ess, and its
inward, noiseless peace, till once more it gushes up toward the sweet
heaven through the Arethusan font of death. Easily, then, is it to be
seen why De Quincey himself continually reverted, both in his conscious
reminiscences and through the subconscious relapses of dreams, from a
life clouded and disguised in its maturer years, to the unmasked purity
of its earliest heaven. And what from the vast desert, what from the
fatal wreck of life, was he to look back upon, for even an imaginary
solace, if not upon the rich argosies that spread their happier sails
above a calmer sea? We are forcibly reminded of the dream which
Milton[A] gives to his Christ in the desert, hungry and tired:--

"There he slept,
And dreamed, as appetite is wont to dream,
Of meats and drinks, Nature's refreshment sweet.
Him thought he by the brook of Cherith stood,
And saw the ravens with their horny beaks
Food to Elijah bringing even and morn,
Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought:
He saw the prophet also, how he fled
Into the desert, and how there he slept
Under a juniper, then how, awaked,
He found his supper on the coals prepared,
And by the angel was bid rise and eat,
And eat the second time after repose,
The strength whereof sufficed him forty days;
Sometimes that with Elijah he partook,
Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse."

[Footnote A: _Paradise Regained_, Book II.]

If the splendors of divinity could be so disguised by the severe
necessities of the wilderness and of brutal hunger as to be thus
solicited and baffled even in dreams,--if, by the lowest of mortal
appetites, they could be so humiliated and eclipsed as to revel in the
shadowy visions of merely human plenty,--then by how much more must the
human heart, eclipsed at noon, revert, under the mask of sorrow and of
dreams, to the virgin beauties of the dawn! with how much more violent
revulsion must the weary, foot-sore traveller, lost in a waste of sands,
be carried back through the gate of ivory or of horn to the dewy,
flower-strewn fields of some far happier place and time!

The transition from De Quincey's childhood to his opium-experiences is
as natural, therefore, as from strophe to antistrophe in choral
antiphonies. Henceforth, as the reader already understands, we are not
permitted to look upon a simple, undisguised life, unless we draw aside
a veil as impenetrable as that which cove