chester; and that he was a baron of the first | based on substantial worth, is easily, and without rank is evident from the statement of Gerard a sigh, exchanged for that everlasting sunshine Leigh, that his armorial device was inscribed reflected from the loving remembrances of human (and how inscribed, if not memorially and as a hearts. mark of eminent distinction?) on the stained glass in the old church of St. Paul's. But the Earls of Winchester, whatever may have been their prosperity during the nine or ten generations after the Conquest, came suddenly to an abrupt termination, abutting at length on some guilty traitor in the line, who, like a special Adam for the family, involved in his own ruin that prosperity which would else have continued to his successors. The dissevered fragments of the old feudal estate, however, remained in possession of several members of the family, as De Quincey tells us, until the generation next preceding his own, when the last vestige slipped out of the hands of the one sole squire who, together with the name, held also some relic of its ancient belongings. But above the diluvial wreck of the Winchester estates there has arisen an estate far more royal and magnificent, and beneath a farreaching bow of promise, sealed in magical security against a similar disaster. For just here, where every hold is lost upon the original heritage, is the family freshly grounded upon a second heritage,- -one sublime in its order above that of all earthly possessions, one that is forever imperishable, namely, the large domain which the gigantic intellect of Thomas De Quincey has absolved from aboriginal darkness and brought under distinct illumination for all time to come. But, at the same time that we so willingly dispense with these nominal conditions in the case of De Quincey,-though, assuredly, there was never a man upon earth whom these conditions, considered as aerial hieroglyphs of the most regal pomp and magnificence, would more consistently fit, we cannot thus easily set aside those other outward conditions of affluence and respectability, which, by their presence or absence, so materially shape and mould the life, and particularly in its earliest tendencies and impulses. In this respect De Quincey was eminently fortunate. The powers of heaven and of earth andif we side with Milton and other pagan mythologists in attributing the gift of wealth to some Platonian dynasty, the dark powers under the earth seem to have conjointly arrayed themselves in his behalf. Whatever storms were in the book of Fate written against his name they were postponed till a far-off future, in the meantime granting him the happiest of all childhoods. | Really of gentle blood, and thus gaining whatever substantial benefits in constitutional temperament and susceptibilities could be thence derived, although lacking, as Pope also had lacked, the factitious circumstance and airy heralding of this distinction, he was, in addition to this, surrounded by elements of aristocratic refinement and luxury, and thus hedged in not merely against the assault, in any form, of pinchcomfortable circumstances), but even against the ing poverty (as would be anyone in tolerably most trivial hint of possible want, against all necessity of limitation or retrenchment in any normal line of expenditure. These are the vast acres overwhich human pride must henceforth soar, acres that have been, through the mighty realizations of human genius, built out into the mysterious ocean-depths of chaotic Nature, and that have in some measure bridged over infinite chasms in thought, and by He was the son of a merchant, who, at the just so far have extended the fluctuating early age of thirty-nine, died, leaving to his boundaries of human empire. And for De family, (a wife and six children), an estate yielding Quincey himself, in view of that monumental annually an income of sixteen hundred pounds. structure which rises above the shattered wrecks And as at his father's death De Quincey was of his poor, frail body, as above the mummied seven years old, we may reasonably infer, that, dust of Egyptian kings remain eternally the pyra- during this previous period, while his father was mids which they wrought in their life-time, we, still living, and adding to this fixed a fluctuating find it impossible to cherish a single regret, that, income from his yearly gains (which to a wholepossibly, by the treasonable slip of a predecessor, sale merchant of his standing were considerable), he may have been robbed of an earldom, or even the family-fortunes were even more auspicious, that, during a life which by some years overlapped amounting to the yearly realization of between the average allotment to humanity, and through two and three thousand pounds, and that at a which were daily accumulating the most splendid time when Napoleon had not as yet meddled with results in the very highest departments of the financial affairs of Europe, nor by his intimiphilosophy and art, these accumulations neverthe-dations caused even pounds and shillings to less went on without any notable_recognition from a court the most liberal in all Europe; no badge of outward knighthood coming to him through all these years, as formerly to Sir Thomas Browne for his subtle meditations, and to Sir William Hamilton for his philosophic speculations. The absence of such merely nominal titles excites