So it was always with De Quincey. Let thought and feeling wander as they would, his deepest emotions brought him home to religion. His mind was too much occupied with philosophy to let religion hold predominance, but it always occupied the most sacred place in the sabbath-sanctuary of his soul; whether he retired there to rest, to suffer, or to pray. He wrote not a little in defense of Christianity, and on theology generally. Yet in these works he wrote as the logician and the scholar, rather than as the devotee. He says, "My path lies on the interspace between religion and philosophy, that connects them both;" and, elsewhere, "There never yet was profound grief nor profound philosophy which did not inosculate at many points with profound religion." When any subject presented so much room for philosophy, there was little place with him for feeling. He even permitted his all-pervading humor to encroach (but seldom it is true) on ground which, to many, is sacred. It is natural then that we find little enthusiasm in his doctrinal works, except what occasionally vents itself in refutation and invective towards those who would deny a God dearer to him than all other hopes and beliefs, because the sum of all. But in the record of his sufferings, of the great grief of his childhood, when, standing by his sister's corpse, he followed her spirit with almost apocalyptic vision, in its passage home; in his struggles with the opium-fiend that carried his spirit out into the infinite, and would not let it all return again to his dying body, so that by-and-bye when the death should come, he would have no perfect soul to go to God; in the horrid dreams which would not even give him time to suffer in, but must needs make his misery appear eternal; in all of these he shows us what it was that made "of grief itself a fiery chariot for mounting victoriously above the causes of grief." And in this he was much as the rest of us. Without a religion, men can reason through a life time, they can even experience a large share of all human emotion; but when they are called to suffer, philosophy yields to faith.

I would not be thought to intimate that De Quincey's faith was only kept for occasions. The all-pervading charity of his writings is too vital a principle of true religion, to make such an idea reasonable. If he was not enthusiastic, much less was he apathetic. If in belief he was often a philosopher, in life he was always a Christian. His readers may find something in his works to criticise, but nothing to condemn. His blemishes were deficiencies alone, not positive evils. From the first apostrophe, in the "Opium Eater," to the poor outcast who saved his life, (clumsy as it is, in the vastness and power of its feeling,) on to the majestic sentences in "The Cæsars," which show

that even in a Caligula he could find something to pardon, he breathes the spirit of gratitude and charity. He could, perhaps, excuse more readily weaknesses of the flesh than of the intellect. Possibly, because his whole life had been, in the first particular, one mighty weakness. But he found no Nazareth so poor that no good thing could come out of it. The outcast, the "Pariah," the fool, and he himself were all made in one image, and that was, to him, too sacred not to hold some inner trace of its Great Archetype.

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His charity was the charity of a child, because it came from the innocence of a child. I believe there can exist no other mass of writings covering so large a field, which evince less familiarity with the world's evil than those of De Quincey and as for consciousness of offence within himself, the artless confidential character of all that he wrote precludes the possibility of its existence. It has been somewhere said that if a single human character (were it no more than that of the meanest beggar,) were laid open unreservedly to the knowledge of mankind, the record made of it would be the greatest of philosophies or poems Viewed in one light, the confessional character of De Quincey's writings is but the prating of an egotist; viewed in another, it is much of the unfolding which goes to make up that greatest of conceivable writings. From the extravagant dreams and almost nameless griefs of his childhood, through the weird experiences of his maturer years, up to the retrospects and even trivialities of his age, his plea is "Brothers, these things have I known and suffered; I am one of you, bear with me!" Nevertheless, De Quincey was not peculiarly a man of feeling. That ponderous car of the idol intellect, placed on wheels of subtlety and penetration, fashioned and riveted with strongest logic, garnished with learning and imagination, must move on always, sometimes impelled with force almost superhuman, sometimes slowly, painfully urged by strength on which the lethargy of mighty dreams had fallen. Still it must ever move, though it sometimes pass over the offering that devotion or love has cast in its way.

Some authors endeavor to do everything but express themselves in their manner of writing. This was not so with De Quincey, his remarkable candor made his style unstudied, therefore natural and characteristic. As such, it is a valuable assistant in studying his intellect. I have already alluded to a diffuseness which dulled the point of his humor, and I may add, of his pathos also. His logical tendency was not satisfied till every minute particular of his thought had been expressed. Moreover, I believe that his opium indulgencies prevented the concentration of thought, which produces concentration of lan

guage. Be that as it may, analytical philosophers are not the tersest writers. De Quincey's thoughts suggested each other with logical regularity. They followed out a subject to its remotest limits, and thus produced more than ordinary expansion and digression. I have once before compared him with Carlyle, and yet do so again to illustrate their styles by one vital point of difference. Carlyle's thoughts are those of genius, of the originating process. They are not evolved by absolute ratiocination, but are brought forth already matured, like the goddess from the brain of Zeus. As such, each individual one is organic and complicated, and in expression is knotted up into parentheses and elisions. De Quincey's, on the other hand, starting from a point, left it regularly, ramifying and sub-ramifying in bountiful suggestion, but each retaining its logical individuality, neither mingling with another, or returning upon itself. De Quincey's thoughts were growths: Carlyle's are creations.

