Powers of Darkness

This warning is strong medicine but in our world so pertinent.

" From the depths of his own bitter and terrible experience, Charles Lamb, witty, gifted, ruined, lifts up his voice in warning:
" The waters have gone over me. But out of the black depths, could I be heard, I would cry out to all those who have but set one foot in the perilous flood. Could the youth, to whom the flavor of his first wine is delicious as the opening scene of life or the entering upon some newly discovered paradise, look into my desolation, and be made to understand what a dreary thing it is when a man shall feel himself going down a precipice with open eyes and a passive will -- to see his destruction and have no power to stop it, yet feel it all the way emanating from himself; to see all goodness emptied out of him, and yet not be able to forget a time when it was otherwise; to bear about the piteous spectacle of his own ruin;
could he see my fevered eye, feverish with last night's drinking, and feverishly looking for tonight's repetition of the folly; could he but feel the body of the death out of which I cry hourly, with feebler outcry, to be delivered, it were enough to make him dash the sparkling beverage to the earth, in all its mantling temptation."