DER ENGLISCH OPIUMESSER.'

A FRAGMENT FROM A GERMAN.

to drop my first person singularity, and to say a few words on the subject of this sketch.

In the cloud-world (die Nebelwelt) of dreams, when deep sleep falleth upon man, and his thoughts wander through eternity, and he cannot tell whence they come or whither they go-our own Jean Paul is reputed the archdreamer (Erzträumer). But I question whether he is not surpassed by De Quincey in the stupendous awe, the oppressive reality, the intense significance, the colossal sublimity of those visions of the night. De Quincey himself somewhere says that Richter is wanting in the severe simplicity, the horror of the too much, belonging to Grecian architecture, which is essential to the perfection of a dream considered as a work of art; that, in short, he is too elaborate to realise the grandeur of the shadowy. However this may be, the critic is at least competent to pass judgment, and may preface and ratify his criticism with an experto crede. In a sense very different from that of Pope, in the Dunciad,' has the goddess of dreams

'O'er his anointed head,

With mystic words, the sacred opium shed.' The whole earth, it has been said, every night about twelve o'clock, becomes a vast lunatic asylum-with one providen. tial precaution, that the same power which lets loose our minds ties down our hands and feet: there is a train of past associations moving on, and linked into each other by innualso going on at the same time, which produce impressions on the internal nerves and convey them to the brain; and from the collisions, crossings, and combinations of these two trains, under no other guidance upon the railroad of human consciousness, there arise that terrible crash and confusion which we call madness and dreaming. But upon this railroad there are travellers of every degree, and De Quincey always monopolises a special engine, and journeys express, at a rate illimitable by the time tables of mechanical clerks and parliamentary trains, ay, and of pursy, first-class travellers to boot. His dreams, while we at once recognise their truthfulness and reality, are sui generis; they are illuminated by a dim religious light that never was on sea or shore.' They sanctify the low with the lofty. They harmonise the incoherent, so that we see a thousand discrepant fancies

MANY years ago-many enough to give me a wondrously kind fellow-feeling in Horace's Eheu fugaces, Posthume, Posthume!-when I first essayed the study of English under the tutelage of Professor S-, I was advised by that worthy philologian, if I wished to attain anything like a philosophical acquaintance with that language, to pay particular and scrupulous attention to the writings of Thomas de Quincey. At his instigation, I got the only work of that gentleman procurable at that time and in that place (Bonn)-viz., the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'—and was, of course, struck with the vigour, the pathos, the humour, the psychological subtlety, the logical acumen, the imaginative wealth, and the felicitous word-painting' of that strangest of autobiographies. My admiration was-again I may say, of course-increased and deepened by further study of the narrative, together with growing familiarity with the language over which it exercises so comprehensive a sway, so consummate a mastery; and hence I became more and more anxious to procure whatever other writings the Opium-Eater might have given to the world. Professor S- had bid me, by all means, study his opera omnia. Had he written much? was my inquiry. Much every way, was the reply; both in quantity and quality; multa et multum. In vain, how-merable unseen filaments; and there are animal movements ever, did I make search at our libraries and foreign booksellers for the complete series for which my head and heart yearned so beseechingly. One bibliopole vexed me by sending me the æsthetical publications of the French Quatremère de Quincy. Another disappointed me by forwarding a work attributable, indeed, to the real Simon Pure, but upon a subject infinitely repugnant to all my personal predilections and literary antecedents-to wit, The Logic of Political Economy.' Another peremptorily assured me that the Confessions were the only production of the Opium-Eater; and, secondly, that the Logic was the work of a man who wrote upon nothing but the vexed and vexatious questions of the Wealth of Nations.' By dint of perseverance, I succeeded in 'overhauling' Klosterheim' -a novellette of German structure and story, but which did little to magnify my reverence for the object of my research. Now and then, however, in a stray magazine or review of English or Scottish origin, I perused articles which appeared to me marvellously akin in style and sentiment to the Confessions; but all intercourse with Professor S happening to be at an end, I could not make Sometimes the dreams are blended with appalling associa private assurance doubly sure, and the English whom it tions-encompassed with the hour and power of darkness was my lot to fall in with were, I am sorry to say, shock-shrouded with the mysteries of death and the gloom of ingly ignorant of the genealogy of such articles, and of the history of this my model author. And here I cannot but express my sense of irritation provoked by that author, in not saving me all this trouble by collecting his multifarious writings into some compact and collective form, like other honest and (some of them) infinitely inferior scribes. I knew, for instance, that Thomas Carlyle's papers were originally scattered over numerous periodicals; but I had only to apply for his 'works,' and forthwith they reached me in the systematic shape of five uniform volumes. In like manner, I have since procured the similarly published papers of Macaulay, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Alison, Henry Taylor, Stephen, Rogers, Lord Mahon, Prescott, Wilson, Hartley Coleridge, Gilfillan, Leigh Hunt, and others. But, to gather together those of De Quincey, you must as I at last discovered-you must toil through successive years of some half dozen journals, well known in Great Britain by the names of their respective publishers, such as Blackwood, Tait, Macphail, and Hogg; as also the Encyclopædia Britannica, the North British Review, and the London Magazine. Surely it cannot be that the writings of such a master-allowing for all their eccentricities, crotchets (grillenspielen), and vagaries-would not command a sale? The affirmative proposition would, to my way of thinking, involve a metaphysical nut to crack, unequalled for hardness and impracticability by anything in Hegel or Schelling. But now

