There
it was indeed that the human had risen on wings from the
grave; but for that reason, there also it was that the Divine had
been swallowed up by the abyss; the lesser star could not rise
before the greater would submit to eclipse.
it was indeed that the human had risen on wings from the
grave; but for that reason, there also it was that the Divine had
been swallowed up by the abyss; the lesser star could not rise
before the greater would submit to eclipse.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v08 - Dah to Dra
Both felt keenly the
pleasures and sorrows of the outer world, but in both contemplative
imagination was so strong that the actual fact-the real Beatrice, if
you will became as nothing to that same fact transmuted through
idealizing thought. De Quincey was early impressed by the remark-
able fashion in which dreams or reveries weave together the sepa-
rate strands of wakeful existence. Before he was two years old he
had, he says, "a remarkable dream of terrific grandeur about a favor-
ite nurse, which is interesting to myself for this reason,—that it
demonstrates my dreaming tendencies to have been constitutional,
and not dependent on laudanum. " At the same age he "connected
a profound sense of pathos with the reappearance, very early in the
spring, of some crocuses. " These two incidents are a key to the
working of De Quincey's mind. Waking or sleeping, his intellect had.
the rare power of using the facts of life as the composer might use
a song of the street, building on a wandering ballad a whole sym-
phony of transfigured sound, retaining skillfully, in the midst of the
new and majestic music, the winning qualities of the popular strain.
To such a boy, with an imaginative mind, an impassioned nature, and
a memory which retained and developed powerfully year by year
all associations involving the feelings of grandeur, magnificence, or
immensity, to such a boy, life and experience were but the storing
up of material which the creative mind might weave into literature
that had the form of prose and the nature of poetry.
De Quincey shared Dante's rare capacity for retaining strong vis-
ual images, his rare power of weaving them into a new and won-
derful fabric. But De Quincey, though as learned and as acute as
Dante, had not Dante's religious and philosophical convictions. A
blind faith and scholastic reason were the foundations of the great
vision of the 'Divine Comedy. ' De Quincey had not the strong but
limited conception of the world on which to base his imagination, he
had not the high religious vision to nerve him to higher contempla-
tion, and his work can never serve in any way as a guide and
message to mankind. De Quincey's visions, however, have the merit
of not being forced. He did not resolve to see what faith and
reason bade him.
## p. 4558 (#344) ###########################################
4558
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
While all controlled reasoning was suspended under the incantation
of opium, his quick mind, without conscious intent, without preju-
dice or purpose, assembled such mysterious and wonderful sights and
sounds as the naked soul might see and hear in the world of actual
experience. For De Quincey's range of action and association was
not as narrow as might seem. He had walked the streets of Lon-
don friendless and starving, saved from death by a dram given by
one even more wretched than he, only a few months after he had
talked with the king. De Quincey's latent images are therefore not
grotesque or mediæval, not conditioned by any philosophical theory,
not of any Inferno or Paradise. The elements of his visions are
the simple elements of all our striking experiences: the faces of the
dead, the grieving child, the tired woman, the strange foreign face,
the tramp of horses' feet. And opium merely magnified these simple
elements, rendered them grand and beautiful without giving them
any forced connection or relative meaning. We recognize the traces
of our own transfigured experience, but we are relieved from the
necessity of accepting it as having an inner meaning. De Quincey's
singular hold on our affection seems, therefore, to be his rare quality
of presenting the unusual but typical dream or reverie as a beautiful
object of interest, without endeavoring to give it the character of an
allegory or a fable.
The greater part of De Quincey's writings however are historical,
critical, and philosophical in character rather than autobiographical;
but these are now much neglected. We sometimes read a little of
'Joan of Arc,' and no one can read it without great admiration; the
'Flight of the Tartars' has even become a part of "prescribed" lit-
erature in our American schools; but of other essays than these we
have as a rule only a dim impression or a faint memory. There are
obvious reasons why De Quincey's historical and philosophical writ-
ings, in an age which devotes itself so largely to similar pursuits, no
longer recommend themselves to the popular taste. His method is
too discursive and leisurely; his subjects as a rule too remote from
current interest; his line of thought too intricate. These failings,
from our point of view, are the more to be regretted because there
has never been an English essayist more entertaining or suggesti ve
than De Quincey. His works cover a very wide range of subject-
matter, from the 'Knocking on the Gate in Macbeth' to the Cas-
uistry of Roman Meals' and the Toilet of a Hebrew Lady. ' His
topics are always piquant. Like Poe, De Quincey loved puzzling
questions, the cryptograms, the tangled under sides of things, where
there are many and conflicting facts to sift and correlate, the points
that are now usually settled in foot-notes and by references to Ger-
man authorities. In dealing with such subjects he showed not only
―
## p. 4559 (#345) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4559
that he possessed the same keen logic which entertains us in Poe,
but that he was the master of great stores of learned information.
We are never wholly convinced, perhaps, of the eternal truth of his
conclusions, but we like to watch him arrive at them. They seem
fresh and strange, and we are dazzled by the constantly changing
material. Nothing can be more delightful than the constant influx of
new objects of thought, the unexpected incidents, the seemingly in-
expugnable logic that ends in paradox, the play of human interest in
a topic to which all living interest seems alien. There is scarcely a
page in all De Quincey's writings that taken by itself is actually dull.
In each, one receives a vivid impression of the same lithe and active
mind, examining with lively curiosity even a recondite subject; crack-
ing a joke here and dropping a tear there, and never intermitting
the smooth flow of acute but often irrelevant observation.
The gen-
eration that habitually neglects De Quincey has lost little important
historical and philosophical information, perhaps, but it has certainly
deprived itself of a constant source of entertainment.
As a stylist De Quincey marked a new ideal in English; that
of impassioned prose, as he himself expresses it,-prose which delib-
erately exalts its subject-matter, as the opera does its. And it was
really as an opera that De Quincey conceived of the essay. It was
to have its recitatives, its mediocre passages, the well and firmly
handled parts of ordinary discourse. All comparatively unornamented
matter was, however, but preparative to the lyric outburst,— the
strophe and antistrophe of modulated song. In this conception of
style others had preceded him,- Milton notably,- but only half con-
sciously and not with sustained success. There could be no great
English prose until the eighteenth century had trimmed the tangled
periods of the seventeenth, and the romantic movement of the nine-
teenth added fire and enthusiasm to the clear but conventional style
of the eighteenth. Ruskin and Carlyle have both the same element
of bravura, as will be seen if one tries to analyze their best passages
as music. But in De Quincey this lyric arrangement is at once more
delicate and more obvious, as the reader may assure himself if he re-
read his favorite passages, noticing how many of them are in essence
exclamatory, or actually vocative, as it were. In this ideal of impas-
sioned prose De Quincey gave to the prose of the latter part of the
century its keynote. Macaulay is everywhere equally impassioned or
unimpassioned; the smooth-flowing and useful canal, rather than the
picturesque river in which rapids follow the long reaches of even
water, and are in turn succeeded by them. To conceive of style as
music,-as symmetry, proportion, and measure, only secondarily de-
pendent on the clear exposition of the actual subject-matter,- that is
De Quincey's ideal, and there Pater and Stevenson have followed him.
## p. 4560 (#346) ###########################################
4560
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
De Quincey's fame has not gone far beyond the circle of those
who peak his native tongue. A recent French critic finds him
rough and rude, sinister even in his wit. In that circle however his
reputation has been high, though he has not been without stern
critics. Mr. Leslie Stephen insists that his logic is more apparent
than real; that his humor is spun out and trivial, his jests ill-timed
and ill-made. His claim that his Confessions' created a new genre
is futile; they confess nothing epoch-making,-no real crises of soul,
merely the adventures of a truant schoolboy, the recollections of
a drunkard. He was full of contemptuous and effeminate British
prejudices against agnosticism and Continental geniuses. "And so,"
Mr. Stephen continues, “in a life of seventy-three years De Quincey
read extensively and thought acutely by fits, ate an enormous quan-
tity of opium, wrote a few pages which revealed new capacities
in the language, and provided a good deal of respectable padding
for the magazines. "
Not a single one of the charges can be wholly denied; on analysis
De Quincey proves guilty of all these offenses against ideal culture.
Rough jocoseness, diffusiveness, local prejudice, a life spent on de-
tails, a lack of philosophy, - these are faults, but they are British
faults, Anglo-Saxon faults. They scarcely limit affection or greatly
diminish respect. De Quincey was a sophist, a rhetorician, a brilliant
talker. There are men of that sort in every club, in every com-
munity. We forgive their eccentricity, their lack of fine humor, the
most rigid logic, or the highest learning. We do not attempt to reply
to them. It is enough if the stream of discourse flows gently on from
their lips. A rich and well-modulated vocabulary, finely turned
phrases, amusing quips and conceits of fancy, acute observations, a
rich store of recondite learning,- these charm and hold us.
Such a
talker, such a writer, was De Quincey. Such was his task,- to amuse,
to interest, and at times to instruct us. One deeper note he struck
rarely, but always with the master's hand,—the vibrating note felt in
passages characteristic of immensity, solitude, grandeur; and it is to
that note that De Quincey owes the individuality of his style and his
fame.
There are few facts in De Quincey's long career that bear directly
on the criticism of his works. Like Ruskin, he was the son of a
well-to-do and cultivated merchant, but the elder De Quincey unfor-
tunately died too early to be of any help in life to his impulsive and
unpractical boy, who quarreled with his guardians, ran away from
school, and neglected his routine duties at Oxford. His admiration
for Wordsworth and Coleridge led him to the Lake country, where he
married and settled down. The necessity of providing for his family
at last aroused him from his life of meditation and indulgence in
## p. 4561 (#347) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4561
opium, and brought him into connection with the periodicals of the
day. After the death of his wife in 1840 he moved with his children
to the vicinity of Edinburgh, where in somewhat eccentric solitude
he spent the last twenty years of his uneventful life.
GRlabeled
CHARLES LAMB
From Biographical Essays'
T SOUNDS paradoxical, but is not so in a bad sense, to say that
in every literature of large compass some authors will be
found to rest much of the interest which surrounds them on
their essential non-popularity. They are good for the very reason
that they are not in conformity to the current taste. They in-
terest because to the world they are not interesting. They attract
by means of their repulsion. Not as though it could separately
furnish a reason for loving a book, that the majority of men had
found it repulsive. Prima facie, it must suggest some presump-
tion against a book that it has failed to gain public attention.
To have roused hostility indeed, to have kindled a feud against
its own principles or its temper, may happen to be a good sign.
That argues power. Hatred may be promising. The deepest
revolutions of mind sometimes begin in hatred. But simply to
have left a reader unimpressed is in itself a neutral result, from
which the inference is doubtful. Yet even that, even simple
failure to impress, may happen at times to be a result from posi-
tive powers in a writer, from special originalities such as rarely
reflect themselves in the mirror of the ordinary understanding.
