Beauties selected from the writings of Thomas De Quincey ...

Preface

The writings of Thomas de Quincey occupy more than a score of volumes.

Comparatively few persons have leisure for the pereusal of so many miscellaneous works by the same author ; yet, all who pretend to a knowledge of English Literature sliould be familiar with the chefs-d'oeuvre of De Quincey — one of the greatest masters of the English Language.

His autobiography, scattered through many volumes, is here collected and so arranged as to give a complete view of his early life and his peculiar character. The other selections from his various works, furnish striking examples of the pathetic and the humorous, the quaint and the ludicrous, the serious and the sublime. The miscellaneous nature of De Quincey's writings renders them specially fit for this kind of eclecticism. It is hoped that the present volume will prove an acceptable addition to our current literature, and induce a desire for a still farther acquaintance with the elegant author.

Contents

DE QUINCEY'S EARLY LIFE I. The De Quinceys n. Childhood

III. Introduction to the World of Strife .

rV. I AM Introduced to the Warfare of a Public School V. I Enter the World . . . .

I. The De Quinceys

This family, which split into three national divisions, — English, French, and American, — was originally Norwegian ; and in the year of our Christian era One Thousand spoke the most undeniable Norse. Throughout the eleventh century, the heads of this family held themselves in readiness to join any likely leader; and did join William the Norman.

This Norwegian family having assumed a territorial denomination from the district or village of Quincey, in the province now called Normandy, transplanted themselves to England; where, and subsequently by marriage in Scotland, they ascended to the highest rank in both kingdoms, and held the highest offices open to a subject. Early in the seventh century, when it seemed likely that the interests of a particular family would be entangled with the principles at issue, multitudes became anxious to evade the strife by retiring to the asylum of forests. Amongst these was one branch of the De Quinceys.

Enamored of Democracy, this family, laying aside the aristocratic De attached to their name, settled in New-England where they subsequently rose, through long public services, to the highest moral rank — as measured by all possible expressions of public esteem that are consistent with the simplicities of the great republic. Mr. Josiah Quincy, as head of this distinguished family, is appealed to as one who takes rank by age and large political experience, with the founders of the American Union.

Another branch of the same family had, at a much earlier period, settled in France. Finally, the squires and squireens natually remained in England. The last of them who enjoyed any relics, whatever, of that ancient territorial domain, was an elder kinsman of my father. I never had the honor of seeing him ; in fact, it was impossible that I should have such an honor, since he died during the American war, which war had closed, although it had not paid its bills, some time before my birth. He enacted the part of squireen, I have been told, creditably enough in a village belonging either to the county of Leicester, Nottingham, or Rutland. With his death, a new era commenced for this historical family, which now, (as if expressly to irritate its ambition) finds itself distributed amongst three mighty nations, — France, America, and England, and precisely those three that are usually regarded as the leaders of civilization.

n.

CHILDHOOD.

My father was a merchant ; not in the sense of Scotland, where it means a retail dealer, one, for instance, who sells groceries in a cellar, but in the English sense, a sense rigorously exclusive ; that is, he was a man engaged in foreign commerce, and no other ; therefore, in wholesale commerce, and no other. He died at an early age, leaving to his family, then consisting of a wife and six children, an unburdened estate producing exactly sixteen hundred pounds a year. Naturally, therefore, at the date of my narrative, — whilst he was still living, — he had an income very much larger, from the addition of current commercial profits. Now, to any man who is acquainted with commercial life as it exists in England, it will readily occur that in an opulent English family of that class — opulent though not emphatically rich in a mercantile estimate — the domestic economy is pretty sure to move upon a scale of liberality altogether unknown amongst the corresponding orders in foreign nations.

We, the children of the house, stood, in fact, upon the very happiest tier in the social scaffolding for all good influences. The prayer of Agur — "Give me neither poverty nor riches" — was realized for us. That blessing we had, being neither too high nor too low. High enough we were to see models of good manners, of self-respect, and of simple dignity ; obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes. Grateful also to this hour I am, that, amidst luxuries in all things else, we were trained to a Spartan simplicity of diet — that we fared, in fact, very much less sumptuously than the servants. And if (after the model of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius) I should return thanks to Providence for all the separate blessings of my early situation, these four I would single out as worthy of special commemoration — that I lived in a rustic solitude ; that this solitude was in England ; that my infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of sisters, and not by horrid, pugilistic brothers ; finally, that I and they were dutiful and loving members of a pure, holy, and magnificent church.

