Gents Mag 1857 part 2 p.108
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Gentleman's Magazine 1857 part 2 p.108
account of all that had been most interesting in his life, both with regard to outward influences and inward development, up to the very time at which the "Confessions" were composed. The early loss of an accomplished father, and subsequent contention with an unaccomodating guardian, plunged the precocious boy into "a sea of troubles," from which he only escaped at last, tempest-tost, and sorely hurt in body and in mind. The description of his sufferings during that period of his youth in which the worst of his privations were experienced in is painfully eloquent, not merely because it discloses an appalling stress of hardest physical ills, but also because it gives us more than one accidental glimpse of the singularly loving, sensitive, and thoughtful nature which the poor boy bore with him in the bitterness of his destitution. By a hollow reconciliation with his guardian, he was eventually rescued from that perilous state, and enabled to return to the studies which, even at age, he passionately loved. The wish that he had faithfully clung to was gratified by a residence at Oxford, where, amongst the multitude of his enjoyments, not the least, assuredly, arose out of the intimacy which he formed with John Wilson. Two or three years afterwards he is found tenanting a cottage at Grasmere - a cottage which Wordsworth had before inhabited - the "white cottage, embowered with flowering shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession of flowers upon the walls and clustering around the windows, through all the months of spring, summer, and autumn, - beginning, in fact, with May roses, and ending with jasmine," - which he has described with so much beauty in the "Confessions," and which it was his lot to taste by turns the pleasures and dread pains his opium-eating brought. His half-playful and half-loving picture of this home, rich only in its books and beauty, is as faithful as it it is charming. In this "humble cot," placed upon "the calmest, fairest spot on earth," he resided twenty years, enjoying the society of the many gifted men who were then living in the lake-country, studying subjects of philosophy from which most of his comntemporaries would have shrunk, drinking his ruby-coloured laudanum freely, dreaming glorious dreams of loveliness and awe unspeakable, and pouring forth the treasures of his rich intelligence in contributions to the periodical press. But of the peculiar force and splendour of the opium-dreams, it should be remembered that scarcely anything can be attributed to the opium. It might, by its specific influence, assist in concentrating and increasing activity, but it would add nothing either to the organic power of the individual, or to the element of new combinations which might be already hoarded in his memory. Yet it is out of these, in their relation of material and constructive faculty, that any new creation must proceed. Give the drug, in quantity sufficient to produce sleep, to an ignorant, unimaginative man, and you will probably get from him in his dreams nothing grander than Charles Lamb's "Ghost of a Fish-wife;" but give it, under the same condition, to Coleridge, and his imagination would have bodied forth the "sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice" of Kubla-Kahn, the stately palace - "Where Alph, the sacred river, ran, Through caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea." Or give it to De Quincey, and he shall dream of some Sabbath-scene of loveliness expanding into the magnificence of mountains raised to more than Alpine height, with interspace between them of savannahs and forest-lawns, and some unforgotten grave amidst it; or some solitary well-remembered form of one whom he had lost in early youth, "sitting upon a stone shaded |
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