It seems little to be perceived, how much the great Scriptural
idea of the worldly and the unworldly is found to emerge in lit-
erature as well as in life. In reality, the very same combinations
of moral qualities, infinitely varied, which compose the harsh
physiognomy of what we call worldliness in the living groups of
life, must unavoidably present themselves in books. A library
divides into sections of worldly and unworldly, even as a crowd
of men divides into that same majority and minority. The
world has an instinct for recognizing its own, and recoils.
from certain qualities when exemplified in books, with the same
VIII-286
## p. 4562 (#348) ###########################################
4562
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it in real
life. From qualities for instance of childlike simplicity, of shy
profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world does and
must turn away its face towards grosser, bolder, more deter-
mined, or more intelligible expressions of character and intellect;
and not otherwise in literature, nor at all less in literature, than
it does in the realities of life.
Charles Lamb, if any ever was, is amongst the class here
contemplated; he, if any ever has, ranks amongst writers whose
works are destined to be forever unpopular, and yet forever
interesting; interesting moreover by means of those very quali-
ties which guarantee their non-popularity. The same qualities
which will be found forbidding to the worldly and the thought-
less, which will be found insipid to many even amongst robust
and powerful minds, are exactly those which will continue to
command a select audience in every generation.
The prose
essays, under the signature of "Elia," form the most delightful
section amongst Lamb's works. They traverse a peculiar field of
observation, sequestered from general interest; and they are
composed in a spirit too delicate and unobtrusive to catch the
ear of the noisy crowd, clamoring for strong sensations. But
this retiring delicacy itself, the pensiveness checkered by gleams
of the fanciful, and the humor that is touched with cross-lights
of pathos, together with the picturesque quaintness of the objects
casually described, whether men, or things, or usages; and in
the rear of all this, the constant recurrence to ancient recollec-
tions and to decaying forms of household life, as things retiring
before the tumult of new and revolutionary generations; these
traits in combination communicate to the papers a grace and
strength of originality which nothing in any literature approaches,
whether for degree or kind of excellence, except the most felici-
tous papers of Addison, such as those on Sir Roger de Coverley,
and some others in the same vein of composition. They resem-
ble Addison's papers also in the diction, which is natural and
idiomatic even to carelessness. They are equally faithful to the
truth of nature; and in this only they differ remarkably - that
the sketches of Elia reflect the stamp and impress of the writer's
own character, whereas in all those of Addison the personal
peculiarities of the delineator (though known to the reader from
the beginning through the account of the club) are nearly qui-
escent. Now and then they are recalled into a momentary
## p. 4563 (#349) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4563
notice, but they do not act, or at all modify his pictures of Sir
Roger or Will Wimble. They are slightly and amiably eccentric;
but the Spectator himself, in describing them, takes the station
of an ordinary observer.
Everywhere, indeed, in the writings of Lamb, and not merely
in his Elia,' the character of the writer co-operates in an under-
current to make the effect of the thing written. To understand
in the fullest sense either the gayety or the tenderness of a par-
ticular passage, you must have some insight into the peculiar
bias of the writer's mind, whether native and original, or im-
pressed gradually by the accidents of situation; whether simply
developed out of predispositions by the action of life, or violently
scorched into the constitution by some fierce fever of calamity.
There is in modern literature a whole class of writers, though
not a large one, standing within the same category; some marked
originality of character in the writer becomes a coefficient with
what he says to a common result; you must sympathize with this
personality in the author before you can appreciate the most sig-
nificant parts of his views. In most books the writer figures as
a mere abstraction, without sex or age or local station, whom the
reader banishes from his thoughts. What is written seems to
proceed from a blank intellect, not from a man clothed with
fleshly peculiarities and differences. These peculiarities and dif-
ferences neither do, nor (generally speaking) could. intermingle
with the texture of the thoughts so as to modify their force or
their direction. In such books-and they form the vast majority
- there is nothing to be found or to be looked for beyond the
direct objective. (Sit venia verbo! ) But in a small section of
books, the objective in the thought becomes confluent with the
subjective in the thinker-the two forces unite for a joint prod-
uct; and fully to enjoy the product, or fully to apprehend either
element, both must be known. It is singular and worth inquir-
ing into, for the reason that the Greek and Roman literature had
no such books. Timon of Athens, or Diogenes, one may con-
ceive qualified for this mode of authorship, had journalism existed
to rouse them in those days; their "articles" would no doubt
have been fearfully caustic. But as they failed to produce any-
thing, and Lucian in an after age is scarcely characteristic enough
for the purpose, perhaps we may pronounce Rabelais and Mon-
taigne the earliest of writers in the class described. In the cen-
tury following theirs came Sir Thomas Browne, and immediately
## p. 4564 (#350) ###########################################
4564
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
after him La Fontaine. Then came Swift, Sterne, with others
less distinguished; in Germany, Hippel the friend of Kant, Har-
mann the obscure, and the greatest of the whole body - John
Paul Friedrich Richter. In him, from the strength and determi-
nateness of his nature as well as from the great extent of his
writing, the philosophy of this interaction between the author as
a human agency and his theme as an intellectual reagency might
best be studied. From him might be derived the largest number
of cases, illustrating boldly this absorption of the universal into
the concrete of the pure intellect into the human nature of the
author. But nowhere could illustrations be found more interest-
ing - shy, delicate, evanescent-shy as lightning, delicate and
evanescent as the colored pencilings on a frosty night from the
Northern Lights, than in the better parts of Lamb.
To appreciate Lamb, therefore, it is requisite that his charac-
ter and temperament should be understood in their coyest and
most wayward features. A capital defect it would be if these
could not be gathered silently from Lamb's works themselves.
It would be a fatal mode of dependency upon an alien and sep-
arable accident if they needed an external commentary. But they
do not. The syllables lurk up and down the writings of Lamb,
which decipher his eccentric nature. His character lies there dis-
persed in anagram; and to any attentive reader the re-gathering
and restoration of the total word from its scattered parts is
inevitable without an effort. Still it is always a satisfaction in
knowing a result, to know also its why and how; and in so far
as every character is likely to be modified by the particular
experience, sad or joyous, through which the life has traveled,
it is a good contribution towards the knowledge of that resulting
character as a whole to have a sketch of that particular experi
ence. What trials did it impose? What energies did it task?
What temptations did it unfold? These calls upon the moral
powers, which in music so stormy many a life is doomed to
hear, how were they faced? The character in a capital degree
molds oftentimes the life, but the life always in a subordinate
degree molds the character. And the character being in this case
of Lamb so much of a key to the writings, it becomes important
that the life should be traced, however briefly, as a key to the
character.
――
## p. 4565 (#351) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4565
DESPAIR
From Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'
―――――
THEN a tumultuous dream
HEN suddenly would come a dream of far different character
commencing with a music such as
now I often heard in sleep, music of preparation and of
awakening suspense. The undulations of fast gathering tumults
were like the opening of the Coronation Anthem; and like that,
gave the feeling of a multitudinous movement, of infinite caval-
cades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The
morning was come of a mighty day-a day of crisis and of
ultimate hope for human nature, then suffering mysterious
eclipse, and laboring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, but
I knew not where, somehow, but I knew not how,- by some
beings, but I knew not by whom,-a battle, a strife, an agony,
was traveling through all its stages, - was evolving itself, like
the catastrophe of some mighty drama; with which my sympathy
was the more insupportable from deepening confusion as to its
local scene, its cause, its nature, and its undecipherable issue. I
(as is usual in dreams, where of necessity we make ourselves
central to every movement) had the power, and yet had not the
power, to decide it.
I had the power, if I could raise myself to
will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of
twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable
guilt.
"Deeper than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive.
Then like a chorus the passion deepened. Some greater interest.
was at stake, some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had
pleaded or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms;
hurryings to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I
knew not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and
lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense.
that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth
all the world to me; and but a moment allowed-and clasped
hands, with heart-breaking partings, and then-everlasting fare-
wells! and with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the
incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound
was reverberated-everlasting farewells! and again, and yet
again reverberated — everlasting farewells!
And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud, "I will sleep no
more! "
-
## p. 4566 (#352) ###########################################
4566
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
THE DEAD SISTER
From Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'
N THE day after my sister's death, whilst the sweet temple
ON of her brain was yet unviolated by human scrutiny, I
formed my own scheme for seeing her once more. Not
for the world would I have made this known, nor have suffered
a witness to accompany me. I had never heard of feelings that
take the name of "sentimental," nor dreamed of such a possibil
ity. But grief even in a child hates the light, and shrinks from
human eyes.
The house was large, there were two staircases;
and by one of these I knew that about noon, when all would be
quiet, I could steal up into her chamber. I imagine that it was
exactly high noon when I reached the chamber door; it was
locked, but the key was not taken away. Entering, I closed the
door so softly that although it opened upon a hall which as-
cended through all the stories, no echo ran along the silent.
walls. Then turning around, I sought my sister's face. But the
bed had been moved, and the back was now turned. Nothing
met my eyes but one large window wide open, through which
the sun of midsummer at noonday was showering down torrents
of splendor. The weather was dry, the sky was cloudless, the
blue depths seemed the express types of infinity; and it was not
possible for eye to behold or for heart to conceive any symbols
more pathetic of life and the glory of life.
Let me pause for one instant in approaching a remembrance
so affecting and revolutionary for my own mind, and one which
(if any earthly remembrance) will survive for me in the hour of
death, to remind some readers, and to inform others, that in
the original 'Opium Confessions' I endeavored to explain the
reason why death, cæteris paribus, is more profoundly affecting
in summer than in other parts of the year; so far at least as it
is liable to any modification at all from accidents of scenery or
season. The reason, as I there suggested, lies in the antagonism
between the tropical redundancy of life in summer and the dark
sterilities of the grave. The summer we see, the grave we
haunt with our thoughts; the glory is around us, the darkness
is within us. And the two coming into collision, each exalts
the other into stronger relief. But in my case there was even
a subtler reason why the summer had this intense power of
―――
## p. 4567 (#353) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4567
vivifying the spectacle or the thoughts of death. And recollect-
ing it, often I have been struck with the important truth, that
far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through
perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes
(if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of
being disentangled, than ever reach us directly and in their own
abstract shapes. It had happened that amongst our nursery col-
lection of books was the Bible, illustrated with many pictures.
And in long dark evenings, as my three sisters with myself sate
by the firelight round the guard of our nursery, no book was
so much in request amongst us. It ruled us and swayed us as
mysteriously as music. One young nurse, whom we all loved,
before any candle was lighted would often strain her eye to read
it for us; and sometimes, according to her simple powers, would
endeavor to explain what we found obscure. We, the child-
ren, were all constitutionally touched with pensiveness; the fitful
gloom and sudden lambencies of the room by firelight suited our
evening state of feelings; and they suited also the divine revela-
tions of power and mysterious beauty which awed us. Above
all, the story of a just man- man and yet not man, real above
all things and yet shadowy above all things, who had suffered
the passion of death in Palestine-slept upon our minds like
early dawn upon the waters.
