een certainty determine its course, as, for
instance, an extraordinary vantage-height of source, securing for it the
force and swiftness of a torrent,--yet how shifting are the
mountain-winds, chilling into frosty silence or quickening with Favonian
warmth, and how shifting the flying clouds, which, whether marshalled in
mimic tournament above it, or in the shock of a real conflict, forever
sway its tender fountains! Thus, even in inexperienced childhood, do the
scales of the individual destiny begin, favorably or unfavorably, to
determine their future preponderations, by reason of influences merely
material, and before, indeed, any sovereignty save a corporeal one (in
conjunction with heavenly powers) is at all recognized in life. For, in
this period, with which above all others we associate influences the
most divine, "with trailing clouds of glory," those influences which are
purely material are the most efficiently operative. Against the former,
adult man, in whom reason is developed, _may_ battle, though ignobly,
and, for himself, ruinously; and against the latter oftentimes he _must_
struggle, to escape ignominious shipwreck. But the child, helpless alike
for both these conflicts, is, through the very ignorance which shields
him from all conscious guilt, bound over in the most impotent (though,
because impotent and unconscious, the least humiliating) slavery to
material circumstance,--a slavery which he cannot escape, and which,
during the period of its absolutism, absorbs his very blood, bone, and
nerve. To poverty, which the strong man resists, the child succumbs; on
the other hand, that affluence of comfort, from which philosophy often
weans the adult, wraps childhood about with a sheltering care; and
fortunate indeed it is, if the mastery of Nature over us during our
first years is thus a gentle dealing with us, fertilizing our powers
with the rich juices of an earthly prosperity. And in this respect De
Quincey _was_ eminently fortunate. The powers of heaven and of earth
and--if we side with Milton and _other_ pagan mythologists in
attributing the gift of wealth to some Plutonian dynasty--the dark
powers _under_ the earth seem to have conjointly arrayed themselves in
his behalf. Whatever storms were in the book of Fate written against his
name they postponed till a far-off future, in the mean time granting him
the happiest of all childhoods. Really of gentle blood, and thus gaining
whatever substantial benefits