in us no deep regret; there is in them little that is monumental, and the pretty tinsel, with which they gild monuments already shrink into less worth and significance than they quit school, he thought himself compelled to | cut off all communication with his guardians, and gave himself up to a Bohemian life among the Welsh mountains, wandering from one rustic valley to another with the most scanty means of support, for just then the Allies were in full rig against France, and the shrinkage of guineas in our young wanderer's pocket became palpably evident in view of the increased price of his dinner. The time did come at length when the full epos of a remarkable prosperity was closed up and sealed for De Quincey. But that was in the unseen future. To the child it was not permitted to look beyond the hazy lines that bounded his oasis of flowers into the fruitless waste abroad. Poverty, want, at least so great as to compel the daily exercise of his mind for mercenary ends, was stealthily advancing from the rear; but the sound of its stern steppings was wholly muffled by intervening years of luxurions opulence and ease. I dwell thus at length upon the aristocratic elegance of De Quincey's earliest surroundings, (which, coming at a later period, I should notice merely as an accident), because, although not potential element, capable of producing or of adding one single iota to the essential character of genius, it is yet a negative condition-a sine qua non-to the displays of genius in certain directions and under certain aspects. By misfortune it is true that power may be intensified. So may it by the baptism of malice. But, given a certain degree of power, there still remains a question as to its kind. So deep is the sky: but of what hue, of what aspect? Wine is strong, and so is the crude alcohol: but what the mellowness? And the blood in our veins, it is an infinite force: but of what temper? Is it warm, or is it cold? Does it minister to Moloch, or to Apollo? Will it shape the Madonna face, or the Medusa? Why, the simple fact that the rich blue sky overarches this earth of ours, or that it is warm blood which flows in our veins, is sufficient to prove that no malignant Ahriman made the world. Just here the question is not, what increment or what momentum genius may receive from outward circumstances, but what colouring,.what mood. Here it is that a Mozart differs from a Mendelssohn. The important difference which obtains, in this respect, between great powers in literature, otherwise co-ordinate, will receive illustration from a comparison between De Quincey and Byron. For both these writers were capable, in a degree rarely equalled in any literature, of reproducing, or rather, we should say, of reconstructing, the pomp of * But afterwards he discovered his mistake, and that it was only by the lack on his part of that frankness which the kindness of his guardians deserved that he had brought so much misery upon himself in after-life. His younger brother, Richard, the Pink of the "Autobiographic Sketches," made the same mistake, a mistake which in his case was never rectified, but led to a life of perilous wanderings and adventures." our Nature and of human life. In this general office they stand together: both wear, in eyes, the regal purple; both have caused to rise between earth and heaven miracles of grandeur, such as never Cheops wrought through his myriad slaves, or Solomon with his fabled ring. But in the final result, as in the whole modus operandi, of their architecture, they stand apart toto cœlo. Byron builds a structure that repeats certain elements in Nature or humanity; but they are those elements only which are allied to gloom, for he builds in suspicion and distrust, and upon the basis of a cynicism that has been nurtured in his very flesh and blood from birth; he erects a Pisa-like tower which overhangs and threatens all human hopes and all that is beautiful in human love. Who else, save this archangelic intellect, shut out by a mighty shadow of eclipse from the bright hopes and warm affections of all sunny hearts, could have orignated such a Pandemonian monster as the poem on "Darkness ?" The most striking specimen of Byron's imaginative power, and nearly the most striking that has ever been produced, is the apostrophe to the sea, in "Childe Harold." But what is it in the sea which affects Lord Byron's susceptibilities to grandeur? Its destructiveness alone. And how? Is it through any high moral purpose or meaning that seems to sway the movements of destruction? No; it is only through the gloomy mystery of the ruin itself,-ruin revealed upon a scale so vast and under conditions of terror the most appalling,-ruin wrought under the semblance of an almighty passion for revenge directed against the human race. Thus, as an expression of the attitude which the sea maintains toward man, we have the following passage of Æschylian grandeur, but also of Eschylian gloom : "Thou dost arise And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields Who but this dark spirit, forever wooing the powers of darkness, and of darkness the most sullen, praying to Nemesis alone, could, with such lamentable lack of faith in the purity and soundness of human affections, have given utterance to a sentiment like this: "O love! no habitant of earth thou art,- or the following: "Who loves, raves,-'tis youth's frenzy," etc.? and