-
The nurse knew and explained to us the chief differences in
Oriental climates; and all these differences (as it happens) express
themselves in the great varieties of summer. The cloudless sun-
lights of Syria-those seemed to argue everlasting summer; the
disciples plucking the ears of corn- that must be summer; but
above all, the very name of Palm Sunday (a festival in the
English Church) troubled me like an anthem. "Sunday! " what
was that? That was the day of peace which masked another
peace, deeper than the heart of man can comprehend. "Palms! "
what were they? That was an equivocal word; palms in the
sense of trophies expressed the pomps of life; palms as a product
of nature expressed the pomps of summer. Yet still, even this
explanation does not suffice; it was not merely by the peace and
by the summer, by the deep sound of rest below all rest, and of
ascending glory, that I had been haunted. It was also because
Jerusalem stood near to those deep images both in time and in
place. The great event of Jerusalem was at hand when Palm
Sunday came; and the scene of that Sunday was near in place to
## p. 4568 (#354) ###########################################
4568
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
Jerusalem. Yet what then was Jerusalem? Did I fancy it to be
the omphalos (navel) of the earth? That pretension had once
been made for Jerusalem, and once for Delphi; and both preten-
sions had become ridiculous as the figure of the planet became
known. Yes, but if not of the earth, for earth's tenant Jerusalem
was the omphalos of mortality. Yet how? There on the con-
trary it was, as we infants understood, that mortality had been
trampled under foot. True; but for that very reason, there it
was that mortality had opened its very gloomiest crater.
There
it was indeed that the human had risen on wings from the
grave; but for that reason, there also it was that the Divine had
been swallowed up by the abyss; the lesser star could not rise
before the greater would submit to eclipse. Summer therefore
had connected itself with death, not merely as a mode of antago
nism, but also through intricate relations to Scriptural scenery
and events.
Out of this digression, which was almost necessary for the
purpose of showing how inextricably my feelings and images of
death were entangled with those of summer, I return to the
bedchamber of my sister. From the gorgeous sunlight I turned
round to the corpse. There lay the sweet childish figure, there
the angel face; and as people usually fancy, it was said in the
house that no features had suffered any change. Had they not?
The forehead indeed, the serene and noble forehead, hat
might be the same; but the frozen eyelids, the darkness that
seemed to steal from beneath them, the marble lips, the stiff en-
ing hands laid palm to palm as if repeating the supplications of
closing anguish,- could these be mistaken for life? Had it been
so, wherefore did I not spring to those heavenly lips with tears
and never-ending kisses? But so it was not. I stood checked
for a moment; awe, not fear, fell upon me; and whilst I stood,
a solemn wind began to blow,- the most mournful that
ever heard. Mournful! that is saying nothing. It was a wind
that had swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries.
Many times since, upon a summer day, when the sun is about
the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and utter.
ing the same hollow, solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell:
it is in this world the one sole audible symbol of eternity.
three times in my life I have happened to hear the same sound
in the same circumstances; namely, when standing between
open window and a dead body on a summer day.
ear
And
an
—
-
## p. 4569 (#355) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4569
Instantly, when my ear caught this vast olian intonation,
when my eye filled with the golden fullness of life, the pomps
and glory of the heavens outside, and, turning, when it settled.
upon the frost which overspread my sister's face, instantly a
trance fell upon me. A vault seemed to open in the zenith of
the far blue sky a shaft which ran up forever.
I in spirit rose,
as if on billows that also ran up the shaft forever, and the bil-
lows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but that also ran
before us and fled away continually. The flight and the pursuit
seemed to go on for ever and ever. Frost, gathering frost, some
Sarsar wind of death, seemed to repel me; I slept for how long
I cannot say; slowly I recovered my self-possession, and found
myself standing as before, close to my sister's bed.
O flight of the solitary child to the solitary God-flight from
the ruined corpse to the throne that could not be ruined! - how
rich wert thou in truth for after years! Rapture of grief that,
being too mighty for a child to sustain, foundest a happy oblivion
in a heaven-born dream, and within that sleep didst conceal a
dream; whose meaning, in after years, when slowly I deciphered,
suddenly there flashed upon me new light; and even by the grief
of a child, as I will show you, reader, hereafter, were confounded
the falsehoods of philosophers.
In the 'Opium Confessions' I touched a little upon the extraor-
dinary power connected with opium (after long use) of ampli-
fying the dimensions of time. Space also it amplifies, by degrees
that are sometimes terrific. But time it is upon which the exalt-
ing and multiplying power of opium chiefly spends its operation.
Time becomes infinitely elastic, stretching out to such immeas-
urable and vanishing termini that it seems ridiculous to compute
the sense of it, on waking, by expressions commensurate to
human life. As in starry fields one computes by diameters of the
earth's orbit, or of Jupiter's, so in valuing the virtual time lived
during some dreams, the measurement by generations is ridicu-
lous by millennia is ridiculous; by æons, I should say, if æons
were more determinate, would be also ridiculous. On this single
occasion, however, in my life, the very inverse phenomenon
occurred. But why speak of it in connection with opium? Could
a child of six years old have been under that influence? No, but
simply because it so exactly reversed the operation of opium.
Instead of a short interval expanding into a vast one, upon this
occasion a long one had contracted into a minute. I have reason
## p. 4570 (#356) ###########################################
4570
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
to believe that a very long one had elapsed during this wander-
ing or suspension of my perfect mind. When I returned to my-
self, there was a foot (or I fancied so) on the stairs. I was
alarmed; for I believed that if anybody should detect me, means
would be taken to prevent my coming again. Hastily, therefore,
I kissed the lips that I should kiss no more, and slunk like a
guilty thing with stealthy steps from the room. Thus perished
the vision, loveliest amongst all the shows which earth has
revealed to me; thus mutilated was the parting which should
have lasted forever; thus tainted with fear was the farewell
sacred to love and grief, to perfect love and perfect grief.
O Ahasuerus, everlasting Jew! fable or not a fable, thou, when
first starting on thy endless pilgrimage of woe,- thou, when first
flying through the gates of Jerusalem and vainly yearning to
leave the pursuing curse behind thee,-couldst not more cer-
tainly have read thy doom of sorrow in the misgivings of thy
troubled brain, than I when passing forever from my sister's
room. The worm was at my heart; and confining myself to that
state of life, I may say, the worm that could not die. For if
when standing upon the threshold of manhood, I had ceased to
feel its perpetual gnawings, that was because a vast expansion of
intellect, it was because new hopes, new necessities, and the
frenzy of youthful blood, had translated me into a new creature.
Man is doubtless one by some subtle nexus that we cannot per-
ceive, extending from the new-born infant to the superannuated
dotard; but as regards many affections and passions incident to
his nature at different stages, he is not one: the unity of man in
this respect is coextensive only with the particular stage to which
the passion belongs. Some passions, as that of sexual love, are
celestial by one half of their origin, animal and earthly by the
other half. These will not survive their own appropriate stage.
But love which is altogether holy, like that between two children,
will revisit undoubtedly by glimpses the silence and the darkness
of old age; and I repeat my belief- that unless bodily torment
should forbid it, that final experience in my sister's bedroom, or
some other in which her innocence was concerned, will rise again.
for me to illuminate the hour of death.
-
## p. 4571 (#357) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4571
I knew
OF
Reader,
LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW
From Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'
FTENTIMES at Oxford I saw Levana in my dreams.
her by her Roman symbols. Who is Levana?
that do not pretend to have leisure for very much scholar-
ship, you will not be angry with me for telling you. Levana
was the Roman goddess that performed for the new-born infant
the earliest office of ennobling kindness,-typical, by its mode, of
that grandeur which belongs to man everywhere, and of that
benignity in powers invisible which even in pagan worlds some-
times descends to sustain it. At the very moment of birth, just
as the infant tasted for the first time the atmosphere of our
troubled planet, it was laid on the ground. That might bear dif-
ferent interpretations. But immediately, lest so grand a creature
should grovel there for more than one instant, either the pater-
nal hand as proxy for the goddess Levana, or some near kins-
man as proxy for the father, raised it upright, bade it look erect
as the king of all this world, and presented its forehead to the
stars, saying perhaps in his heart, "Behold what is greater than
yourselves! " This symbolic act represented the function of
Levana. And that mysterious lady, who never revealed her face
(except to me in dreams), but always acted by delegation, had
her name from the Latin verb (as still it is the Italian verb)
levare, to raise aloft.
This is the explanation of Levana. And hence it has arisen
that some people have understood by Levana the tutelary power
that controls the education of the nursery. She that would not
suffer at his birth even a prefigurative or mimic degradation for
her awful ward, far less could be supposed to suffer the real
degradation attaching to the non-development of his powers. She
therefore watches over human education.
Therefore it is that Levana often communes with the powers
that shake man's heart: therefore it is that she dotes upon grief.
"These ladies," said I softly to myself, on seeing the ministers
with whom Levana was conversing, "these are the Sorrows; and
they are three in number, as the Graces are three, who dress
man's life with beauty; the Parca are three, who weave the
dark arras of man's life in their mysterious loom always with col-
ors sad in part, sometimes angry. with tragic crimson and black;
## p. 4572 (#358) ###########################################
4572
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
the Furies are three, who visit, with retributions called from the
other side of the grave, offenses that walk upon this; and once
even the Muses were but three, who fit the harp, the trumpet,
or the lute, to the great burdens of man's impassioned creations.
These are the Sorrows, all three of whom I know. " The last
words I say now; but in Oxford I said, "One of whom I
know, and the others too surely I shall know. " For already in
my fervent youth I saw (dimly relieved upon the dark back-
ground of my dreams) the imperfect lineaments of the awful
sisters. These sisters-by what name shall we call them?
If I say simply "The Sorrows," there will be a chance of
mistaking the term; it might be understood of individual sor-
row,- separate cases of sorrow,—whereas I want a term express-
ing the mighty abstractions that incarnate themselves in all
individual sufferings of man's heart; and I wish to have these
abstractions presented as impersonations; that is, as clothed with
human attributes of life, and with functions pointing to flesh.
Let us call them therefore Our Ladies of Sorrow.
The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachrymarum, Our
Lady of Tears. She it is that night and day raves and moans,
calling for vanished faces. She stood in Rama, where a voice
was heard of lamentation,- Rachel weeping for her children,
and refusing to be comforted. She it was that stood in Bethle-
hem on the night when Herod's sword swept its nurseries of
Innocents, and the little feet were stiffened forever, which, heard
at times as they tottered along floors overhead, woke pulses of
love in household hearts that were not unmarked in heaven.
Her eyes are sweet and subtile, wild and sleepy, by turns;
oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentimes challenging the heav
ens. She wears a diadem round her head. And I knew by
childish memories that she could go abroad upon the winds,
when she heard that sobbing of litanies, or the thundering of
organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer clouds.
This sister, the elder, it is that carries keys more than papal at
her girdle, which open every cottage and every palace. She, to
my knowledge, sate all last summer by the bedside of the blind
beggar, him that so often and so gladly I talked with; whose
pious daughter, eight years old, with the sunny countenance,
resisted the temptations of play and village mirth to travel all
day long on dusty roads with her afflicted father. For this did
God send her a great reward. In the springtime of the year,
## p. 4573 (#359) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4573
and whilst yet her own spring was budding, he recalled her
to himself. But her blind father mourns forever over her; still
he dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is locked
within his own; and still he wakens to a darkness that is now
within a second and a deeper darkness. This Mater Lachrymarum
also has been sitting all this winter of 1844-5 within the bed-
chamber of the Czar, bringing before his eyes a daughter (not
less pious) that vanished to God not less suddenly, and left
behind her a darkness not less profound. By the power of her
keys it is that Our Lady of Tears glides, a ghostly intruder,
into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless
children, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile to Mississippi.