The earliest incidents in my life, which left stings in my memory so as to be remembered at this day, were two, and both before I could have completed my second year; namely, first, a remarkable dream of terrific grandeur about a favorite nurse, which is interesting to myself for this reason — that it demonstrates my dreaming tendencies to have been constitutional, and not dependent upon laudanum ; and, secondly, the fact of having connected a profound sense of pathos with the reappearance, very early in the spring, of some crocuses. This I mention as inexplicable : for such annual resurrections of plants and flowers affect us only as memorials, or suggestions of some higher change, and therefore in connection with the idea of death ; yet of death I could, at that time, have had no experience whatever.

This, however, I was speedily to acquire. My two eldest sisters — eldest of three then living, and also elder "than myself — were summoned to an early death. The first who died was Jane, about two years older than myself. She was three and a half, I one and a half, more or less, by some trifle that I do not recollect. But death was then scarcely intelligible to me, and I could not so properly be said to suffer sorrow as a sad perplexity.

So passed away from earth one of those three sisters that made up my nursery playmates ; and so did my acquaintance (if such it could be called) commence with mortality. Yet, in fact I knew little more of mortality than that Jane had disappeared. She had gone away ; but perhaps she would come back. Happy interval of heaven-born ignorance ! Gracious immunity of infancy from sorrow disproportioned to its strength ! I was sad for Jane's absence. But still ia my heart I trusted that she would come again. Summer and winter came again — crocuses and roses ; why not little Jane ?

Thus easily was healed, then, the first wound in my infant heart. Not so the second. For thou, dear, noble Elizabeth, around whose ample brow, as often as thy sweet countenance rises upon the darkness, I fancy a tiara of light or a gleaming aureola in token of thy premature intellectual grandeur, — thou whose head, for its superb developments, was the astonishment of science, — thou next, but after an interval of happy years, thou also wert summoned away from our nursery ; and the night, which for me gathered upon that event, ran after my steps far into life ; and perhaps at this day I resemble little for good or for ill that which else I should have been. Pillar of fire that didst go before me to guide and to quicken, — pillar of darkness, when thy countenance was turned away to God, that didst too truly reveal to my dawning fears the secret shadow of death, — by what mysterious gravitation was it that iny heart had been drawn to thine ?

" Love, the holy sense.

Best gift of God, in thee was most intense.'*

It is needless to pursue, circumstantially, the course of that sickness which carried off my leader and companion. She (according to my recollection at this moment,) was just as near to nine as I to six. And perhaps this natural precedency in authority of years and judgment, united to the tender humility with which she declined to assert it, had been amongst the fascinations of her presence. I grieved that my sister should lie in bed ; I grieved still more to hear her moan. But all this appeared to me no more than as a night of trouble, on which the dawn would soon arise. moment of darkness and delirium, when the elder nurse awakened me from that delusion, and launched God's thunderbolt at my heart in the assurance that my sister MUST die ! Rightly it is said of utter, utter misery, that it " can not be remembered.'''^ Itself, as a rememberable thing, is swallowed up in its own chaos. Blank anarchy and confusion of mind fell upon me. Deal and blind I was as I reeled under the revelation. I

* " I stood in unimaginable trance

And agony which can not be remembered."

—Speech of Alhadra, in Coleridge'' s Remorse.

wish not to recall the circumstances of that time, when my agony was at its height, and hers, in another sense, was approaching. Enough it is to say that all was soon over ; and the morning of that day had at last arrived which looked down upon her innocent face, sleeping the sleep from which there is no awaking, and upon me sorrowing the sorrow for which there is no consolation.

