the city when thou ridest naked through the large a family! Shall my youth harm me? streets at noon.

friezes of never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as if they were stories drawn from times before (Edipus or Priam-before Tyre-before Memphis.1 And, at the same time, a corresponding change took place in my dreams; a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour. And the four following facts may be mentioned, as noticeable at this time:

1. That as the creative state of the eye increased, a sympathy seemed to arise between the waking and the dreaming states of the brain in one point—that whatsoever I happened to call up and to trace by a voluntary act upon the darkness was very apt to transfer itself to my dreams; so that I feared to exercise this faculty; for, as Midas turned all things to gold, that yet baffled his hopes and defrauded his human desires, so whatsoever things capable of being visually represented I did but think of in the darkness, immediately shaped themselves into phantoms of the eye; and, by a process apparently no less inevitable, when thus once traced in faint and visionary colours, like writings in sympathetic ink, they were drawn out by the fierce chemistry of my dreams, into insufferable splendour that fretted my heart.

forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived; I could not be said to recollect them; for if I had been told of them when waking, I should not have been able to acknowledge them as parts of my past experience. But placed as they were before me, in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I recognised them instantaneously. I was once told by a near relative of mine, that having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of death but for the critical assistance which reached her, she saw in a moment her whole life, in its minutest incidents, arrayed before her simultaneously as in a mirror; and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part. This, from some opium experiences of mine, I can believe; I have, indeed, seen the same thing asserted twice in modern books, and accompanied by a remark which I am convinced is true-viz., that the dread book of account, which the Scriptures speak of,3 is, in fact, the mind itself of each individual. Of this, at least, I feel assured, that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the 2. For this, and all other changes in my mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend dreams, were accompanied by deep-seated anxi- away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or ety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly unveiled, the inscription remains for ever; just incommunicable by words. I seemed every as the stars seem to withdraw before the comnight to descend, not metaphorically, but liter-mon light of day, whereas, in fact, we all know ally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses, that it is the light which is drawn over them depths below depths, from which it seemed as a veil, and that they are waiting to be hopeless that I could ever re-ascend. Nor did revealed when the obscuring daylight shall have I, by waking, feel that I had re-ascended. This withdrawn. I do not dwell upon; because the state of gloom which attended these gorgeous spectacles, amounting at last to utter darkness, as of some suicidal despondency, cannot be approached by words.

3. The sense of space, and, in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, etc., were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or a hundred years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience.

4. The minutest incidents of childhood, or

1 Greece. Phoenicia, Egypt, form a climax of an-
tiquity.
2 at any rate.

Having noticed these four facts as memorably distinguishing my dreams from those of health, I shall now cite a case illustrative of the first fact; and shall then cite any others that I remember, either in their chronological order, or any other that may give them more effect as pictures to the reader.

I had been in youth, and even since, for occasional amusement, a great reader of Livy, whom, I confess, that I prefer, both for style and matter, to any other of the Roman historians; and I had often felt as most solemn and appalling sounds, and most emphatically representative of the majesty of the Roman people, the two words so often occurring in Livy-Consul Romanus; especially when the consul is introduced in his military character. I mean to say that the words king-sultan-regent, etc., or any other titles of those who embody in their own persons the collective majesty of a great people, had 3 Revelation, xx, 12.

less power over my reverential feelings. I had | paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the also, though no great reader of history, made heavens; faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, myself minutely and critically familiar with surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by one period of English history-viz., the period generations, by centuries:-my agitation was of the Parliamentary War-having been at- infinite,-my mind tossed--and surged with the tracted by the moral grandeur of some who ocean. figured in that day, and by the many interesting May, 1818. memoirs which survive those unquiet times. Both these parts of my lighter reading, having The Malay has been a fearful enemy for furnished me often with matter of reflection, months. I have been every night, through his now furnished me with matter for my dreams. means, transported into Asiatic scenes. I know Often I used to see, after painting upon the not whether others share in my feelings on this blank darkness a sort of rehearsal whilst wak-point; but I have often thought that if I were ing, a crowd of ladies, and perhaps a festival, compelled to forego England, and to live in and dances. And I heard it said, or I said to China, and among Chinese manners and modes myself, "These are English ladies from the un- of life and scenery, I should go mad. The happy times of Charles I. These are the wives causes of my horror lie deep; and some of them and the daughters of those who met in peace, must be common to others. Southern Asia, in and sat at the same tables, and were allied by general, is the seat of awful images and assomarriage or by blood; and yet, after a certain ciations. As the cradle of the human race, it day in August, 1642,4 never smiled upon each would alone have a dim and reverential feeling other again, nor met but in the field of battle; connected with it. But there are other reasons. and at Marston Moor, at Newbury, or at Nase- No man can pretend that the wild, barbarous, by, cut asunder all ties of love by the cruel and capricious superstitions of Africa, or of sabre, and washed away in blood the memory of savage tribes elsewhere, affect him in the way ancient friendship.' 99 The ladies danced, and that he is affected by the ancient, monumental, looked as lovely as the court of George IV. Yet cruel, and elaborate religions of Indostan, etc. I knew, even in my dreams, that they had been The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their in the grave for nearly two centuries. This institutions, histories, modes of faith, etc., is pageant would suddenly dissolve; and, at a so impressive, that to me the vast age of the clapping of hands, would be heard the heart-race and name overpowers the sense of youth quaking sound of Consul Romanus; and imme- in the individual. A young Chinese seems to Even Engdiately came "sweeping by," in gorgeous palu-me an antediluvian man renewed. daments,5 Paulus or Marius, girt round by a company of centurions, with the crimson tunic hoisted on a spear, and followed by the alalagmoss of the Roman legions.