And her, because she is the first-born of her house, and has the
widest empire, let us honor with the title of "Madonna. "
The second sister is called Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of
Sighs. She never scales the clouds, nor walks abroad upon the
winds. She wears no diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever
seen, would be neither sweet nor subtile; no man could read
their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams,
and with wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises not her
eyes; her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, droops for-
ever, forever fastens on the dust. She weeps not.
She groans
not. But she sighs inaudibly at intervals. Her sister Madonna
is oftentimes stormy and frantic, raging in the highest against
Heaven, and demanding back her darlings. But Our Lady of
Sighs never clamors, never defies, dreams not of rebellious aspira-
tions. She is humble to abjectness. Hers is the meekness that
belongs to the hopeless. Murmur she may, but it is in her sleep.
Whisper she may, but it is to herself in the twilight. Mutter
she does at times, but it is in solitary places that are desolate as
she is desolate, in ruined cities, and when the sun has gone down
to his rest. This sister is the visitor of the Pariah; of the Jew;
of the bondsman to the oar in the Mediterranean galleys; of the
English criminal in Norfolk Island, blotted out from the books
of remembrance in sweet far-off England; of the baffled penitent
reverting his eyes forever upon a solitary grave, which to him
seems the altar overthrown of some past and bloody sacrifice, on
which altar no oblations can now be availing, whether towards
pardon that he might implore, or towards reparation that he
might attempt. Every slave that at noonday looks up to the
tropical sun with timid reproach, as he points with one hand to
## p. 4574 (#360) ###########################################
4574
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
the earth, our general mother, but for him a stepmother,—as he
points with the other hand to the Bible, our general teacher, but
against him sealed and sequestered; every woman sitting in
darkness, without love to shelter her head or hope to illumine her
solitude, because the heaven-born instincts kindling in her nature
germs of holy affections, which God implanted in her womanly
bosom, having been stifled by social necessities, now burn sul-
lenly to waste like sepulchral lamps among the ancients; every
nun defrauded of her unreturning May-time by wicked kinsmen,
whom God will judge; every captive in every dungeon; all that
are betrayed, and all that are rejected; outcasts by traditionary
law, and children of hereditary disgrace:- all these walk with
Our Lady of Sighs. She also carries a key; but she needs it
little. For her kingdom is chiefly amongst the tents of Shem,
and the houseless vagrant of every clime. Yet in the very high-
est ranks of man she finds chapels of her own; and even in
glorious England there are some that, to the world, carry their
heads as proudly as the reindeer, who yet secretly have received
her mark upon their foreheads.
But the third sister, who is also the youngest! Hush!
whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large, or
else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is
hers.
Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost be-
yond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes rising
so high might be hidden by distance. But being what they are,
they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which
she wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not for
matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for
ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground.
She is the defier of God. She also is the mother of lunacies,
and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her
power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can
approach only those in whom a profound nature has been up-
heaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles and
the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and
tempest from within. Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast
or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps
timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with incal-
culable motions, bounding, and with a tiger's leaps. She carries
no key; for though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all
doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is
Mater Tenebrarum,— Our Lady of Darkness.
## p. 4575 (#361) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4575
These were the Semnai Theai, or Sublime Goddesses, these
were the Eumenides, or Gracious Ladies (so called by antiquity
in shuddering propitiation) of my Oxford dreams. Madonna
spoke. She spoke by her mysterious hand. Touching my head,
she beckoned to our Lady of Sighs; and what she spoke, trans-
lated out of the signs which (except in dreams) no man reads,
was this:
―――――
"Lo! here is he whom in childhood I dedicated to my altars.
This is he that once I made my darling. Him I led astray, him
I beguiled, and from heaven I stole away his young heart to
mine. Through me did he become idolatrous; and through me
it was, by languishing desires, that he worshiped the worm,
and prayed to the wormy grave. Holy was the grave to him;
lovely was its darkness; saintly its corruption. Him, this young
idolator, I have seasoned for thee, dear gentle Sister of Sighs!
Do thou take him now to thy heart, and season him for our
dreadful sister. And thou,"-turning to the Mater Tenebrarum,
she said, "wicked sister, that temptest and hatest, do thou take
.
him from her. See that thy sceptre lie heavy on his head.
Suffer not woman and her tenderness to sit near him in his
darkness. Banish the frailties of hope, wither the relenting of
love, scorch the fountains of tears, curse him as only thou canst
curse. So shall he be accomplished in the furnace, so shall he
see the things that ought not to be seen, sights that are abom-
inable, and secrets that are unutterable. So shall he read elder
truths, sad truths, grand truths, fearful truths. So shall he rise
again before he dies. And so shall our commission be accom-
plished which from God we had,-to plague his heart until he
had unfolded the capacities of his spirit. "
SAVANNAH-LA-MAR
From 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'
GOD
OD smote Savannah-la-mar, and in one night by earthquake
removed her, with all her towers standing and population
sleeping, from the steadfast foundations of the shore to the
coral floors of ocean. And God said:-"Pompeii did I bury and
conceal from men through seventeen centuries; this city I will
bury, but not conceal. She shall be a monument to men of my
mysterious anger, set in azure light through generations to come;
## p. 4576 (#362) ###########################################
4576
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
for I will enshrine her in a crystal dome of my tropic seas. "
This city therefore, like a mighty galleon with all her apparel
mounted, streamers flying, and tackling perfect, seems floating
along the noiseless depths of ocean; and oftentimes in glassy
calms, through the translucid atmosphere of water that now
stretches like an air-woven awning above the silent encampment,
mariners from every clime look down into her courts and ter-
races, count her gates, and number the spires of her churches.
She is one ample cemetery, and has been for many a year; but
in the mighty calms that brood for weeks over tropic latitudes,
she fascinates the eye with a Fata Morgana revelation as of
human life still subsisting, in submarine asylums sacred from
the storms that torment our upper air.
Thither, lured by the loveliness of cerulean depths, by the
peace of human dwellings privileged from molestation, by the
gleam of marble altars sleeping in everlasting sanctity, often-
times in dreams did I and the Dark Interpreter cleave the
watery veil that divided us from her streets. We looked into
the belfries, where the pendulous bells were waiting in vain for
the summons which should awaken their marriage peals; together
we touched the mighty organ keys, that sang no jubilates for the
ear of Heaven, that sang no requiems for the ear of human
sorrow; together we searched the silent nurseries, where the
children were all asleep, and had been asleep through five gen-
erations. "They are waiting for the heavenly dawn," whispered
the Interpreter to himself: "and when that comes, the bells and
the organs will utter a jubilate repeated by the echoes of Para-
dise. " Then turning to me he said: "This is sad, this is pit-
eous; but less would not have sufficed for the purpose of God.
Look here. Put into a Roman clepsydra one hundred drops of
water; let these run out as the sands in an hour-glass, every
drop measuring the hundredth part of a second, so that each
shall represent but the three-hundred-and-sixty-thousandth part of
an hour. Now count the drops as they race along; and when
the fiftieth of the hundred is passing, behold! forty-nine are not,
because already they have perished; and fifty are not, because
they are yet to come. You see therefore how narrow, how incal-
culably narrow, is the true and actual present. Of that time
which we call the present, hardly a hundredth part but belongs
either to a past which has fled, or to a future which is still on
the wing. It has perished, or it is not born. It was, or it is
―――――――――
## p. 4577 (#363) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4577
not. Yet even this approximation to the truth is infinitely false.
For again subdivide that solitary drop, which only was found to
represent the present, into a lower series of similar fractions, and
the actual present which you arrest measures now but the thirty-
six-millionth of an hour; and so by infinite declensions the true
and very present, in which only we live and enjoy, will vanish
into a mote of a mote, distinguishable only by a heavenly vision.
Therefore the present, which only man possesses, offers less
capacity for his footing than the slenderest film that ever spider
twisted from her womb. Therefore also even this incalculable
shadow from the narrowest pencil of moonlight is more transitory
than geometry can measure, or thought of angel can overtake.
The time which is, contracts into a mathematic point; and even
that point perishes a thousand times before we can utter its
birth. All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infi-
nite in its velocity of flight towards death. But in God there
is nothing finite; but in God there is nothing transitory; but
in God there can be nothing that tends to death. Therefore it
follows that for God there can be no present. The future is
the present of God, and to the future it is that he sacrifices the
human present. Therefore it is that he works by earthquake.
Therefore it is that he works by grief. Oh, deep is the plow-
ing of earthquake! Oh, deep" — (and his voice swelled like a
sanctus rising from the choir of a cathedral) — "Oh, deep is the
plowing of grief! But oftentimes less would not suffice for the
agriculture of God. Upon a night of earthquake he builds a
thousand years of pleasant habitations for man. Upon the sorrow
of an infant he raises oftentimes from human intellects glorious
vintages that could not else have been. Less than these fierce
plowshares would not have stirred the stubborn soil. The one is
needed for earth, our planet,- for earth itself as the dwelling-
place of man; but the other is needed yet oftener for God's
mightiest instrument,-yes" (and he looked solemnly at myself),
"is needed for the mysterious children of the earth! "
VIII-287
## p. 4578 (#364) ###########################################
4578
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
THE BISHOP OF BEAUVAIS AND JOAN OF ARC
From Miscellaneous Essays'
B'
ISHOP OF BEAUVAIS! thy victim died in fire upon a scaffold
thou upon a down bed. But for the departing minutes of
life, both are oftentimes alike. At the farewell crisis, when
the gates of death are opening, and flesh is resting from its
struggles, oftentimes the tortured and torturer have the same
truce from carnal torment; both sink together into sleep; together
both, sometimes, kindle into dreams. When the mortal mists
were gathering fast upon you two, bishop and shepherd girl,—
when the pavilions of life were closing up their shadowy curtains
about you, let us try, through the gigantic glooms, to decipher
the flying features of your separate visions.
The shepherd girl that had delivered France-she from her
dungeon, she from her baiting at the stake, she from her duel
with fire, as she entered her last dream saw Domrémy, saw the
fountain of Domrémy, saw the pomp of forests in which her
childhood had wandered. That Easter festival which man had
denied to her languishing heart, that resurrection of springtime
which the darkness of dungeons had intercepted from her, hun-
gering after the glorious liberty of forests, were by God given
back into her hands, as jewels that had been stolen from her by
robbers. With those, perhaps (for the minutes of dreams can
stretch into ages), was given back to her by God the bliss of
childhood. By special privilege, for her might be created in this
farewell dream, a second childhood, innocent as the first; but
not, like that, sad with the gloom of a fearful mission in the
rear. The mission had now been fulfilled. The storm was
weathered, the skirts even of that mighty storm were drawing
off. The blood that she was to reckon for had been exacted; the
tears that she was to shed in secret had been paid to the last.