again : "Few-none-find what they love or could have loved, This, then, is the nearest approach to human De Quincey, on the other hand, in whose heart there was laid no such hollow basis for infidelity toward the master-passions of humanity, repeated the pomps of joy or of sorrow, as evolved out of universal human nature, and as, through sunshine and tempest, typified in the outside world, but never for one instant did he seek alliance, on the one side, with the shallow enthusiasm of the raving Bacchante, or, on the other, with the overshadowing despotism of gloom; nor can there be found on a single page of all his writings the slightest hint indicating even a latent sympathy with the power which builds only to crush, or with the intellect that denies, and that against the dearest objects of human faith fulminates its denials and shocking recantations solely for the purposes of scorn. Whence this marked difference? To account for it, we must needs trace back to the first haunts of childhood the steps of these two fugitives, each of whom has passed thence, the one into desert mirage, teeming with processions of the gloomiest falsities in life, and the other also into the desert, but where he is yet refreshed and solaced by an unshaken faith in the genial verities of life, though separated from them by irrecoverable miles of trackless waste, and where, however apparently abandoned and desolate, he is yet ministered unto by angels, and no mimic fantasies are suffered to exercise upon his heart their overmastering seductions to “Allure, or terrify, or undermine.” ture furnishes its basis; but it is the externa. structure of circumstance, built up or building about childhood—to shelter or imprison-which, more than all else, gives it its determinate character; and though this outward structure may in after-life be thoroughly obliterated, or reoriginally developed remain and hold a sway placed by its opposite-yet will the tendencies almost uninterrupted over life. And, generally, the happy influences that preside over the child may be reduced under three heads: first, a genial temperament-one that naturally, and of its own motion, inclines toward a centre of peace and rest rather than toward the opposite centre of strife; secondly, profound domestic affec tions; and, thirdly, affluence, which, although of all three it is the most negative, and most material condition, is yet practically the most important, because of the degree in which it is necessary to the full and unlimited prosperity of the other two. For how frequent are the cases in which the happiest of temperaments are perverted by the necessities of toil, too burdensome to tender years, or in which corroding anxieties, weighing upon parents' hearts, check the free play of domestic love! And in all cases where such limitations are present, even in the gentlest form, there must be a cramping up of the human organization and individuality somewhere; and everywhere, and under all cir cumstances, there must be sensibly felt the absence of that leisure which crowns and glorifies ths affections of home, making them seem the most like summer sunshine, or rather like a sunshine which knows no season, which is an eternal presence in the soul. As regards all these three elements, De Quincey's childhood was prosperous; afterwards, vicissitudes came-mighty changes, capable of affecting all other transmutations, but thoroughly impotent to annul the inwrought grace of a pre-established beauty. On the other hand, Byron's childhood was in all these elements, unfortunate. The sting left in his mother's heart by the faithless desertion of her husband, after the desolation of her fortunes, was for ever inflicted upon him, and inten Whether the days of childhood be our happiest days, is a question all by itself. But there can be no question as to the inevitable certainty with which the conditions of child-sified by her fitful temper; and, notwithstanding hood, fortunate or unfortunate, determine the change in his outward prospects which the main temper and disposition of our lives. occurred afterwards, he was never able to lift For it is underneath the multitude of fleeting himself out of the Trophonian cave into which proposals and concious efforts, born of reason, his infancy had been thrust, any more than and which, to one looking upon life from any Vulcan could have cured that crooked gait of superficial stand-point, seem to have all to do his, which dated from some vague infantile rewith its conduct, that there runs the under-membrances of having been rudely kicked out current of disposition, which is born to Nature, which is cradled and nurtured with us in our infancy, which is itself a general choice, branching out into our specific choices of certain directions and aims, among all opposite directions and aims, and which, although we rarely recognize its important functions, is in all cases the arbiter of our destiny. And in the 4 summer's day." very word disposition is indicated the finality of its arbitraments as contrasted with all proposition. of heaven over its brazen battlements, one eve And this allusion to Vulcan reminds us that Byron, in addition to all his other early mis Now, with respect to this disposition: Na-haps, had also the identical club-foot of the Lemnian god. Among the guardians over Byron's childhood was a demon, that, receiving an ample place in his victim's heart, stood demoniacally his ground through life, transmuting love to hate, and what might have been benefits to fatal snares. Over De Quincey's childhood, on the contrary, a strong angel guarded to withstand and thwart all threatened ruin, teaching him the gentle whisperings of faith and love in the darkest hours of life: an angel that built happy palaces, the beautiful images of which, in their echoed festivals, far outlasted the splendour of their material sub stance. 