n as welcome as they are rare.

II
THOMAS DE QUINCEY

"In thoughts from the visions of the night when deep sleep falleth on
men."--JOB.

I

Although a passion for the Earth is a prevalent note in the character of
the literary Vagabond, yet while harking to the call of the country, he
is by no means deaf to the call of the town. With the exception of
Thoreau, who seemed to have been insensible to any magic save that of the
road and woodland, our literary Vagabonds have all felt and confessed to
the spell of the city. It was not, as in the case of Lamb and Dickens,
the one compelling influence, but it was an influence of no small
potency.

The first important event in De Quincey's life was the roaming life on
the hillside of North Wales; the second, the wanderings in "stony-hearted
Oxford Street." Later on the spell of London faded away, and a longing
for the country possessed him once more. But the spell of London was
important in shaping his literary life, and must not be under-estimated.
Mention has been made of Lamb and Dickens, to whom the life of the town
meant so much, and whose inspiration they could not forgo without a pang.
But these men were not attracted in the same way as De Quincey. What
drew De Quincey to London was its mystery; whereas it was the stir and
colour of the crowded streets that stirred the imagination of the two
Charles's. We scarcely realize as we read of those harsh experiences,
those bitter struggles with poverty and loneliness, that the man is
writing of his life in London, is speaking of some well-known
thoroughfares. It is like viewing a familiar scene in the moonlight,
when all looks strange and weird. A faint but palpable veil of phantasy
seemed to shut off De Quincey from the outside world. In his most
poignant passages the voice has a ghostly ring; in his most realistic
descriptions there is a dreamlike unreality. A tender and sensitive soul
in his dealings with others, there are no tears in his writings. One has
only to compare the early recorded struggles of Dickens with those of De
Quincey to feel the difference between the two temperaments. The one
passionately concrete, the other dispassionately abstract. De Quincey
will take some heartfelt episode and deck it out in so elaborate a
panoply of rhetoric that the human element seems to have vanished.
Beautiful as are many of the passages describing the pathetic outcast
Ann, the reader is too