heaven through which the grandeurs of eternity flow into the penetralian
recesses of the human heart, after that once the faculties of thought,
or the sensibilities, have been powerfully awakened. Sensibility _had_
been thus awakened in De Quincey, through grief occasioned by the loss
of a sister, his favorite and familiar playmate,--a grief so profound,
that he, somewhere, in speaking of it, anticipates the certainty of its
presence in the hour of death; and thought, also, had been prematurely
awakened, both under the influence of this overmastering pathos of
sorrow, and because of his strong predisposition to meditation. Both the
pathos and the meditative tendencies were increased by the halcyon peace
of his childhood. In a memorial of the poet Schiller, he speaks of that
childhood as the happiest, "of which the happiness has survived and
expressed itself, not in distinct records, but in deep affection, in
abiding love, and the hauntings of meditative power." His, at least, was
the felicity of this echoless peace.

In no memorial is it so absolutely requisite that a marked prominence
should be given to its first section as in De Quincey's. This is a
striking peculiarity in his life. If it were not so, I should have
seriously transgressed in keeping the reader's attention so long upon a
point which, aside from such peculiarity, would yield no sufficient, at
least no proportionate value. But, in the treatment of any life, that
cannot seem disproportionate which enters into it as an element only and
just in that ratio of prominence with which it enters into the life
itself, No stream can rise above the level of its source. No life, which
lacks a prominent interest as to its beginnings, can ever, in its entire
course, develop any distinguishing features of interest. This is true of
any life; but it is true of De Quincey's above all others on record,
that, through all its successive arches, ascending and descending, it
repeats the original arch of childhood. Repeats,--but with what
marvellous transformations! For hardly is its earliest section passed,
when, for all its future course, it is masked by a mighty trouble. No
longer does it flow along its natural path, and beneath the open sky,
but, like the sacred Alpheus, runs

"Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to the sunless sea."

Yet, amid the "briny tides" of that sea, amid turmoil and perplexity and
the saddest of mysteries, it preserves its earliest gentlen