'By down-lapsing thought

Stream onward, lose their edges, and so creep,
Roll'd on each other, rounded, smoothed, and brought
Into the gulfs of sleep.'

the grave. Sometimes they are pervaded with unimagi
nable horrors of Oriental imagery and mythological tor-
tures: the dreamer is oppressed with tropical heat and
vertical sunlight, and brings together all the physical
prodigies of China and Hindostan. He runs into pagodas,
and is fixed for centuries at the summit, or in secret
rooms; he flees from the wrath of Brahma through all the
forests of Asia; Vishnu hates him; Seeva lays wait for
him; he comes suddenly on Isis and Osiris; he has done
a deed, they say, at which the ibis and the crocodile
tremble; he is buried for a thousand years in stone coffins,
with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the
heart of eternal pyramids. Anon there dawns upon him
a day-as he expresses it in his solemnly impassioned
manner-'a day of crisis and of final hope for human na-
ture, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labour-
ing in some dread extremity: somewhere, he knew not
where-somehow, he knew not how-by some beings, he
knew not whom' (if you, reader, know anything to excel
this in dream-literature, you have the advantage of me)—
'a battle, an agony, a strife was conducting-was evolv-
ing like a great drama or piece of music; with which his
sympathy was the more insupportable, from his confusion
as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue.
He, as is usual in dreams (where, of necessity, we make
ourselves central to every movement), had the power, and
yet had not the power, to decide it.
He had the power, if

he could raise himself, to will it; and yet again had not
the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantes was upon
him, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt.' But I cannot
trust myself to continue the fascinating work of quotation
-even of a dream from which he awoke in struggles, and
cried aloud, 'I will sleep no more!' Surely never did
man, like this man, realise the Shaksperean phrase, the
fierce vexation of a dream.' And well may we fancy that
in those days, happily bygone, when the opium-tyranny
was upon him, his nightly prayer must have been like
Banquo's:-

'A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,
And yet I would not sleep. Merciful Power!
Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature
Gives way to in repose!'

Herodotus, the Essenes, Secret Societies, Christianity, the Calmuck Tartars, &c. Under the second, those on Coleridge and Society at the Lakes, Kant, Goethe, Milton, Pope, Shakspere, Goldsmith, Bentley, Parr. Under the third, those on Bennett's Ceylon, Mure's Modern Greece, James's Charlemagne, Lessing's Laocoon, Landor's Works, Schlosser's Literary History, Plato's Republic, Nichol's System of the Heavens, Gilfillan's Gallery of Literary Portraits, the Poetry of Wordsworth, Homer and the Homerido, Whately's Rhetoric, and a host besides. Under the fourth, those on the Aristocracy of England, China and the Opium Question, the Canton Expedition, the Irish Repeal Agitation, the English Corn Laws, Hints for the Hustings, &c. Under the fifth, those on his autobiography (some scores in number), the exqui

For his fate resembled that of Byron's Manfred, when the sitely affecting Suspiria de Profundis, and the Sketch from voice of Incantation rang in his ears:

• Though thy slumber may be deep,

Yet thy spirit shall not sleep;

These are shades which will not vanish,
These are thoughts thou canst not banish.
-And to thee shall night deny
All the quiet of her sky.'