The hatred to herself in all eyes had been faced steadily, had
been suffered, had been survived.
pleasures and sorrows of the outer world, but in both contemplative
imagination was so strong that the actual fact-the real Beatrice, if
you will became as nothing to that same fact transmuted through
idealizing thought. De Quincey was early impressed by the remark-
able fashion in which dreams or reveries weave together the sepa-
rate strands of wakeful existence. Before he was two years old he
had, he says, "a remarkable dream of terrific grandeur about a favor-
ite nurse, which is interesting to myself for this reason,—that it
demonstrates my dreaming tendencies to have been constitutional,
and not dependent on laudanum. " At the same age he "connected
a profound sense of pathos with the reappearance, very early in the
spring, of some crocuses. " These two incidents are a key to the
working of De Quincey's mind. Waking or sleeping, his intellect had.
the rare power of using the facts of life as the composer might use
a song of the street, building on a wandering ballad a whole sym-
phony of transfigured sound, retaining skillfully, in the midst of the
new and majestic music, the winning qualities of the popular strain.
To such a boy, with an imaginative mind, an impassioned nature, and
a memory which retained and developed powerfully year by year
all associations involving the feelings of grandeur, magnificence, or
immensity, to such a boy, life and experience were but the storing
up of material which the creative mind might weave into literature
that had the form of prose and the nature of poetry.
De Quincey shared Dante's rare capacity for retaining strong vis-
ual images, his rare power of weaving them into a new and won-
derful fabric. But De Quincey, though as learned and as acute as
Dante, had not Dante's religious and philosophical convictions. A
blind faith and scholastic reason were the foundations of the great
vision of the 'Divine Comedy. ' De Quincey had not the strong but
limited conception of the world on which to base his imagination, he
had not the high religious vision to nerve him to higher contempla-
tion, and his work can never serve in any way as a guide and
message to mankind. De Quincey's visions, however, have the merit
of not being forced. He did not resolve to see what faith and
reason bade him.
## p. 4558 (#344) ###########################################
4558
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
While all controlled reasoning was suspended under the incantation
of opium, his quick mind, without conscious intent, without preju-
dice or purpose, assembled such mysterious and wonderful sights and
sounds as the naked soul might see and hear in the world of actual
experience. For De Quincey's range of action and association was
not as narrow as might seem. He had walked the streets of Lon-
don friendless and starving, saved from death by a dram given by
one even more wretched than he, only a few months after he had
talked with the king. De Quincey's latent images are therefore not
grotesque or mediæval, not conditioned by any philosophical theory,
not of any Inferno or Paradise. The elements of his visions are
the simple elements of all our striking experiences: the faces of the
dead, the grieving child, the tired woman, the strange foreign face,
the tramp of horses' feet. And opium merely magnified these simple
elements, rendered them grand and beautiful without giving them
any forced connection or relative meaning. We recognize the traces
of our own transfigured experience, but we are relieved from the
necessity of accepting it as having an inner meaning. De Quincey's
singular hold on our affection seems, therefore, to be his rare quality
of presenting the unusual but typical dream or reverie as a beautiful
object of interest, without endeavoring to give it the character of an
allegory or a fable.
The greater part of De Quincey's writings however are historical,
critical, and philosophical in character rather than autobiographical;
but these are now much neglected. We sometimes read a little of
'Joan of Arc,' and no one can read it without great admiration; the
'Flight of the Tartars' has even become a part of "prescribed" lit-
erature in our American schools; but of other essays than these we
have as a rule only a dim impression or a faint memory. There are
obvious reasons why De Quincey's historical and philosophical writ-
ings, in an age which devotes itself so largely to similar pursuits, no
longer recommend themselves to the popular taste. His method is
too discursive and leisurely; his subjects as a rule too remote from
current interest; his line of thought too intricate. These failings,
from our point of view, are the more to be regretted because there
has never been an English essayist more entertaining or suggesti ve
than De Quincey. His works cover a very wide range of subject-
matter, from the 'Knocking on the Gate in Macbeth' to the Cas-
uistry of Roman Meals' and the Toilet of a Hebrew Lady. ' His
topics are always piquant. Like Poe, De Quincey loved puzzling
questions, the cryptograms, the tangled under sides of things, where
there are many and conflicting facts to sift and correlate, the points
that are now usually settled in foot-notes and by references to Ger-
man authorities. In dealing with such subjects he showed not only
―
## p. 4559 (#345) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4559
that he possessed the same keen logic which entertains us in Poe,
but that he was the master of great stores of learned information.
We are never wholly convinced, perhaps, of the eternal truth of his
conclusions, but we like to watch him arrive at them. They seem
fresh and strange, and we are dazzled by the constantly changing
material. Nothing can be more delightful than the constant influx of
new objects of thought, the unexpected incidents, the seemingly in-
expugnable logic that ends in paradox, the play of human interest in
a topic to which all living interest seems alien. There is scarcely a
page in all De Quincey's writings that taken by itself is actually dull.
In each, one receives a vivid impression of the same lithe and active
mind, examining with lively curiosity even a recondite subject; crack-
ing a joke here and dropping a tear there, and never intermitting
the smooth flow of acute but often irrelevant observation.
The gen-
eration that habitually neglects De Quincey has lost little important
historical and philosophical information, perhaps, but it has certainly
deprived itself of a constant source of entertainment.
As a stylist De Quincey marked a new ideal in English; that
of impassioned prose, as he himself expresses it,-prose which delib-
erately exalts its subject-matter, as the opera does its. And it was
really as an opera that De Quincey conceived of the essay. It was
to have its recitatives, its mediocre passages, the well and firmly
handled parts of ordinary discourse. All comparatively unornamented
matter was, however, but preparative to the lyric outburst,— the
strophe and antistrophe of modulated song. In this conception of
style others had preceded him,- Milton notably,- but only half con-
sciously and not with sustained success. There could be no great
English prose until the eighteenth century had trimmed the tangled
periods of the seventeenth, and the romantic movement of the nine-
teenth added fire and enthusiasm to the clear but conventional style
of the eighteenth. Ruskin and Carlyle have both the same element
of bravura, as will be seen if one tries to analyze their best passages
as music. But in De Quincey this lyric arrangement is at once more
delicate and more obvious, as the reader may assure himself if he re-
read his favorite passages, noticing how many of them are in essence
exclamatory, or actually vocative, as it were. In this ideal of impas-
sioned prose De Quincey gave to the prose of the latter part of the
century its keynote. Macaulay is everywhere equally impassioned or
unimpassioned; the smooth-flowing and useful canal, rather than the
picturesque river in which rapids follow the long reaches of even
water, and are in turn succeeded by them. To conceive of style as
music,-as symmetry, proportion, and measure, only secondarily de-
pendent on the clear exposition of the actual subject-matter,- that is
De Quincey's ideal, and there Pater and Stevenson have followed him.
## p. 4560 (#346) ###########################################
4560
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
De Quincey's fame has not gone far beyond the circle of those
who peak his native tongue. A recent French critic finds him
rough and rude, sinister even in his wit. In that circle however his
reputation has been high, though he has not been without stern
critics. Mr. Leslie Stephen insists that his logic is more apparent
than real; that his humor is spun out and trivial, his jests ill-timed
and ill-made. His claim that his Confessions' created a new genre
is futile; they confess nothing epoch-making,-no real crises of soul,
merely the adventures of a truant schoolboy, the recollections of
a drunkard. He was full of contemptuous and effeminate British
prejudices against agnosticism and Continental geniuses. "And so,"
Mr. Stephen continues, “in a life of seventy-three years De Quincey
read extensively and thought acutely by fits, ate an enormous quan-
tity of opium, wrote a few pages which revealed new capacities
in the language, and provided a good deal of respectable padding
for the magazines. "
Not a single one of the charges can be wholly denied; on analysis
De Quincey proves guilty of all these offenses against ideal culture.
Rough jocoseness, diffusiveness, local prejudice, a life spent on de-
tails, a lack of philosophy, - these are faults, but they are British
faults, Anglo-Saxon faults. They scarcely limit affection or greatly
diminish respect. De Quincey was a sophist, a rhetorician, a brilliant
talker. There are men of that sort in every club, in every com-
munity. We forgive their eccentricity, their lack of fine humor, the
most rigid logic, or the highest learning. We do not attempt to reply
to them. It is enough if the stream of discourse flows gently on from
their lips. A rich and well-modulated vocabulary, finely turned
phrases, amusing quips and conceits of fancy, acute observations, a
rich store of recondite learning,- these charm and hold us.
Such a
talker, such a writer, was De Quincey. Such was his task,- to amuse,
to interest, and at times to instruct us. One deeper note he struck
rarely, but always with the master's hand,—the vibrating note felt in
passages characteristic of immensity, solitude, grandeur; and it is to
that note that De Quincey owes the individuality of his style and his
fame.
There are few facts in De Quincey's long career that bear directly
on the criticism of his works. Like Ruskin, he was the son of a
well-to-do and cultivated merchant, but the elder De Quincey unfor-
tunately died too early to be of any help in life to his impulsive and
unpractical boy, who quarreled with his guardians, ran away from
school, and neglected his routine duties at Oxford. His admiration
for Wordsworth and Coleridge led him to the Lake country, where he
married and settled down. The necessity of providing for his family
at last aroused him from his life of meditation and indulgence in
## p. 4561 (#347) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4561
opium, and brought him into connection with the periodicals of the
day. After the death of his wife in 1840 he moved with his children
to the vicinity of Edinburgh, where in somewhat eccentric solitude
he spent the last twenty years of his uneventful life.
GRlabeled
CHARLES LAMB
From Biographical Essays'
T SOUNDS paradoxical, but is not so in a bad sense, to say that
in every literature of large compass some authors will be
found to rest much of the interest which surrounds them on
their essential non-popularity. They are good for the very reason
that they are not in conformity to the current taste. They in-
terest because to the world they are not interesting. They attract
by means of their repulsion. Not as though it could separately
furnish a reason for loving a book, that the majority of men had
found it repulsive. Prima facie, it must suggest some presump-
tion against a book that it has failed to gain public attention.
To have roused hostility indeed, to have kindled a feud against
its own principles or its temper, may happen to be a good sign.
That argues power. Hatred may be promising. The deepest
revolutions of mind sometimes begin in hatred. But simply to
have left a reader unimpressed is in itself a neutral result, from
which the inference is doubtful. Yet even that, even simple
failure to impress, may happen at times to be a result from posi-
tive powers in a writer, from special originalities such as rarely
reflect themselves in the mirror of the ordinary understanding.
It seems little to be perceived, how much the great Scriptural
idea of the worldly and the unworldly is found to emerge in lit-
erature as well as in life. In reality, the very same combinations
of moral qualities, infinitely varied, which compose the harsh
physiognomy of what we call worldliness in the living groups of
life, must unavoidably present themselves in books. A library
divides into sections of worldly and unworldly, even as a crowd
of men divides into that same majority and minority. The
world has an instinct for recognizing its own, and recoils.
from certain qualities when exemplified in books, with the same
VIII-286
## p. 4562 (#348) ###########################################
4562
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it in real
life. From qualities for instance of childlike simplicity, of shy
profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world does and
must turn away its face towards grosser, bolder, more deter-
mined, or more intelligible expressions of character and intellect;
and not otherwise in literature, nor at all less in literature, than
it does in the realities of life.
