sum of six cents I might purchase an excursion ticket over all the earth; ships and dromedaries, tents and hospices were all contained in a box of Tilden’s extract.” He found the drug to be a boon to his creativity: “[M]y pen glanced presently like lightning in the effort to keep neck and neck with my ideas,” he writes at one point, although, “[a]t last, thought ran with such terrific speed that I could no longer write at all.” Although he later grew to think of cannabis as “the very witch-plant of hell, the weed of madness” and his involvement with it as unwise, “[w]herein I was wrong I was invited by a mother’s voice… The motives for the hasheesh-indulgence were of the most exalted ideal nature, for of this nature are all its ecstasies and its revelations — yes, and a thousand-fold more terrible, for this very reason, its unutterable pangs.” For a time he seemed never to be out from under the influence of hashish. “[L]ife became with me one prolonged state of hasheesh exaltation…” he wrote, and noted that “the effect of every successive indulgence grows more perduring until the hitherto isolated experiences become tangent to each other; then the links of