The last couplet, however, would seem wanting in appli-
cability, if literally understood; for the Opium-Eater has
the credit of having been very heterodox in his observance
of the times and seasons of repose, interpreting them by
contraries. Thus the Ettrick Shepherd addresses him in
one of the 'Noctes':-'Mr De Quinshy, you and me leeves
in twa different warlds, and yet it's wonnerfu' hoo we un-
derstan' ane anither sae weel's we do—quite a phenomena.
When I'm soopin' you're breakfastin'; when I'm lyin'
doun, after your coffee you're risin' up; as I'm coverin' my
head wi' the blankets, you're pittin' on your breeks; as
my een are steekin' like sunflowers aneath the moon,
yours are glowin' like twa gas-lamps; and while your
mind is masterin' poleetical economy and metapheesics, in
a desperate fecht wi' Ricawdro and Cant, I'm heard by
the nicht-wanderin' fairies snorin' trumpet-nosed through
the land o' Nod.' Are not these the characteristics to
charm my countrymen? this synthesis of day-dreaming
and night-reverie? I have often marvelled, indeed, that
De Quincey is not an idol amongst us, so analogous is his
psychological temperament, in many notable respects, to
our national type. But then he must be read in his own
language, for a spell lies in his ipsissima verba. This
may be one cause of his faint hold upon us; and possibly
another may be the round terms in which he ridicules us
and our literature, albeit he has, in point of fact, done
very much to secure for that literature a respectful recep-
tion in his native land.

Fain would I linger over the Confessions, and tell how his visions varied-how at one time he gazed on such pomp of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by waking eye, unless in the clouds-at another, on silvery expanses of water-at another, on a rocking sea paved with innumerable human faces, imploring, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries, till, in infinite agitation, his mind tossed and surged with the ocean. Or that dream of quite melting pathos and holy serenity, when it was Easter Sunday in the East, and very early in the morning-nigh unto Jerusalem-when his eye rested upon a form, sitting on a stone, and shaded by Judæan palms. Ah, is not De Quincey also among the poets? At least he sings melody of the rarest and the sweetest to my inmost spirit. But I must pass on; dreaming is perhaps contagious. (Methinks I hear his aside-Not such dreaming as that, my dear sir!)

Now for his other works: pauca verba. Klosterheim' and the Logic of Political Economy' I have alluded to. His contributions to periodicals sweep over a vast area of topics. The most compendious and not the least correct of possible titles for them would be, De omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis. They might be divided into historical, biographical, critical, political, personal, and miscellaneous. Under the first head, come his papers on the Caesars (recently panegyrized in the Edinburgh Review'), Cicero,

Childhood. Under the last comes a delicious miscellany,
including treatises and jeux d'esprit, wandering from
Casuistry to the King of Haiti, from War to Style, from
Protestantism to Dinner Real and Reputed, from Antigone
to Lord Carlisle, from Joan of Arc to Murder considered
as one of the Fine Arts, from Miracles to a Templar's
Dialogues, from Logic to the Sphinx's Riddle, from a
Household Wreck to the Literature of his Infancy, from
the Nautico-Military Nun of Spain to a Vision of Sudden
Death, from Greece under the Romans to the English
Mail Coach. His intellect is omnivorous. All is, or is
treated as, fish that comes to his net; if for no other pur-
pose, at least to be called over the coals. His memory is
prodigious. Like the man in ‘Juvenal,' he can tell you, at
a moment's notice, all about

'Nutricem Anchise, nomen patriamque noverca
Anchemoli; dicet quot Acestes vixerit annos,
Quot Siculus Phrygibus vini donaverit urnas,'

and an infinity of similar minutie. Whatever subject he
takes up, he invests with characteristic attractions of depth,
scholarship, imagination, wit, and humour. He combines
the seldom harmonising elements of severe logical preci-
sion and florid fancy. Archdeacon Hare calls him the
great logician of our times.' His writings evidence an

almost

'Seraphic intellect and force

To seize and throw the doubts of man;
Impassion'd logic, which outran
The hearer in its fiery course.'