Charles Lamb, if any ever was, is amongst the class here
contemplated; he, if any ever has, ranks amongst writers whose
works are destined to be forever unpopular, and yet forever
interesting; interesting moreover by means of those very quali-
ties which guarantee their non-popularity. The same qualities
which will be found forbidding to the worldly and the thought-
less, which will be found insipid to many even amongst robust
and powerful minds, are exactly those which will continue to
command a select audience in every generation.
The prose
essays, under the signature of "Elia," form the most delightful
section amongst Lamb's works. They traverse a peculiar field of
observation, sequestered from general interest; and they are
composed in a spirit too delicate and unobtrusive to catch the
ear of the noisy crowd, clamoring for strong sensations. But
this retiring delicacy itself, the pensiveness checkered by gleams
of the fanciful, and the humor that is touched with cross-lights
of pathos, together with the picturesque quaintness of the objects
casually described, whether men, or things, or usages; and in
the rear of all this, the constant recurrence to ancient recollec-
tions and to decaying forms of household life, as things retiring
before the tumult of new and revolutionary generations; these
traits in combination communicate to the papers a grace and
strength of originality which nothing in any literature approaches,
whether for degree or kind of excellence, except the most felici-
tous papers of Addison, such as those on Sir Roger de Coverley,
and some others in the same vein of composition. They resem-
ble Addison's papers also in the diction, which is natural and
idiomatic even to carelessness. They are equally faithful to the
truth of nature; and in this only they differ remarkably - that
the sketches of Elia reflect the stamp and impress of the writer's
own character, whereas in all those of Addison the personal
peculiarities of the delineator (though known to the reader from
the beginning through the account of the club) are nearly qui-
escent. Now and then they are recalled into a momentary
## p. 4563 (#349) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4563
notice, but they do not act, or at all modify his pictures of Sir
Roger or Will Wimble. They are slightly and amiably eccentric;
but the Spectator himself, in describing them, takes the station
of an ordinary observer.
Everywhere, indeed, in the writings of Lamb, and not merely
in his Elia,' the character of the writer co-operates in an under-
current to make the effect of the thing written. To understand
in the fullest sense either the gayety or the tenderness of a par-
ticular passage, you must have some insight into the peculiar
bias of the writer's mind, whether native and original, or im-
pressed gradually by the accidents of situation; whether simply
developed out of predispositions by the action of life, or violently
scorched into the constitution by some fierce fever of calamity.
There is in modern literature a whole class of writers, though
not a large one, standing within the same category; some marked
originality of character in the writer becomes a coefficient with
what he says to a common result; you must sympathize with this
personality in the author before you can appreciate the most sig-
nificant parts of his views. In most books the writer figures as
a mere abstraction, without sex or age or local station, whom the
reader banishes from his thoughts. What is written seems to
proceed from a blank intellect, not from a man clothed with
fleshly peculiarities and differences. These peculiarities and dif-
ferences neither do, nor (generally speaking) could. intermingle
with the texture of the thoughts so as to modify their force or
their direction. In such books-and they form the vast majority
- there is nothing to be found or to be looked for beyond the
direct objective. (Sit venia verbo! ) But in a small section of
books, the objective in the thought becomes confluent with the
subjective in the thinker-the two forces unite for a joint prod-
uct; and fully to enjoy the product, or fully to apprehend either
element, both must be known. It is singular and worth inquir-
ing into, for the reason that the Greek and Roman literature had
no such books. Timon of Athens, or Diogenes, one may con-
ceive qualified for this mode of authorship, had journalism existed
to rouse them in those days; their "articles" would no doubt
have been fearfully caustic. But as they failed to produce any-
thing, and Lucian in an after age is scarcely characteristic enough
for the purpose, perhaps we may pronounce Rabelais and Mon-
taigne the earliest of writers in the class described. In the cen-
tury following theirs came Sir Thomas Browne, and immediately
## p. 4564 (#350) ###########################################
4564
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
after him La Fontaine. Then came Swift, Sterne, with others
less distinguished; in Germany, Hippel the friend of Kant, Har-
mann the obscure, and the greatest of the whole body - John
Paul Friedrich Richter. In him, from the strength and determi-
nateness of his nature as well as from the great extent of his
writing, the philosophy of this interaction between the author as
a human agency and his theme as an intellectual reagency might
best be studied. From him might be derived the largest number
of cases, illustrating boldly this absorption of the universal into
the concrete of the pure intellect into the human nature of the
author. But nowhere could illustrations be found more interest-
ing - shy, delicate, evanescent-shy as lightning, delicate and
evanescent as the colored pencilings on a frosty night from the
Northern Lights, than in the better parts of Lamb.
To appreciate Lamb, therefore, it is requisite that his charac-
ter and temperament should be understood in their coyest and
most wayward features. A capital defect it would be if these
could not be gathered silently from Lamb's works themselves.
It would be a fatal mode of dependency upon an alien and sep-
arable accident if they needed an external commentary. But they
do not. The syllables lurk up and down the writings of Lamb,
which decipher his eccentric nature. His character lies there dis-
persed in anagram; and to any attentive reader the re-gathering
and restoration of the total word from its scattered parts is
inevitable without an effort. Still it is always a satisfaction in
knowing a result, to know also its why and how; and in so far
as every character is likely to be modified by the particular
experience, sad or joyous, through which the life has traveled,
it is a good contribution towards the knowledge of that resulting
character as a whole to have a sketch of that particular experi
ence. What trials did it impose? What energies did it task?
What temptations did it unfold? These calls upon the moral
powers, which in music so stormy many a life is doomed to
hear, how were they faced? The character in a capital degree
molds oftentimes the life, but the life always in a subordinate
degree molds the character. And the character being in this case
of Lamb so much of a key to the writings, it becomes important
that the life should be traced, however briefly, as a key to the
character.
――
## p. 4565 (#351) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4565
DESPAIR
From Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'
―――――
THEN a tumultuous dream
HEN suddenly would come a dream of far different character
commencing with a music such as
now I often heard in sleep, music of preparation and of
awakening suspense. The undulations of fast gathering tumults
were like the opening of the Coronation Anthem; and like that,
gave the feeling of a multitudinous movement, of infinite caval-
cades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The
morning was come of a mighty day-a day of crisis and of
ultimate hope for human nature, then suffering mysterious
eclipse, and laboring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, but
I knew not where, somehow, but I knew not how,- by some
beings, but I knew not by whom,-a battle, a strife, an agony,
was traveling through all its stages, - was evolving itself, like
the catastrophe of some mighty drama; with which my sympathy
was the more insupportable from deepening confusion as to its
local scene, its cause, its nature, and its undecipherable issue. I
(as is usual in dreams, where of necessity we make ourselves
central to every movement) had the power, and yet had not the
power, to decide it.
I had the power, if I could raise myself to
will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of
twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable
guilt.
"Deeper than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive.
Then like a chorus the passion deepened. Some greater interest.
was at stake, some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had
pleaded or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms;
hurryings to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I
knew not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and
lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense.
that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth
all the world to me; and but a moment allowed-and clasped
hands, with heart-breaking partings, and then-everlasting fare-
wells! and with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the
incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound
was reverberated-everlasting farewells! and again, and yet
again reverberated — everlasting farewells!
And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud, "I will sleep no
more! "
-
## p. 4566 (#352) ###########################################
4566
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
THE DEAD SISTER
From Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'
N THE day after my sister's death, whilst the sweet temple
ON of her brain was yet unviolated by human scrutiny, I
formed my own scheme for seeing her once more. Not
for the world would I have made this known, nor have suffered
a witness to accompany me. I had never heard of feelings that
take the name of "sentimental," nor dreamed of such a possibil
ity. But grief even in a child hates the light, and shrinks from
human eyes.
The house was large, there were two staircases;
and by one of these I knew that about noon, when all would be
quiet, I could steal up into her chamber. I imagine that it was
exactly high noon when I reached the chamber door; it was
locked, but the key was not taken away. Entering, I closed the
door so softly that although it opened upon a hall which as-
cended through all the stories, no echo ran along the silent.
walls. Then turning around, I sought my sister's face. But the
bed had been moved, and the back was now turned. Nothing
met my eyes but one large window wide open, through which
the sun of midsummer at noonday was showering down torrents
of splendor. The weather was dry, the sky was cloudless, the
blue depths seemed the express types of infinity; and it was not
possible for eye to behold or for heart to conceive any symbols
more pathetic of life and the glory of life.
Let me pause for one instant in approaching a remembrance
so affecting and revolutionary for my own mind, and one which
(if any earthly remembrance) will survive for me in the hour of
death, to remind some readers, and to inform others, that in
the original 'Opium Confessions' I endeavored to explain the
reason why death, cæteris paribus, is more profoundly affecting
in summer than in other parts of the year; so far at least as it
is liable to any modification at all from accidents of scenery or
season. The reason, as I there suggested, lies in the antagonism
between the tropical redundancy of life in summer and the dark
sterilities of the grave. The summer we see, the grave we
haunt with our thoughts; the glory is around us, the darkness
is within us. And the two coming into collision, each exalts
the other into stronger relief. But in my case there was even
a subtler reason why the summer had this intense power of
―――
## p. 4567 (#353) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4567
vivifying the spectacle or the thoughts of death. And recollect-
ing it, often I have been struck with the important truth, that
far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through
perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes
(if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of
being disentangled, than ever reach us directly and in their own
abstract shapes. It had happened that amongst our nursery col-
lection of books was the Bible, illustrated with many pictures.
And in long dark evenings, as my three sisters with myself sate
by the firelight round the guard of our nursery, no book was
so much in request amongst us. It ruled us and swayed us as
mysteriously as music. One young nurse, whom we all loved,
before any candle was lighted would often strain her eye to read
it for us; and sometimes, according to her simple powers, would
endeavor to explain what we found obscure. We, the child-
ren, were all constitutionally touched with pensiveness; the fitful
gloom and sudden lambencies of the room by firelight suited our
evening state of feelings; and they suited also the divine revela-
tions of power and mysterious beauty which awed us. Above
all, the story of a just man- man and yet not man, real above
all things and yet shadowy above all things, who had suffered
the passion of death in Palestine-slept upon our minds like
early dawn upon the waters.