These peculiarities will stand in the way of De Quincey's being generally long remembered. No sentence of his contains the concentration of various elements necessary to make a proverb. His mind was too logical for that. He stated his convictions as syllogisms, relying upon his reader's reason rather than upon his faith or intuition. Occasionally, but very seldom, where feeling had driven out logic, he has written expressions of remarkable force and beauty. Two such sentences I can never forget. One is in the "Flight of a Tartar Tribe," where he says of a cruel pursuit, "The spectacle became too atrocious; it was that of a host of lunatics pursued by a host of fiends." The other is in the "Suspiria." He tells of his feelings when viewing his sister's corpse with "the frozen eyelids and the darkness that seemed to steal from beneath them."

De Quincey was undoubtedly a polished writer. Yet no one would have anticipated it from the first part of the opium "Confessions." They are worse than awkward. They pay no regard to any rules of composition save those of grammar. Their trivial diffuseness is wearisome and disgusting. Some of the apostrophes (always a characteristic of De Quincey's style,) starting with passionate expression, break down with their own weight into mere childish exclamations, with the first few sentences. And yet all of it bears the appearance of latent strength. The papers were commenced while he was weak in mind and body from opium. They increase in merit (probably keeping pace with his health) almost imperceptibly, till in the "Suspiria," we find ourselves reading, instead of the stammerings of a school-boy, the writings of a wit, a philosopher and a poet. This character he sus

tains for himself quite regularly through his later works. Occasionally, it is true, when the demands of time or necessities sorer still, goaded him, he wrote things which were better left undone. For the world is too apt to judge authors by their all, not by their best.

The main thing to be regretted in De Quincey's literary life is, that he left no one great work, such as he certainly had the capacity to perform. He had not genius in its true sense, therefore he could not, in any of his brief works, give the world a novelty which it must retain. But he had capacity to write a great history of philosophy or of national, even universal, politics, which would have placed him higher, perhaps, than Macaulay, for Macaulay had not De Quincey's philosophy;-higher, certainly, than Gibbon, for Gibbon had not De Quincey's Christianity.

De Quincey's writings were not characterized by preponderance of any particular set of ideas or belief. He had some peculiar, but reasonable notions on war, temperance, and a few other matters, which were the result of his philosophical analysis of the subjects. He rode no "hobbies," however, and wrote less to advance principles than to support doctrines. He taught a sufficient lesson in his own life, to compensate for the absence of special effort otherwise. And yet he has vastly promoted the religious tendency of literature. His descriptions of his opium dreams, he called "modes of impassioned poetry, ranging under po precedents that I am aware of in any literature.” Novelty, however, is the last merit of these papers. They assisted in opening to prose much of what was before considered the exclusive field of poetry, and in so doing, gave its best impulse to the style of imaginative, abstract and in short poetical prose, now becoming general. The influence of the Addisonian Era was to cause the tremendous similes and apostrophes, which are the natural vehicles for the deepest feeling, to be considered excrescences on the body of legitimate prose. This opinion, although tending to make the style of writing more "chaste," made it address itself mainly to the intellect and surface feelings, while it appealed little to that inner nature which alone can make philosophy practical or religion truly moral. No one has done more than De Quincey to correct this, and to give feeling and intuition their true places as faculties which sometimes transcend pure reason. The effect of such modification of style, on the religious tendency of literature, must be good for it is only by the encouragement of these highly abstract qualities, that faith, the most abstract of all, can stand in its proper relation to reason.

Of the character of De Quincey's dreams, there has been so much

written, that to write more is but to supererrogate, and incur charge of imitation. One probable effect upon the seer, I, nevertheless, venture to suggest. It is known that the influence of opium is to amplify time and space immeasurably. He who has felt its weird spell, has had foretaste of eternity, such as is not otherwise given to uninspired men. His conceptions are enlarged beyond those of mortal life, and he lives here henceforth almost as one returned to earth, without having tasted Lethe. Yet for all this, he forfeits the strength necessary to mould his conceptions into available form. I fancy that much of De Quincey's life was thus passed. His thoughts, if not the creations, were at least the memories of a demi-god. His conceptions reached into fields that unassisted intellect has known only by their boundaries; and yet when these revelations of the "dark interpreter," were to be disseminated, the mighty hand that had raised him, held him down powerless.

This essay (even were there no other reason than its brevity,) can be little more than a kindly meant injustice to De Quincey's memory. That memory is enshrined in the mighty thought-monument he has left us, a monument too great to mark only a grave. If, in holding up my poor rush-light to some of its grand inscriptions, any adequate shadow has fallen on these pages, I know that it is indeed a shadow, gloomy, though it images majesty; profound, though it betokens one who thought more than he loved, and suffered more than either.

Yet on leaving him, with something of that feeling which crowds every pleasant recollection into the spirit of the word "fare-well," one's thoughts turn involuntarily to that portion of his life where his own memories best loved to linger. That Bronté like childhood, filled as far back as memory could reach, with strange, precocious imaginings; its nursery songs, Greek poetry; its fairy tales and heroic legends, stories of Psyches or Agamemnons; its sports, brain-tasks that would weary the scholars; and yet its loves and griefs, feelings that would overflow even women's hearts-this strange childhood seemed all through his sad life, to be bathed in that light which, creeping in from the land whence God sends forth the soul, mingles with the faithray to light the returning path into Eternity.

We who grope here still call it back to dispel the gloom which clings about his memory; but he needs it no longer, for now, with perfect sight, he is among those realities of which his stupendous dreams were faintest shadows. In pace.