Gents Mag 1857 part 2 p.109
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Gentleman's Magazine 1857 part 2 p.109
by Judeam palms," silent and solemn as a spiritual presence, and vanishing in dimness and thick darkness, as the scenery of his dream is changed into the lamp-light of a London night, where he walks, with the lost one he had wept for walking again with him, just as he had done "eighteen years before, along the endless terraces of Oxford-street." With great truth "Elia" tells us, in one his excellent essays, the "degree of the soul's ceativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking." The "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" were published in a small volume, which sold well, and was for a few years a somewhat scarce book. Besides this reprint from the pages of the "London," we believe that the novel of "Walladmor," "Klosterheim," and The Logic of Political Economy," are the only works of Mr. De Quincey which his readers have had access to in the form of separate publications. His other voluminous writings were contributed to various periodical works, - to the "Encyclopedia Britannica," the "North British Review," the "London Magazine," the Magazines of Tait and Blackwood, and to "Hogg's Instructor." Many, possibly, may have been buried in repositories less popular than those which we know of and have named. In any cse, it is quite time that essays which are for the most part possessed of many of the best and rarest qualities of literature - effusions of one of the subtlest intellects and most powerful imaginations of the age - should be collected and preserved, before the task becomes in reality, as the author himself is said to have once declared it to be, "absolutely, insuperably, and for ever impossible." The five volumes now before us are a good beginning of the work which, according to Mr. De Quincey, neither "the archangel Gabriel nor his multipotent adversary" durst attempt. It is a good beginning of the work; for though many a choice paper remains of necessity not gathered in at present, the selection has been made in such a manner as to embrace examples, collected without regard to time or place of original publication, of most of Mr. De Quincey's great and various literary powers. After the "Confessions of an Opium-Eater," the brief biographies of Coleridge and Wordsworth, which made their first appearance more than twenty years ago in "Tait's Magazine," will be likely to attract, and they will assuredly well reward, the attention of the reader. Of these illustrious writers, nothing equal in merit to Mr. De Quincey's essays has been ever before written in so small a space. Enjoying an intimacy with them, probably the more unreserved because of that very depth and wide range of sympathy with their respective modes of thought which made him the most congenial of all companions to them, and the most competent of all commentators on their genius to us, he has, in these papers, produced the truest and most interesting estimation of them that we ever have seen, or ever expect to see. His reverence for them had grown with his own growth:- "At a period," he tells us, "when neither the one nor the other writer was valued by the public - both having a long warfare to accomplish of contumely and ridicule, before they could rise into their present estimation - I found in these poems (Lyrical Ballads) 'the ray of a new morning,' and an absolute revelation of untrodden worlds, teeming with power and beauty as yet unsuspected amongst men."It was, moreover, a crowning interest in the case of Coleridge, to hear, a few years later, that he "had applied his whole mind to metaphysics and psychology," which was at that time De Quincey's own pursuit. In his delineations of these extraordinary men, whom he studied with a zeal pro- |
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