-
The nurse knew and explained to us the chief differences in
Oriental climates; and all these differences (as it happens) express
themselves in the great varieties of summer. The cloudless sun-
lights of Syria-those seemed to argue everlasting summer; the
disciples plucking the ears of corn- that must be summer; but
above all, the very name of Palm Sunday (a festival in the
English Church) troubled me like an anthem. "Sunday! " what
was that? That was the day of peace which masked another
peace, deeper than the heart of man can comprehend. "Palms! "
what were they? That was an equivocal word; palms in the
sense of trophies expressed the pomps of life; palms as a product
of nature expressed the pomps of summer. Yet still, even this
explanation does not suffice; it was not merely by the peace and
by the summer, by the deep sound of rest below all rest, and of
ascending glory, that I had been haunted. It was also because
Jerusalem stood near to those deep images both in time and in
place. The great event of Jerusalem was at hand when Palm
Sunday came; and the scene of that Sunday was near in place to
## p. 4568 (#354) ###########################################
4568
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
Jerusalem. Yet what then was Jerusalem? Did I fancy it to be
the omphalos (navel) of the earth? That pretension had once
been made for Jerusalem, and once for Delphi; and both preten-
sions had become ridiculous as the figure of the planet became
known. Yes, but if not of the earth, for earth's tenant Jerusalem
was the omphalos of mortality. Yet how? There on the con-
trary it was, as we infants understood, that mortality had been
trampled under foot. True; but for that very reason, there it
was that mortality had opened its very gloomiest crater.
There
it was indeed that the human had risen on wings from the
grave; but for that reason, there also it was that the Divine had
been swallowed up by the abyss; the lesser star could not rise
before the greater would submit to eclipse. Summer therefore
had connected itself with death, not merely as a mode of antago
nism, but also through intricate relations to Scriptural scenery
and events.
Out of this digression, which was almost necessary for the
purpose of showing how inextricably my feelings and images of
death were entangled with those of summer, I return to the
bedchamber of my sister. From the gorgeous sunlight I turned
round to the corpse. There lay the sweet childish figure, there
the angel face; and as people usually fancy, it was said in the
house that no features had suffered any change. Had they not?
The forehead indeed, the serene and noble forehead, hat
might be the same; but the frozen eyelids, the darkness that
seemed to steal from beneath them, the marble lips, the stiff en-
ing hands laid palm to palm as if repeating the supplications of
closing anguish,- could these be mistaken for life? Had it been
so, wherefore did I not spring to those heavenly lips with tears
and never-ending kisses? But so it was not. I stood checked
for a moment; awe, not fear, fell upon me; and whilst I stood,
a solemn wind began to blow,- the most mournful that
ever heard. Mournful! that is saying nothing. It was a wind
that had swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries.
Many times since, upon a summer day, when the sun is about
the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and utter.
ing the same hollow, solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell:
it is in this world the one sole audible symbol of eternity.
three times in my life I have happened to hear the same sound
in the same circumstances; namely, when standing between
open window and a dead body on a summer day.
ear
And
an
—
-
## p. 4569 (#355) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4569
Instantly, when my ear caught this vast olian intonation,
when my eye filled with the golden fullness of life, the pomps
and glory of the heavens outside, and, turning, when it settled.
upon the frost which overspread my sister's face, instantly a
trance fell upon me. A vault seemed to open in the zenith of
the far blue sky a shaft which ran up forever.
I in spirit rose,
as if on billows that also ran up the shaft forever, and the bil-
lows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but that also ran
before us and fled away continually. The flight and the pursuit
seemed to go on for ever and ever. Frost, gathering frost, some
Sarsar wind of death, seemed to repel me; I slept for how long
I cannot say; slowly I recovered my self-possession, and found
myself standing as before, close to my sister's bed.
O flight of the solitary child to the solitary God-flight from
the ruined corpse to the throne that could not be ruined! - how
rich wert thou in truth for after years! Rapture of grief that,
being too mighty for a child to sustain, foundest a happy oblivion
in a heaven-born dream, and within that sleep didst conceal a
dream; whose meaning, in after years, when slowly I deciphered,
suddenly there flashed upon me new light; and even by the grief
of a child, as I will show you, reader, hereafter, were confounded
the falsehoods of philosophers.
In the 'Opium Confessions' I touched a little upon the extraor-
dinary power connected with opium (after long use) of ampli-
fying the dimensions of time. Space also it amplifies, by degrees
that are sometimes terrific. But time it is upon which the exalt-
ing and multiplying power of opium chiefly spends its operation.
Time becomes infinitely elastic, stretching out to such immeas-
urable and vanishing termini that it seems ridiculous to compute
the sense of it, on waking, by expressions commensurate to
human life. As in starry fields one computes by diameters of the
earth's orbit, or of Jupiter's, so in valuing the virtual time lived
during some dreams, the measurement by generations is ridicu-
lous by millennia is ridiculous; by æons, I should say, if æons
were more determinate, would be also ridiculous. On this single
occasion, however, in my life, the very inverse phenomenon
occurred. But why speak of it in connection with opium? Could
a child of six years old have been under that influence? No, but
simply because it so exactly reversed the operation of opium.
Instead of a short interval expanding into a vast one, upon this
occasion a long one had contracted into a minute. I have reason
## p. 4570 (#356) ###########################################
4570
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
to believe that a very long one had elapsed during this wander-
ing or suspension of my perfect mind. When I returned to my-
self, there was a foot (or I fancied so) on the stairs. I was
alarmed; for I believed that if anybody should detect me, means
would be taken to prevent my coming again. Hastily, therefore,
I kissed the lips that I should kiss no more, and slunk like a
guilty thing with stealthy steps from the room. Thus perished
the vision, loveliest amongst all the shows which earth has
revealed to me; thus mutilated was the parting which should
have lasted forever; thus tainted with fear was the farewell
sacred to love and grief, to perfect love and perfect grief.
O Ahasuerus, everlasting Jew! fable or not a fable, thou, when
first starting on thy endless pilgrimage of woe,- thou, when first
flying through the gates of Jerusalem and vainly yearning to
leave the pursuing curse behind thee,-couldst not more cer-
tainly have read thy doom of sorrow in the misgivings of thy
troubled brain, than I when passing forever from my sister's
room. The worm was at my heart; and confining myself to that
state of life, I may say, the worm that could not die. For if
when standing upon the threshold of manhood, I had ceased to
feel its perpetual gnawings, that was because a vast expansion of
intellect, it was because new hopes, new necessities, and the
frenzy of youthful blood, had translated me into a new creature.
Man is doubtless one by some subtle nexus that we cannot per-
ceive, extending from the new-born infant to the superannuated
dotard; but as regards many affections and passions incident to
his nature at different stages, he is not one: the unity of man in
this respect is coextensive only with the particular stage to which
the passion belongs. Some passions, as that of sexual love, are
celestial by one half of their origin, animal and earthly by the
other half. These will not survive their own appropriate stage.
But love which is altogether holy, like that between two children,
will revisit undoubtedly by glimpses the silence and the darkness
of old age; and I repeat my belief- that unless bodily torment
should forbid it, that final experience in my sister's bedroom, or
some other in which her innocence was concerned, will rise again.
for me to illuminate the hour of death.
-
## p. 4571 (#357) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4571
I knew
OF
Reader,
LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW
From Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'
FTENTIMES at Oxford I saw Levana in my dreams.
her by her Roman symbols. Who is Levana?
that do not pretend to have leisure for very much scholar-
ship, you will not be angry with me for telling you. Levana
was the Roman goddess that performed for the new-born infant
the earliest office of ennobling kindness,-typical, by its mode, of
that grandeur which belongs to man everywhere, and of that
benignity in powers invisible which even in pagan worlds some-
times descends to sustain it. At the very moment of birth, just
as the infant tasted for the first time the atmosphere of our
troubled planet, it was laid on the ground. That might bear dif-
ferent interpretations. But immediately, lest so grand a creature
should grovel there for more than one instant, either the pater-
nal hand as proxy for the goddess Levana, or some near kins-
man as proxy for the father, raised it upright, bade it look erect
as the king of all this world, and presented its forehead to the
stars, saying perhaps in his heart, "Behold what is greater than
yourselves! " This symbolic act represented the function of
Levana. And that mysterious lady, who never revealed her face
(except to me in dreams), but always acted by delegation, had
her name from the Latin verb (as still it is the Italian verb)
levare, to raise aloft.
This is the explanation of Levana. And hence it has arisen
that some people have understood by Levana the tutelary power
that controls the education of the nursery. She that would not
suffer at his birth even a prefigurative or mimic degradation for
her awful ward, far less could be supposed to suffer the real
degradation attaching to the non-development of his powers. She
therefore watches over human education.
Therefore it is that Levana often communes with the powers
that shake man's heart: therefore it is that she dotes upon grief.
"These ladies," said I softly to myself, on seeing the ministers
with whom Levana was conversing, "these are the Sorrows; and
they are three in number, as the Graces are three, who dress
man's life with beauty; the Parca are three, who weave the
dark arras of man's life in their mysterious loom always with col-
ors sad in part, sometimes angry. with tragic crimson and black;
## p. 4572 (#358) ###########################################
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THOMAS DE QUINCEY
the Furies are three, who visit, with retributions called from the
other side of the grave, offenses that walk upon this; and once
even the Muses were but three, who fit the harp, the trumpet,
or the lute, to the great burdens of man's impassioned creations.
These are the Sorrows, all three of whom I know. " The last
words I say now; but in Oxford I said, "One of whom I
know, and the others too surely I shall know. " For already in
my fervent youth I saw (dimly relieved upon the dark back-
ground of my dreams) the imperfect lineaments of the awful
sisters. These sisters-by what name shall we call them?
If I say simply "The Sorrows," there will be a chance of
mistaking the term; it might be understood of individual sor-
row,- separate cases of sorrow,—whereas I want a term express-
ing the mighty abstractions that incarnate themselves in all
individual sufferings of man's heart; and I wish to have these
abstractions presented as impersonations; that is, as clothed with
human attributes of life, and with functions pointing to flesh.
Let us call them therefore Our Ladies of Sorrow.
The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachrymarum, Our
Lady of Tears. She it is that night and day raves and moans,
calling for vanished faces. She stood in Rama, where a voice
was heard of lamentation,- Rachel weeping for her children,
and refusing to be comforted. She it was that stood in Bethle-
hem on the night when Herod's sword swept its nurseries of
Innocents, and the little feet were stiffened forever, which, heard
at times as they tottered along floors overhead, woke pulses of
love in household hearts that were not unmarked in heaven.
Her eyes are sweet and subtile, wild and sleepy, by turns;
oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentimes challenging the heav
ens. She wears a diadem round her head. And I knew by
childish memories that she could go abroad upon the winds,
when she heard that sobbing of litanies, or the thundering of
organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer clouds.
This sister, the elder, it is that carries keys more than papal at
her girdle, which open every cottage and every palace. She, to
my knowledge, sate all last summer by the bedside of the blind
beggar, him that so often and so gladly I talked with; whose
pious daughter, eight years old, with the sunny countenance,
resisted the temptations of play and village mirth to travel all
day long on dusty roads with her afflicted father. For this did
God send her a great reward. In the springtime of the year,
## p. 4573 (#359) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4573
and whilst yet her own spring was budding, he recalled her
to himself. But her blind father mourns forever over her; still
he dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is locked
within his own; and still he wakens to a darkness that is now
within a second and a deeper darkness. This Mater Lachrymarum
also has been sitting all this winter of 1844-5 within the bed-
chamber of the Czar, bringing before his eyes a daughter (not
less pious) that vanished to God not less suddenly, and left
behind her a darkness not less profound. By the power of her
keys it is that Our Lady of Tears glides, a ghostly intruder,
into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless
children, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile to Mississippi.
