fairly in his mouth, and runs away with Euripides in his pocket. Then he goes wandering in Wales-gypsy-like- and from there strikes across country blindly to London, where he becomes gypsy indeed. He bargains with Jews to advance money on his expectations: and with this money for "sinker," he sounds a depth of sin and misery which we may guess at, by what we know, but which in their fulness, even his galloping pen never told. Into some of those depths his friends traced him, and patched up a truce, which landed him in Oxford.

Quiet and studious here at first he is represented as a rare talker, a little given to wine— writing admiring letters to Wordsworth and others, who were his gods in those days; falling somehow into taste for that drug which for so many years held him in its grip, body and soul. The Oxford career being finished after a sort, there are saunterings through London streets again - evenings with the Lambs, with Godwin, and excursions to Somersetshire and the Lake country, where he encounters and gives nearer worship to the poetic gods of his idolatry. Al

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ways shy, but earnest; most interesting to strangers- with his pale face, high brow and lightning glances; talking too with a winning flow and an exuberance of epithet that somewhiles amounts to brilliancy no wonder he was tenderly entreated by good Miss Wordsworth; no wonder the poet of the "Doe of Rylstone" enjoyed the titillation of such fresh, bright praises!

So De Quincey at twenty-four became householder near to Grasmere-in the cottage I spoke of in the opening of the chapter—once occupied by Wordsworth, and later by Hartley Coleridge. There, on that pretty shelf of the hills- scarce lifted above Rydal-water, he gathers his books studies the mountains- provokes the gossip of all the pretty Dalesmen's daughters — lives there a bachelor, eight years or more-ranging round and round in bright autumnal days with the sturdy John Wilson (of the Noctes Ambrosianæ) -cultivating intimacy with poor crazy Lloyd (who lived nearby) — studying all anomalous characters with curious intensity, and finding anomalies where others found none. Meantime and through all, his sensibilities are kept wrought

to fever heat by the opiate drinks — always flank

ing him at his table; and he, so dreadfully wonted to those devilish drafts, that on some occasions

- he actually consumes within the twenty-four hours the equivalent of seven full wine-glasses of laudanum! No wonder the quiet Dales-people looked dubiously at the light burning in those cottage windows far into the gray of morning, and counted the pale-faced, big-headed man for something uncanny.

In these days comes about that strange episode of his mad attachment to the little elfin child— Catharine Wordsworth of whom the poet-father wrote:

"Solitude to her

Was blithe society, who filled the air

With gladness and involuntary songs.

Light were her sallies, as the tripping fawn's,
Forth startled from the form where she lay couched;
Unthought of, unexpected, as the stir

Of the soft breeze ruffling the meadow flowers."

Yet De Quincey, arrogantly interpreting the deep-seated affections of that father's heart, says, "She was no favorite with Wordsworth;" but he "himself was blindly, doatingly, fascinated" by

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this child of three. And of her death, before she is four, when De Quincey is on a visit in London, he says, with crazy exaggeration :

"Never, perhaps, from the foundations of those mighty hills was there so fierce a convulsion of grief as mastered my faculties on receiving that heart-shattering news. I had always viewed her as an impersonation of the dawn and the spirit of infancy. . . . I returned hastily to Grasmere; stretched myself every night, for more than two months running, upon her grave; in fact often passed the night upon her grave in mere intensity of sick, frantic yearning after neighborhood to the darling of my heart."*

This is a type of his ways of feeling, and of his living, and of his speech-tending easily to all manner of extravagance: black and white are too tame for his nerve-exaltation; if a friend looks sharply, "his eye glares;" if disturbed, he has a "tumult of the brain; " if he doubles his fist, his gestures are the wildest; and a well-built son and daughter of a neighbor Dalesman are the images of "Coriolanus and Valeria."

*Page 215; vol. ii., Reminiscences. Boston Edition.

Marriage and other Flights.

At thirty-one, or thereabout, De Quincey married the honest daughter of an honest yeoman of the neighborhood. She was sensible (except her marriage invalidate the term), was kindly, was long-suffering, and yet was very human. I suspect the interior of that cottage was not always like the islands of the blessed. Mr. Froude would perhaps have enjoyed lifting the roof from such a house. Many children were born to that strangely coupled pair, some of them still living and most worthy.

It happens by and by to this impractical man, from whose disorderly and always open hand inherited moneys have slipped away; it happensI say that he must earn his bread by his own toil; so he projects great works of philosophy, of political economy, which are to revolutionize opinions; but they topple over into opium dreams before they are realized. He tries editing a county paper, but it is nought. At last he utilizes even his vices, and a chapter of the Confessions of an Opium Eater, in the London Magazine, draws