From De Quincey's "Opium-Eater"
I guess it's considered his best work. Read it years ago and am enjoying it even more now. Seemingly. Full of detours and interesting curlicues. * An excerpt (really, any random section will do): ... Some of these rambles led me to great distances, for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time; and sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a northwest passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and head-lands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphynx's riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen. I could almost have believed at times that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae , and doubted whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts o...