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language; nay, purely impassioned prose as 'The Confessions' and 'Suspiria de Profundis' is scarcely to be found in any language; but the narration of dreams, while exposed to all its difficulties, is invested with superadded difficulties, arising from the shifting, visionary character of the world in which its scenes are laid, 'where a single false note, a single word in a wrong key, will ruin the whole music.' De Quincey's habit of dreaming was constitutional, and displayed itself even in infancy. He was naturally extremely sensitive, and of a melancholy temperament; he was so passionately fond of undisturbed repose, that he willingly submitted to any amount of contempt if he could only be let alone; he had that weird faculty which is forever peopling the darkness with myriads of phantoms; then came the afflictions of childhood--that night, which ran after his footsteps far into life--and finally came opium, which is a specific 'for exalting the dream scenery, for deepening its shadows, and, above all, for strengthening the sense of its fearful realities:' all these allied characteristics and circumstances, combined with his vast intellectual capacity, imparted to De Quincey's dreams a terrific grandeur. They were sometimes frightful, sometimes sublime, but always accompanied by anxiety and melancholy gloom. 'I seemed,' says he, 'every night to descend--not metaphorically, but literally to descend--into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever reascend. Nor did I, by awaking, feel that I had reascended. This I do not dwell upon; because the state of gloom which attended these gorgeous spectacles, amounting, at least, to utter darkness, as of some suicidal despondency, cannot be approached by words.' De Quincey's most elaborate dreams are: 'The Daughter of Lebanon,' 'Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow,' 'The Vision of Sudden Death,' and 'Dream Fugue.' The last named is the most perfect in its conception, the most powerful in its execution. It is too long to quote, too sublime to be marred by abbreviation. If any one desires to see what can be done with the English language in an 'effort to wrestle with the utmost power of music,' let him read that dream. We shall, meanwhile, present one from the year 1820, and leave the reader to form his own estimate of it: 'The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in dreams--a music of preparation and of
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