On the day after my sister's death, whilst the sweet temple 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 possibility. But grief, even in a child, hates the light, and shrinks from human eyes. The house was large enough to have two staircases ; and by one of these I knew that about midday, when all would be quiet, (for the servants dined at one o'clock), I could steal up into her chamber. I imagine that it was about an hour after 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 ascended through all the stories, no echo ran along the silent walls. Then, turning round, I sought my sister's face. But the bed had been moved, and the back was now turned towards myself. Nothing met my eyes but one large window, wide open, through which the sun of midsummer, at midday, 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.

From the gorgeous sunlight I turned around 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, — that might be the same ; but the frozen eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal from beneath them, the marble lips, the stiffening 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 saddest that ear ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand centuries. Many times since, upon summer days, when the sun is about the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow, solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell : it is in this world the one great audible symbol of eternity. And three times in my life have I happened to hear the same sound in the same circumstances — namely, when standing between an open window and a dead body on a summer day.

Instantly, when my ear caught this vast ^olian intonation, when my eye filled with the golden fulness of life, the pomps of the heavens above, or the glory of the flowers below, and turning when it settled upon the frost which overspread my sister's face, instantly a trance fell upon rao. 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 billows 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 mo ; some mighty relation between God and death dimly struggled to evolve itself from the dreadful antagonism bet'^veen them ; shadowy meanings even yet continued to exercise and torment, in dreams, the deciphering oracle within me. I slept — for how long I cannot sav: slowly I recovered my self-possession ; and when" I woke, found myself standing, as before, close to my sister's bed.

1 have reason to believe that a very long interval had elapsed during this wandering or suspension of my perfect mind. When I returned to myself, there was a foot (or I fancied so) on the stairs. I was alarmed ; for, if any body had detected me, means would have been 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 for ever ; tainted thus with fear was that farewell sacred to love and grief, to perfect love and to grief that could not be healed.

At this time, and under this impulse of rapacious grief, that grasped at what it could not obtain, the faculty of shaping images in the distance out of slight elements, and grouping them after the yearnings of the heart, grew upon me in morbid excess. And I recall at the present moment one instance of that sort which may show how merely shadows, or a gleam of brightness, or nothing at all, could furnish a sufficient basis for this creative faculty.

On Sunday mornings I went with the rest of my family to church : it was a church on the ancient model of England, having aisles, galleries,* organ, all things ancient and venerable, and the proportions majestic. Here, whilst the congregation knelt through the long litany, as often as we came to that passage, so beautiful amongst many that are so, where God is supplicated on behalf of " all sick persons and young children," and that he would " show his pity upon all prisoners and captives," I wept in secret ; and raising my streaming eyes to the upper windows of the galleries, saw, on days when the sun was shining, a spectacle as affecting as ever prophet can have beheld. The sides of the windows were rich with storied glass ; through the deep purples and crimsons streamed the golden light ; emblazonries of heavenly illumination (from the sun) mingling with the earthly emblazonries (from art and its gorgeous coloring) of what is grandest in man. There were the apostles that had trampled upon earth, and the glories of earth, out of celestial love to man.

* " Galleries.'' — These, though condemned on some grounds by tho restorers of authentic church architecture, have, nevertheless, this one advantage — that, when the heiffht of a church is that dimension which most of all expresses its sacred character, galleries expound and interpret that height.

Tliere were the martyrs that had borne witness to the truth through flames, through torments, and through armies of fierce, insulting faces. There were the saints who, under intolerable pangs, had glorified God by meek submission to his will. And all the time, whilst tliis tumult of sublime memorials held on as the deep chords from some accompaniment in the bass, I saw through the wide central field of the window, where the glass was w^colored, white, fleecy clouds sailing over the azure depths of the sky : were it but a fragment or a hint of such a cloud, immediately under the flash of my sorrow-haunted eye, it grew and shaped itself into visions of beds with white lawny curtains ; and in the beds lay sick children, dying children, that were tossing in anguish, and weeping clamorously for death. God, for some mysterious reason, could not suddenly release them from their pain ; but he sufi'ered the beds, as it seemed, to rise slowly through the clouds ; slowly the beds ascended into the chambers of the air ; slowly, also, his arms descended from the heavens, that he and his young children, whom in Palestine, once and for ever, he had blessed, though they must pass slowly through the dreadful chasm of separation, might yet meet the sooner.

