secret recesses of human nature hitherto sealed up in darkness. Along
that border-line by which the glimmerings of consciousness are, as by
the thinnest, yet the most impervious veil, separated from the regions
of the unexplored and the undefinable, De Quincey walked familiarly and
with privileged eye and ear. Many a nebulous mass of hieroglyphically
inscribed meanings did he--this Champollion, defying all human enigmas,
this Herschel, or Lord Rosse, forever peering into the obscure chasms
and yawning abysses of human astronomy--resolve into orderly
constellations, that, once and for all, through his telescopic
interpretation and enlargement, were rendered distinct and commensurable
amongst men. The conditions of his power in this respect are
psychologically inseparable from the remarkable conditions of his life,
two of which are especially to be noticed. First, a ruling disposition
towards meditation, constituting him, in the highest sense of the word,
a poet. Secondly, the peculiar qualities which this singular mental
constitution derived from his use of opium,--qualities which, although
they did not increase, or even give direction to his meditative power,
at least magnified it, both optically, as to its visual capacity, and
creatively, as to its constructive faculty. These two conditions, each
concurrent with the other in its ruling influence, impart to his life a
degree of psychological interest which belongs to no other on record.
Nor is this all. The reader knows how often a secondary interest will
attach to the mightiest of conquerors or to the wisest of sovereigns,
who is not merely in himself, and through his own deeds, magnificent,
but whose glory is many times repeated and piled up by numerous
reverberations of itself from a contemporary race of Titans. Thus,
doubtless, Charles V., although himself King of Spain, Germany, the
Netherlands, and a portion of Italy, gloried in the sublime empery of
the Turkish Solyman, as by some subtile connection of fate sympathetic
with his own. A secondary interest of this nature belongs to the life of
De Quincey,--a life which inclosed, as an island, a whole period of
English literature, one, too, which in activity and originality is
unsurpassed by any other, including the names of Scott and Dickens, of
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, and Southey, of Moore, Byron, Shelley, and
Keats. His connection with very many of these was not simply that of
coexistence, but also of familia