66 We-the children of the house-" says De Quincey, in his “ Autobiographic Sketches," "stood, in fact, upon the happiest tier in the social scaffolding for all good influences. The prayer of Agur,Give me neither poverty nor riches,' was realized for us. That blessing we had, being neither too high nor too low. High enough we were to see models of good manners, of self-respect, and of simple dignity; obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes. Amply furnished with all the nobler benefits of wealth, with extra means of health, of intellectual culture, and of elegant enjoyment, on the other hand we knew nothing of its social distinctions. Not depressed by the consciousness of privations too sordid, nor tempted into restlessness by privileges too aspiring, we had no motives for shame, we had none for pride. Grateful, also, to this hour I am, that, amidst luxuries in all things else, we were trained to a Spartan simplicity of diet-that we fared, in fact, very much less sumptuonsly than the servants. And if (after the manner of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius) I should return thanks to Providence for all the separate blessings of my early situation, these four I would single out as worthy of special commemoration: that I lived in a rural solitude; that this solitude was in England; that my infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of sisters, and not by horrid pugilistic brothers; finally, that I and they were dutiful and loving members of a pure, holy, and magnificent church.” 66 Let the reader suppose a different case from here presented. Let him suppose, for instance, that De Quincey, now arrived at the age of seven, and having now at least one 'pugilistic brother" to torment his peace, could annul his own infancy, and in its place substitute that of one of the factory-boys of Manchester, of the same age (and many such could be found) among those with whom daily the military predispositions of this brother brought him into a disagreeable conflict. Instead of the pure air of outside Lancashire, let there be substituted the cotton-dust of the Lancashire mills. The contrast, even in thought, is painful. It is true that thus the irrepressible fires of human genius could not be quenched. Nay, through just these instrumentalities, oftentimes, is genius fostered. We need not the instance of Romulus and Remus, or of the Persian Cyrus, to prove that men have sometimes been nou The rished by bears or by she-wolves. Nevertheless, this is essentially a Roman nurture. Greeks, on the contrary, laid their infant heroes on beds of violets-if we may believe the Pindaric odes-set over them a divine watch, and fed them with angel's food. And this Grecian nurture De Quincey had. And not the least important element of this nnrture is that of perfect leisure. Through this it is that we pass from the outward to the subjective relations of De Quincey's childhood; for only in connection with these has the element just introduced any value, since leisure, which is the atmosphere, the breathing place of genius, is also cap and bells for the fool. In relation to power, it is, like solitude, the open heaven through which the grandeurs of eternity flow into the penetralian recesses of the human heart, after that once the faculties of thought, or the sensibilities, have been powerfully awakened. Sensibility had been thus awakened in De Quincey, through grief occasioned by the loss of a sister, his favourite and familiar playmate-a grief so profound, that he, somewhere, in speaking of it, anticipates the certainty of its presence in the hour of death; and thought, also, had been prematurely awakened, both under the influence of this overmastering pathos of sorrow, and because of his strong predisposi tion to meditation. Both the pathos and the meditative tendencies were increased by the halcyon peace of his childhood. In a memorial of the poet Schiller, he speaks of that childhood as the happiest, "of which the happiness has survived and expressed itself, not in distinct records, but in deep affection, in abiding love, and the hauntings of meditative power." His, at least, was the felicity of this echoless peace. In no memorial is it so absolutely requisite that a marked prominence should be given to its first section as in De Quincey's. This is a striking peculiarity in his life. If it were not so, I should have seriously transgressed in keeping the reader's attention so long upon a point which, aside from such peculiarity, would yield no sufficient, at least no proportionate value. But, in the treatment of any life, that cannot seem disproportionate which enters into it as an element only, and just in that ratio of prominence with which it enters into the life itself. No stream can rise above the level of its source. No life, which lacks a prominent interest as to its beginnings, can ever, in its entire course, develop