These visions were self-sustained. These visions needed not that any sound should speak to me, or music mould my feelings. The hint from the litany, the fragment from the clouds, — those and the storied windows were sufficient. But not the less the blare of the tumultuous organ wrought its own separate creations. And oftentimes in anthems, when the mighty instrument threw its vast colunms of sound, fierce yet melodious, over the voices of the choir, — high in arches, when it seemed to rise, surmounting and overriding the strife of the vocal parts, and gathering by strong coercion the total storm into unity, — sometimes I seemed to rise and walk triumphantly upon those cloud^ which, but a moment before, I had looked up to as mementoes of prostate sorrow ; yes, sometimes under the transfigurations of music, felt of grief itself as of a fiery chariot for mounting victoriously above the causes of grief.

God speaks to children, also, in dreams, and by the oracles that lurk in darkness. But in solitude, above all things, when made vocal to the meditative heart by the truths and services of a national church, God holds with children " communion undisturbed." Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone ; all leave it alone. Even a little child has a dread, whispering consciousness, that, if he should be summoned to travel into God's presence, no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the hand, nor mother to carry him in her arms, nor little sister to share his trepidations. King and priest, warrior and maiden, philosopher and child, all must walk those mighty galleries alone. The solitude, therefore, which in this world appalls or fascinates a child's heart, is but the echo of a far deeper solitude, through which already he has passed, and of another solitude deeper still, through which he has to pass : reflex of one solitude — prefiguration of another.

burden of solitude, that cleavest to man through every stage of his being ! in his birth, which has been — > in his life, which is — in his death, which shall be — « mighty and essential solitude ! that wast, and art, and art to be ; thou broodest, like the Spirit of God moving upon the surface of the deeps, over every heart that sleeps in the nurseries of Christendom. Like the vast laboratory of the air, which, seeming to be nothing, or less than the shadow of a shade, hides within itself the principles of all things, solitude for the meditating child is the Agrippa's mirror of the unseen universe. Deep is the solitude of millions who, with hearts welling forth love, have none to love them. Deep is the solitude of those who, under secret griefs, have none to pity them. Deep is the solitude of those who, fighting with doubts or darkness, have none to counsel them. But deeper than the deepest of these solitudes is that which broods over childhood under the passion of sorrow — bringing before it, at intervals, the final solitude which watches for it, and is waiting for it within the gates of death. mighty and essential solitude, that wast, and art, and art to be, thy kingdom is made perfect in the grave ; but even over those that keep watch outside the grave, like myself, an infant of six years old, thou stretchest out a sceptre of fascination.

Well it was for me that, at this crisis, I was summoned to put on the harness of life by commencing my classical studies under one of my guardians, a clergyman of the English Church, and (so far as regarded Ijatin) a most accomplished scholar.

At the very commencement of my new studies there

happened an incident which afflicted me much for a

short time, and left behind a gloomy impression, that

suffering and wretchedness were diffused amongst all creatures tliat breathe. A person had given me a kitten. There are three animals which seem, beyond all others, to reflect the beauty of human infancy in two of its elements — namely, joy and guileless innocence, though less in its third element of simplicity, because that requires language for its full expression : these three animals are the kitten, the lamb, and the fawn. Other creatures may be as happy, but they do not show it so much. Great was the love which poor silly I had for this little kitten ; but, as I left home at ten in the morning, and did not return till near five in the afternoon, I was obliged, with some anxiety, to throw it for those seven hours upon its own discretion, as infirm a basis for reasonable hope as could be imagined. I did not wish the kitten, indeed, at all less foolish than it was, except just when I was leaving home, and then its exceeding folly gave me a pang. Just about that time, it happened that we had received, as a present from Leicestershire, a fine young Newfoundland dog, who was under a cloud of disgrace for crimes of his youthful blood committed in that county. My poor kitten, it was supposed, had been engaged in some playful trespass upon Turk's property, and Turk laid her dead on the spot. It is impossible to describe my grief when the case was made known to me at five o'clock in the evening, by a man's holding out the little creature dead : she that I had left so full of glorious life — life which even in a kitten is infinite, — was now stretched in motionless repose. I remember that there was a large coal-stack in the yard. I dropped my Latin books, sat down upon a huge block of coal, and burst into a passion of tears.

