and rich with aphorisms as it is,the work may slightly dissappoint a reader who is expecting a fantasmagoric ,intimate,honest and detailed account on the psychodellic experiences evoked by opium.A more appropriate title would be "The Brief Autobiography of an English Opium Eater" .Although a true and powerfull commander of the words, De Quincey often pulls off the main stream of the account and drags the reader though the bottomless chaos of irrelivant information. As brief as an article for a newspaper must be, the "Confessions"in fact reveal very little insight into the characters and their truths, and very little confessions of personal intimacies. The confedential privacy which De Quincey so hard tried to maintain prevents the reader from sympathizing with any of the characters, all of which appear flat and shallow , including De Quincey himself (a beautifully sensitive personality) due to lack of description . The gloomy melancholy, horrors and nightmares unapproached by words Q. writes about I failed to sence, see ,hear, smell or percept in anyway whatsoever. If it is not for the plot and theme that I read a book, it is for the exquisite style, penetrating characters and images or outstanding ideas, none of which I came across.The ideas and images have never underwent the prosess of translation into a physical act. Had I not known that the work was meant to be an article for the average lot, and not a novel, I would have defined it as incommunicable.