any distinguishing features of interest. This is true of any life; but it is true of De Quincey above all others on record, that, through all its successive arches, ascending and descending, it repeats the original arch of childhood. Repeats but with what marvellous transformations! For hardly is its earliest section passed, when, for all its future course, it is masked by a mighty trouble. No longer does it flow along its natural path, and beneath the open sky, but, like the sacred Alpheus, runs "Through caverns measureless to man, Down to the sunless sea." Yet, amid the "briny tides" of that sea, amid turmoil and perplexity and the saddest of mysteries, it preserves its earliest gentleness, and its inward, noiseless peace, till once more it gushes up toward the sweet heaven through the Arethusan font of death. Easily, then, is it to be seen why De Quincey himself continually reverted, both in his conscions reminiscences and through the subconscious relapses of dreams, from a life clouded and disguised in its maturer years, to the unmasked purity of its earliest heaven. And what from the vast desert, what from the fatal wreck of life, was he to look back upon, for even an imaginary solace, if not upon the rich argosies that spread their happier sails above a calmer sea? We are forcibly reminded of the dream which Milton* gives to his Christ in the desert, hungry and tired: "There he slept, And dreamed, as appetite is wont to dream, best known to the reader; for it is under the title of "Opium-Eater" that he is most generally recognized. It was through his OpiumConfessions, popular both as to matter and style, that he first conciliated and charmed the reading public-and to such a degree that great expectations were awakened as to anything which afterwards he might write. This expec tation heightens appreciation; and in this case it helped many a metaphysical dose down the voracious throat of the public, without its being aware of the nauseating potion, or experiencing any uncomfortable consequences. The flood of popularity produced by the OpiumConfessions among that large intellectual class of readers who, notwithstanding their mental capacity, yet insist upon the graces of composition and upon a subject of immmdiate and moving interest, was sufficient to float into a popular haven many a ship of heavier freightage, which might else have fallen short of port. The general interest which is manifested in De Quincey personally is also very much due to the fact that he was an opium-eater, and an opium-eater willing to breathe into the public ear the peculiarities of his situation and its hidden mysteries, or suspiria de profundis. Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they This interest is partly of that vulgar sort which brought : He saw the prophet also, how he fled connects itself with all mysterious or abnormal Judged by this interest, considered in its vulgar aspects, De Quincey would suffer gross injustice. Externally, and at one period of his If the splendours of divinity could be so dis- life, I am certain that he had all the requisite guised by the severe necessities of the wilder- qualifications for collecting a mob about him, ness and of brutal hunger as to be thus solicited and that, had he appeared in the streets of Lon. and baffled even in dreams-if, by the lowest of don after one of his long sojourns amonst the mortal appetites, they could be so humiliated mountains, no unearthly wight of whatever deand eclipsed as to reveal in the shadowy scription, no tattered lunatic or Botany-Bay visions of merely human plenty-then by how convict, would have been able to vie with him much more must the human heart, eclipsed at in the picturesque déshabillé of the whole "turnnoon, revert, under the mask of sorrow and of out." Picture to yourself the scene. This dreams, to the virgin beauties of the dawn!"king of shreds and patches"-for, to the outWith how much more violent revulsion must the weary, foot-sore traveller, lost in the waste of sands, be carried back through the gate of ivory or of horn to the dewy flower-strewn fields of some far happier place. ward sense, he seems that now-has been "at large" for days, perhaps for two or three weeks; he has been unkennelled, and, among the lawless mountains, has felt no restraint upon his own lawlessness, however Cyclopean. Doubtless he has met with panthers and wolves, each one of whom will to its dying day retain impressive The transition from De Quincey's childhood to his opium-experiences is as natural, therefore, as from strophe to antistrophe in choral anti-recollections of the wee monster, from which phonies. Henceforth, as the reader already understands, we are not permitted to look upon a simple, undisguised life, unless we draw aside a veil as impenetrable as that which covers the face of Isis or the poppy-sceptred Demeter. Under this papaverian mask it is likely to be *Paradise Regained, Book II. they fled as a trifle too uncanny even for them. would be very difficult to say how he managed As to his subsistence during these rambles, it that affair, at these, or indeed at any other times; and it may be that the prophetic limitation of a fast to forty days is now the urgent occasion of his return from vagabondism. One thing we may be sure of-that he has made plentiful use of a certain magical drug hid away in his waistcoat-pocket. Like Words |