The new intercourse with my guardian, and the changes of scene which naturally it led to, were of use in weaning my mind from the mere disease which threatened it in case I had been left any longer to my total solitude. But out of these changes grew an incident which restored my grief, though in a more troubled shape, and now for the first time associated with something like remorse and deadly anxiety. I can safely say that this was my earliest trespass, and perhaps a venial one, all things considered. Nobody ever discovered it ; and but for my own frankness it would not be known to this day. But that I could not know ; and for years, — that is, from seven or earlier up to ten, — such was my simplicity, that I lived in constant terror. This, though it revived my grief, did me probably great service ; because it was no longer a state of languishhig desire tending to torpor, but of feverish irritation and gnawing care, that kept alive the activity of my understanding.

The case was this : — It happened that I had now, and commencing with my first introduction to Latin studies, a large weekly allowance of pocket-money, — too large for my age, but safely intrusted to myself, who never spent or desired to spend one fraction of it upon anything but books. But all proved too little for my colossal schemes. Had the Vatican, the Bodleian, and the Bibliotheque du Roi, been all emptied into one collection for my private gratification, little progress would have been made towards content in this particu lar craving. Very soon I had run ahead of my allowance, and was about three guineas deep in debt. There I paused ; for deep anxiety* now began to oppress me

2S BEAUTIES OF DE QUINCEY.

as to the course in which this mysterious (and indeed guilty) current of debt would finally flow. For the present it was frozen up ; but I had some reason for thinking that Christmas thawed all debts whatsoever, and set them in motion towards innumerable pockets. Now m?/ debt would be thawed with all the rest ; and in what direction would it flow ? There was no river that would carry it off to sea; to somebody's pocket it would beyond a doubt make its way ; and who was that somebody ? This question haunted me forever. Christmas had come, Christmas had gone, and I heard nothing of the three guineas. My private " little account" had in fact flowed homewards at Christmas, not (as I anticipated) in the shape of an independent current, but as a little tributary rill, that was lost in the waters of some more important river. This I now know, but could not then have known with any certainty. Had I been less ignorant, I should have proposed to mortgage my weekly allowance for the debt, or to form a sinking fund for redeeming it; for the loeekly sum was nearly five per cent, on tlie entire debt.. But I had a mysterious awe of ever alluding to it. This arose from my want of some confidential friend ; whilst my grief pointed continually to the remembrance, that so it had not always been. I durst ask no counsel ; there was no one to ask. Possibly my sister could have given me none in a case which neither of us should have understood, and where to seek for information from others would have been at once to betray the whole reason for seeking it. But, if no advice, she would have given me her pity, and the expression of her endless love ; and, with the relief of sympathy.

that heals for a season all distresses, she would have given me that exquisite luxury — the knowledge that, having parted with my secret, yet also I had not parted with it, since it was in the |Aj^er only of one that could much less betray me than I could betray myself. At this time, — that is, about the year when I ^suffered most, — I was reading Cassar. 0, laurelled scholar, sunbright intellect, " foremost man of all this world," how often did I make out of thy immortal volume a pillow to support my wearied brow, as at evening, on my homeward road, I used to turn into some silent field, where I might give way unobserved to the reveries which besieged me ! I wondered, and found no end of wondering, at the revolution that one short year had made in my happiness. I wondered that such billows could overtake me. At the beginning of that year, how radiantly happy ! At the end, how insupportably alone !

** Into wliat depth thou seest, From what height fallen."

Forever I searched the abysses with some wandering thoughts unintelligible to myself. Forever I dallied with some obscure notion, how my sister's love might be made in some dim way available for delivering me from misery ; or else how the misery I had suffered and was sufi'ering might be made, in some way equally dim, the ransom for winning back her love.