'Oh, Mr North, Mr North,' shouts the Shepherd in another of the Noctes'-when De Quincey is about to refute one of his post-prandial propositions-'I'm about to fa' into Mr De Quinshy's hauns, sac come to my assistance, for I canna thole bein' pressed up backwards, step by step, intill a corner, till an argument that's ca'd a clencher clashes in your face, and knocks your head wi' sic' force against the wa' that your crown gets a clour, leavin' a dent in the wainscoat. Nothing of the kind can excel the richness of his philosophical language, the jewelled panoply of his style. It does indeed bristle with scholasti cisms-but how they tell! You feel, as you read, that here is a man who has gauged the potentiality of every word he makes use of-who has analysed the simples of his every compound phrase. Our philosophical vocabulary owes him many a winged word, and phrases which a while back were scattered about promiscuously, as if they all stood for pretty much the same thing, he has stamped afresh, so that people begin to have some notion of their meaning.' There are critics who complain of his discursive tendency, a complaint to which I can in no sense subscribe. John Foster, the celebrated essayist, has made similar strictures on Coleridge, whose surpassing subtlety he describes as constantly descrying the most unobvious relations, and detecting the most veiled aspect of things; tempting him to depart from the main line of his thought, to indulge in collateral matter; so that, after advancing one acute thought, and another, and another, he perceives among these primary ideas so many secondary ones-so many bearings, distinctions, and analogies-so many pointings towards subjects infinitely remote-that, in the attempt to seize and fix in words these secondary

thoughts, he will suspend for a good while the progress toward the intended point. This is true of Coleridge's distinguished disciple and, let me add, benefactor. But let those who will cavil at the series of digressions and parentheses in which he indulges. On the other hand I revel in them. Never do I feel disposed to quarrel with this peripatetic instinct. De Quincey himself calls it an intermitting necessity affecting his particular system, like that of migration that affects swallows. 'Nobody, says he, is angry with swallows for vagabondising periodically, and surely I have a better right to indulgence than & swallow: I take precedency of a swallow in any company whatsoever.' This very quality must (me saltem judice) impart a singular charm to his conversation-an art of which he is so renowned a master. Much would I give, and far would I pilgrimise, to hear him exemplify in talk the nil tangit quod non ornat. By all accounts

'His talk is like a stream which rans

With rapid change from rocks to roses;
It slips from politics to puns:

It glides from Mahomet to Moses;
Beginning with the laws which keep
The planets in their radiant courses,
And ending with some precept deep

For dressing eels or shoeing horses.'

R. P. Gillies of the 'Foreign Quarterly Review,' describing
De Quincey as he was some six-and-thirty years ago,
says: "Seeing that he was always good-natured and social,
he would take part, at commencement, in any sort of
tattle or twaddle. The talk might be of 'beeves,' and he
could grapple with them if expected to do so; but his
musical cadences were not in keeping with such work,
and, in a few minutes (not without some strictly logical
sequence), he could escape at will from beeves to butter-
fies, and thence to the soul's immortality; to Plato, and
Kant, and Schelling, and Fichte-to Milton's early years
and Shakspere's sonnets-to Wordsworth and Coleridge
-to Homer and Eschylus-to St Thomas of Aquin, St
Basil, and St Chrysostom; and, whatsoever the subject
might be, every one of his sentences (or of his chapters, I
aight say) was woven into the most perfect logical texture,
and uttered in a tone of sustained melody.' A writer in
'Fraser's Magazine,' of ten years since, describes very
pleasantly a night he passed with this most eloquent
dissertator and conversationist,' snugly seated in the Rain-
bow at Edinburgh, where they bade defiance to the blasts
of the wind, keen and cutting as a scythe, that swept the
North Bridge: hour after hour glided on the stream of
talk, welling out from De Quincey's capacious overflowing
cells of thought and memory, that a single word, a hint, or
token could stir and agitate. He seems to live in the
past, and the past has few such admirers or painters.
When fully kindled up and warmed on his subject, his
whole talk is poetry; and his slight attenuated frame, pale
countenance, and massive forehead, with the singular
sweetness and melody of his voice and language, impress
one as if some voice from the dead-from some old
man eloquent'-had risen to tell us of the hidden world
of thought, and imagination, and knowledge.' How often
I long to hear that musical accent, that lenis susurrus,

before I die!

even in its excesses-so, on the other hand, he sways my
spirit to and fro, to the very top of his bent, by his sublime
pathos. How grand and awe-inspiring is the melancholy
of his retrospective glances! How fearfully he makes
one feel
'This is truth the poet sings,
That a sorrow's crown of sorrows is remembering happier things;'
So that one is tempted to continue the strain,
Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof,

In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof."
My heart is full enough to bid him a cordial and a
grateful farewell-too full to continue a rhapsody about
him and all his works. Jam satis superque of my Teu
tonic babble.