And her, because she is the first-born of her house, and has the
widest empire, let us honor with the title of "Madonna. "
The second sister is called Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of
Sighs. She never scales the clouds, nor walks abroad upon the
winds. She wears no diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever
seen, would be neither sweet nor subtile; no man could read
their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams,
and with wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises not her
eyes; her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, droops for-
ever, forever fastens on the dust. She weeps not.
She groans
not. But she sighs inaudibly at intervals. Her sister Madonna
is oftentimes stormy and frantic, raging in the highest against
Heaven, and demanding back her darlings. But Our Lady of
Sighs never clamors, never defies, dreams not of rebellious aspira-
tions. She is humble to abjectness. Hers is the meekness that
belongs to the hopeless. Murmur she may, but it is in her sleep.
Whisper she may, but it is to herself in the twilight. Mutter
she does at times, but it is in solitary places that are desolate as
she is desolate, in ruined cities, and when the sun has gone down
to his rest. This sister is the visitor of the Pariah; of the Jew;
of the bondsman to the oar in the Mediterranean galleys; of the
English criminal in Norfolk Island, blotted out from the books
of remembrance in sweet far-off England; of the baffled penitent
reverting his eyes forever upon a solitary grave, which to him
seems the altar overthrown of some past and bloody sacrifice, on
which altar no oblations can now be availing, whether towards
pardon that he might implore, or towards reparation that he
might attempt. Every slave that at noonday looks up to the
tropical sun with timid reproach, as he points with one hand to
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THOMAS DE QUINCEY
the earth, our general mother, but for him a stepmother,—as he
points with the other hand to the Bible, our general teacher, but
against him sealed and sequestered; every woman sitting in
darkness, without love to shelter her head or hope to illumine her
solitude, because the heaven-born instincts kindling in her nature
germs of holy affections, which God implanted in her womanly
bosom, having been stifled by social necessities, now burn sul-
lenly to waste like sepulchral lamps among the ancients; every
nun defrauded of her unreturning May-time by wicked kinsmen,
whom God will judge; every captive in every dungeon; all that
are betrayed, and all that are rejected; outcasts by traditionary
law, and children of hereditary disgrace:- all these walk with
Our Lady of Sighs. She also carries a key; but she needs it
little. For her kingdom is chiefly amongst the tents of Shem,
and the houseless vagrant of every clime. Yet in the very high-
est ranks of man she finds chapels of her own; and even in
glorious England there are some that, to the world, carry their
heads as proudly as the reindeer, who yet secretly have received
her mark upon their foreheads.
But the third sister, who is also the youngest! Hush!
whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large, or
else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is
hers.
Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost be-
yond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes rising
so high might be hidden by distance. But being what they are,
they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which
she wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not for
matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for
ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground.
She is the defier of God. She also is the mother of lunacies,
and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her
power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can
approach only those in whom a profound nature has been up-
heaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles and
the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and
tempest from within. Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast
or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps
timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with incal-
culable motions, bounding, and with a tiger's leaps. She carries
no key; for though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all
doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is
Mater Tenebrarum,— Our Lady of Darkness.
## p. 4575 (#361) ###########################################
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4575
These were the Semnai Theai, or Sublime Goddesses, these
were the Eumenides, or Gracious Ladies (so called by antiquity
in shuddering propitiation) of my Oxford dreams. Madonna
spoke. She spoke by her mysterious hand. Touching my head,
she beckoned to our Lady of Sighs; and what she spoke, trans-
lated out of the signs which (except in dreams) no man reads,
was this:
―――――
"Lo! here is he whom in childhood I dedicated to my altars.
This is he that once I made my darling. Him I led astray, him
I beguiled, and from heaven I stole away his young heart to
mine. Through me did he become idolatrous; and through me
it was, by languishing desires, that he worshiped the worm,
and prayed to the wormy grave. Holy was the grave to him;
lovely was its darkness; saintly its corruption. Him, this young
idolator, I have seasoned for thee, dear gentle Sister of Sighs!
Do thou take him now to thy heart, and season him for our
dreadful sister. And thou,"-turning to the Mater Tenebrarum,
she said, "wicked sister, that temptest and hatest, do thou take
.
him from her. See that thy sceptre lie heavy on his head.
Suffer not woman and her tenderness to sit near him in his
darkness. Banish the frailties of hope, wither the relenting of
love, scorch the fountains of tears, curse him as only thou canst
curse. So shall he be accomplished in the furnace, so shall he
see the things that ought not to be seen, sights that are abom-
inable, and secrets that are unutterable. So shall he read elder
truths, sad truths, grand truths, fearful truths. So shall he rise
again before he dies. And so shall our commission be accom-
plished which from God we had,-to plague his heart until he
had unfolded the capacities of his spirit. "
SAVANNAH-LA-MAR
From 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'
GOD
OD smote Savannah-la-mar, and in one night by earthquake
removed her, with all her towers standing and population
sleeping, from the steadfast foundations of the shore to the
coral floors of ocean. And God said:-"Pompeii did I bury and
conceal from men through seventeen centuries; this city I will
bury, but not conceal. She shall be a monument to men of my
mysterious anger, set in azure light through generations to come;
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THOMAS DE QUINCEY
for I will enshrine her in a crystal dome of my tropic seas. "
This city therefore, like a mighty galleon with all her apparel
mounted, streamers flying, and tackling perfect, seems floating
along the noiseless depths of ocean; and oftentimes in glassy
calms, through the translucid atmosphere of water that now
stretches like an air-woven awning above the silent encampment,
mariners from every clime look down into her courts and ter-
races, count her gates, and number the spires of her churches.
She is one ample cemetery, and has been for many a year; but
in the mighty calms that brood for weeks over tropic latitudes,
she fascinates the eye with a Fata Morgana revelation as of
human life still subsisting, in submarine asylums sacred from
the storms that torment our upper air.
Thither, lured by the loveliness of cerulean depths, by the
peace of human dwellings privileged from molestation, by the
gleam of marble altars sleeping in everlasting sanctity, often-
times in dreams did I and the Dark Interpreter cleave the
watery veil that divided us from her streets. We looked into
the belfries, where the pendulous bells were waiting in vain for
the summons which should awaken their marriage peals; together
we touched the mighty organ keys, that sang no jubilates for the
ear of Heaven, that sang no requiems for the ear of human
sorrow; together we searched the silent nurseries, where the
children were all asleep, and had been asleep through five gen-
erations. "They are waiting for the heavenly dawn," whispered
the Interpreter to himself: "and when that comes, the bells and
the organs will utter a jubilate repeated by the echoes of Para-
dise. " Then turning to me he said: "This is sad, this is pit-
eous; but less would not have sufficed for the purpose of God.
Look here. Put into a Roman clepsydra one hundred drops of
water; let these run out as the sands in an hour-glass, every
drop measuring the hundredth part of a second, so that each
shall represent but the three-hundred-and-sixty-thousandth part of
an hour. Now count the drops as they race along; and when
the fiftieth of the hundred is passing, behold! forty-nine are not,
because already they have perished; and fifty are not, because
they are yet to come. You see therefore how narrow, how incal-
culably narrow, is the true and actual present. Of that time
which we call the present, hardly a hundredth part but belongs
either to a past which has fled, or to a future which is still on
the wing. It has perished, or it is not born. It was, or it is
―――――――――
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THOMAS DE QUINCEY
4577
not. Yet even this approximation to the truth is infinitely false.
For again subdivide that solitary drop, which only was found to
represent the present, into a lower series of similar fractions, and
the actual present which you arrest measures now but the thirty-
six-millionth of an hour; and so by infinite declensions the true
and very present, in which only we live and enjoy, will vanish
into a mote of a mote, distinguishable only by a heavenly vision.
Therefore the present, which only man possesses, offers less
capacity for his footing than the slenderest film that ever spider
twisted from her womb. Therefore also even this incalculable
shadow from the narrowest pencil of moonlight is more transitory
than geometry can measure, or thought of angel can overtake.
The time which is, contracts into a mathematic point; and even
that point perishes a thousand times before we can utter its
birth. All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infi-
nite in its velocity of flight towards death. But in God there
is nothing finite; but in God there is nothing transitory; but
in God there can be nothing that tends to death. Therefore it
follows that for God there can be no present. The future is
the present of God, and to the future it is that he sacrifices the
human present. Therefore it is that he works by earthquake.
Therefore it is that he works by grief. Oh, deep is the plow-
ing of earthquake! Oh, deep" — (and his voice swelled like a
sanctus rising from the choir of a cathedral) — "Oh, deep is the
plowing of grief! But oftentimes less would not suffice for the
agriculture of God. Upon a night of earthquake he builds a
thousand years of pleasant habitations for man. Upon the sorrow
of an infant he raises oftentimes from human intellects glorious
vintages that could not else have been. Less than these fierce
plowshares would not have stirred the stubborn soil. The one is
needed for earth, our planet,- for earth itself as the dwelling-
place of man; but the other is needed yet oftener for God's
mightiest instrument,-yes" (and he looked solemnly at myself),
"is needed for the mysterious children of the earth! "
VIII-287
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THOMAS DE QUINCEY
THE BISHOP OF BEAUVAIS AND JOAN OF ARC
From Miscellaneous Essays'
B'
ISHOP OF BEAUVAIS! thy victim died in fire upon a scaffold
thou upon a down bed. But for the departing minutes of
life, both are oftentimes alike. At the farewell crisis, when
the gates of death are opening, and flesh is resting from its
struggles, oftentimes the tortured and torturer have the same
truce from carnal torment; both sink together into sleep; together
both, sometimes, kindle into dreams. When the mortal mists
were gathering fast upon you two, bishop and shepherd girl,—
when the pavilions of life were closing up their shadowy curtains
about you, let us try, through the gigantic glooms, to decipher
the flying features of your separate visions.
The shepherd girl that had delivered France-she from her
dungeon, she from her baiting at the stake, she from her duel
with fire, as she entered her last dream saw Domrémy, saw the
fountain of Domrémy, saw the pomp of forests in which her
childhood had wandered. That Easter festival which man had
denied to her languishing heart, that resurrection of springtime
which the darkness of dungeons had intercepted from her, hun-
gering after the glorious liberty of forests, were by God given
back into her hands, as jewels that had been stolen from her by
robbers. With those, perhaps (for the minutes of dreams can
stretch into ages), was given back to her by God the bliss of
childhood. By special privilege, for her might be created in this
farewell dream, a second childhood, innocent as the first; but
not, like that, sad with the gloom of a fearful mission in the
rear. The mission had now been fulfilled. The storm was
weathered, the skirts even of that mighty storm were drawing
off. The blood that she was to reckon for had been exacted; the
tears that she was to shed in secret had been paid to the last.
The hatred to herself in all eyes had been faced steadily, had
been suffered, had been survived.
