n thee"?

or the following:--

"Who loves, raves,--'tis youth's frenzy," etc.?

and again:--

"Few--_none_--find what they love or could have loved,
Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
Necessity of loving having removed
Antipathies"?

This, then, is the nearest approach to human love,--the removal of all
antipathies! But even these

"recur erelong,
Envenomed with irrevocable wrong:
And circumstance--that unspiritual god
And miscreator--makes and helps along
Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,
Whose touch turns hope to dust,--the dust which all have trod."

De Quincey, on the other hand, in whose heart there was laid no such
hollow basis for infidelity toward the master-passions of humanity,
repeated the pomps of joy or of sorrow, as evolved out of universal
human nature, and as, through sunshine and tempest, typified in the
outside world,--but never for one instant did he seek alliance, on the
one side, with the shallow enthusiasm of the raving Bacchante, or, on
the other, with the overshadowing despotism of gloom; nor can there be
found on a single page of all his writings the slightest hint indicating
even a latent sympathy with the power which builds only to crush, or
with the intellect that denies, and that against the dearest objects of
human faith fulminates its denials and shocking recantations solely for
the purposes of scorn.

Whence this marked difference? To account for it, we must needs trace
back to the first haunts of childhood the steps of these two fugitives,
each of whom has passed thence, the one into a desert _mirage_, teeming
with processions of the gloomiest falsities in life, and the other--also
into the desert, but where he is yet refreshed and solaced by an
unshaken faith in the genial verities of life, though separated from
them by irrecoverable miles of trackless wastes, and where, however
apparently abandoned and desolate, he is yet ministered unto by angels,
and no mimic fantasies are suffered to exercise upon his heart their
overmastering seductions to

"Allure, or terrify, or undermine."

Whether the days of childhood be our happiest days, is a question all by
itself. But there can be no question as to the inevitable certainty with
which the conditions of childhood, fortunate or unfortunate, determine
the main temper and disposition of our lives. For it is underneath the
multitude of fleeting proposals and conscious