A FOSSIL animalcule ! Is it possible that such minute and delicate bodies can be changed into, and preserved as, fossils? This is really the case, and the following extracts will prove the truth of this remark. Ehrenberg says, The Infusoria, in consequence of their silicious shells (lorica), form indestructible earths, stone, and rocky invisible animalcules, use them as flints, probably prepare masses. With lime and soda we can prepare glass out of iron from them, and use the mountain-meal, composed of them, as food in hunger.'

To prove this marvellous fact, the following interesting extracts are drawn from Pritchard's History of Infusoria.' 'The shell-like coverings (lorica) are found in large masses, covering many miles of the earth's surface, and occur, when indurated and mixed with argillaceous and other earths, in the form of silicious rock, slate, &c. These remains of the primeval inhabitants of our globe are records in the pages of history, penned by Infinite Truth, unbiassed by ignorance and prejudice; and form some of the first-fruits of the effective application of achromatic glasses in our microscopes. It is hardly possible to take up and examine a dozen flints without discovering species of Infusoria enclosed within them. These may be seen under the microscope, when very thin sections are made.'

As flint is used in the manufacture of glass, the shells of these creatures are thus found coming into use, after Mantell remarks, in his Thoughts on a Pebble,-Inthe inhabitant has been dead thousands of years. Dr vestigation has shown that a great proportion of the mass of the (flinty) pebble is actually composed of the aggregated fossil skeletons of animalcules, so minute as to elude our unassisted vision, but which the magic power of the microscope reveals to us, preserved, like flies in amber, in all their original sharpness of outline and delicacy of struc

ture.'

abounds also in remains of Infusoria: Throughout the An extract from another author will prove that chalk chalk beds there are layers of flint-that is, masses of silex lying detached amidst the chalk. Whence this great or flint, of various sizes, from a pea to a man's head, each quantity of a substance, which seems to be characteristic For this magister sententiarum, this dreamer of dreams, been derived mainly from silicious coverings of animalof the chalk formation? The supposition is, that it has has acquired a strange power over my inner life-arous-cules! The remains of many of these minute and humble ing within, as perhaps no other prose writer has done, animals have been discovered in the chalk, some of them thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears. As on the being the first animals which yet exist in the species upon one hand he excites my mirth to a boisterous pitch, by his earth. It has also been found that the flints invariably grave oddities, his logical 'quips, and cranks, and wanton include the remains of some sponge, or other humble wiles,'ay, and even by his slang, which is so gentlemanly animal form, the lineaments of which are often beautifully *Gilfillan celebrates his 'small, thin, piercing voice, winding out detected by a microscope, if not by the naked eye. Now, preserved amidst the dark glassy substance, and may be so distinctly his subtleties of thought and feeling-bislong and strange entences, evolving like a piece of complicated music,' &c. And so if the silex from the coverings of the dead Infusoria were in the Ettrick Shepherd addresses him:-'And though I canna help in solution amidst the settling substance of the chalk, any thinkin' you speak rather a wee owre slow, yet there's sic music in your decaying sponges, Alcyonia, sea-urchins, or other animals vice, that I'm just perfectly enchanted wi' the soun', while a sense o' truth prevents me frae saying that I aye a'thegither comprehend the mean-placed there, would be sure to collect the particles of the in, for that's aye sae desperate metapheesical.' And elsewhere: silex around them, and thus be converted into flints. And true it is, Mr de Quinshy, that ye ha'e the voice o' a nichtwanderin' man-laigh and lone-pitched on the key o' a wimplin' burn speakin' to itsel' in the silence, aneath the moon and stars."

From 'Drops of Water,' by Miss Agnes Catlow.

'And yet can this heaven of enjoyment be only a mask? Can she feel, feel painfully-can she love unhappily, and yet be so gay and joyous? Madam'-here the stranger addressed the lady of the ambassador- confess that you wish to mystify me, because I take an interest in that lovely girl.' 'Is it possible, baron,' replied the lady spoken to, shak-way got himself presented at court; and, although I meet ing her head, that you do not yet believe? Upon my honour, what I told you is true: she loves one beneath her rank; I know it from a lady who lets nothing of that kind escape her. And why should you think that a princess trained from an early age to perform a part, cannot have sufficient taet to conceal such an unfortunate circumstance from the eyes of the world?'