to come. These are the vast
acres over which human pride must henceforth soar,--acres that have
been, through the mighty realizations of human genius, built out into
the mysterious ocean-depths of chaotic Nature, and that have in some
measure bridged over infinite chasms in thought, and by just so far have
extended the fluctuating boundaries of human empire. And for De Quincey
himself, in view of that monumental structure which rises above the
shattered wrecks of his poor, frail body, as above the mummied dust of
Egyptian kings remain eternally the pyramids which they wrought in their
lifetime, we find it impossible to cherish a single regret, that,
possibly, by the treasonable slip of a predecessor, he may have been
robbed of an earldom,--or even that, during a life which by some years
overlapped the average allotment to humanity, and through which were
daily accumulating the most splendid results in the very highest
departments of philosophy and art, these accumulations nevertheless went
on without any notable recognition from a court the most liberal in all
Europe; no badge of outward knighthood coming to him through all these
years, as formerly to Sir Thomas Browne for his subtile meditations, and
to Sir William Hamilton for his philosophic speculations. The absence of
such merely _nominal_ titles excites in us no deep regret; there is in
them little that is monumental, and the pretty tinsel, with which they
gild monuments already based on substantial worth, is easily, and
without a sigh, exchanged for that everlasting sunshine reflected from
the loving remembrances of human hearts.

But at the same time that we so willingly dispense with these nominal
conditions in the case of De Quincey,--though, assuredly, there was
never a man upon earth whom these conditions, considered as aerial
hieroglyphs of the most regal pomp and magnificence, would more
consistently fit,--we cannot thus easily set aside those other outward
conditions of affluence and respectability, which, by their presence or
absence, so materially shape and mould the life, and particularly in its
earliest tendencies and impulses,--in that season of immature
preparation when the channels of habit are in the process of formation,
and while yet a marvellous uncertainty hangs and broods over the
beginnings of life, as over the infant rivulet yet dandled and tended by
its mountain-nurses. For, although there are certain elements which
rigidly and by a fores