And now came a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll, through many months, promised an abiding torment; and, in fact, it never left me until the winding up of my case. Hitherto the human face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically, nor with any special power of tormenting. But now that which I have called the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself. Perhaps some part of my London life might be answerable for this. Be that as it may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to appear: the sea appeared

4 Charles's standard was raised, giving the signal for civil war, August 22, 1642.

5 military cloaks

lishmen, though not bred in any knowledge such institutions, cannot but shudder at the mystic sublimity of castes that have flowed apart, and refused to mix, through such immemorial tracts of time; nor can any man fail to be awed by the names of the Ganges, or the Euphrates. It contributes much to these feelings, that Southern Asia is, and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life; the great officina gentium.10 Man is a weed in those regions. The vast empires also, in which the enormous population of Asia has always been cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings associated with all oriental names or images. In China, over and above what it has in common with the rest of Southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence, and want of sympathy, placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyse. I could sooner live with lunatics,

6 For this latter Consul, see note to Landor's or brute animals. All this, and much more than

Metellus and Marius, p. 512.

7 A signal of battle.

8 "A word expressing collectively the gathering of the Roman war-cries- Alála, Alála."-De Quincey.

9 A Malay, as related in an earlier part of the Confessions, once knocked at De Quincey's

door.

10 laboratory of nations

I can say, or have time to say, the reader must | instinct with life: the abominable head of the enter into before he can comprehend the un- crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at imaginable horror which these dreams of orien- me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions: and tal imagery, and mythological tortures, im- I stood loathing and fascinated. And so often pressed upon me. Under the connecting feeling did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams, that of tropical heat and vertical sun-lights, I many times the very same dream was broken brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, up in the very same way: I heard gentle voices reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appear- speaking to me (I hear everything when I am ances, that are found in all tropical regions, sleeping); and instantly I awoke: it was broad and assembled them together in China or Indo- noon; and my children were standing, hand in stan. From kindred feelings, I soon brought hand, at my bed-side; come to show me their Egypt and all her gods under the same law. coloured shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chat-them dressed for going out. I protest that so tered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cocka- awful was the transition from the damned crocotoos. I ran into pagodas: and was fixed, for dile, and the other unutterable monsters and centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms; abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innoI was the idol; I was the priest; I was wor-cent human natures and of infancy, that, in shipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind, I wrath of Brama through all the forests of wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for faces. me.11 I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of my oriental dreams, which always filled me with such amazement at the monstrous scenery, that horror seemed absorbed, for a while, in sheer astonishment. Sooner or later, came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment, and left me, not so much in terror, as in hatred and abomination of what I saw. Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me into an oppression as of madness. Into these dreams only, it was, with one or two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of physical horror entered. All before had been moral and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles; especially the last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him; and (as was always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, etc. All the feet of the tables, sofas, etc., soon became

11 Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Siva the destroyer, constitute the great triad of Hindu mythology. Osiris the creator, and Isis, his sister and wife, were Egyptian deities, and the ibis and crocodile were regarded as sacred animals.

FROM SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS*
LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW

Oftentimes at Oxford I saw Levana in my dreams. I knew her by her Roman symbols. Who is Levana? Reader, that do not pretend to have leisure for very much scholarship, you will not be angry with me for telling you. Levana was the Roman goddess that performed for the new-born infant the earliest office of ennobling kindness,-typical, by its mode, of that grandeur which belongs to man everywhere, and of that benignity in powers invisible which even in Pagan worlds sometimes descends to sustain it. At the very moment of birth, just as the infant tasted for the first time the atmosphere of our troubled planet, it was laid on the ground. That might bear different interpretations. But immediately, lest so grand a creature should grovel there for more than one instant, either the paternal hand, as proxy for the goddess Levana, or some near kinsman, as

Suspiria de Profundis (Sighs from the Depths) is the title under which De Quincey began in 1845 to publish a series of articles which were to have closed with a crowning succession of "some twenty or twenty-five dreams and noonday visions.' Most of the articles were either never written or were destroyed. Of Lerana, one of the earliest, Professor Masson has said that "it is a permanent addition to the mythology of the human race," typifying as it does "the varieties and degrees of misery that there are in the world." As for De Quincey's own education through initiation into these several degrees of sorrow, it is to be remembered that in childhood he lost by death his father and two sisters, in youth he ran away from an uncongenial school and wandered like an outcast in Wales and London, and in manhood his body, intellect, and will became enslaved to opium.

proxy for the father, raised it upright, bade it look erect as the king of all this world, and presented its forehead to the stars, saying, perhaps, in his heart, "Behold what is greater than yourselves!'' This symbolic act represented the function of Levana. And that mysterious lady, who never revealed her face (except to me in dreams), but always acted by delegation, had her name from the Latin verb (as still it is the Italian verb) levare, to raise aloft.

more than ever have been counted amongst its martyrs.

66

Therefore it is that Levana often communes with the powers that shake man's heart: therefore it is that she dotes upon grief. "These ladies," said I softly to myself, on seeing the ministers with whom Levana was conversing, these are the Sorrows; and they are three in number, as the Graces are three, who dress man's life with beauty; the Parca2 are three, who weave the dark arras of man's life in their mysterious loom, always with colours sad in part, sometimes angry with tragic crimson and black; the Furies are three, who visit with retributions called from the other side of the grave offences that walk upon this; and once even the Muses were but three, who fit the harp, the trumpet, or the lute, to the great burdens

This is the explanation of Levana, and hence it has arisen that some people have understood by Levana the tutelary power that controls the education of the nursery. She, that would not suffer at his birth even a prefigurative or mimic degradation for her awful ward, far less could be supposed to suffer the real degradation at taching to the non-development of his powers. She therefore watches over human education. of man's impassioned creations. These are the Now the word educo, with the penultimate Sorrows, all three of whom I know." The last short, was derived (by a process often exempli- words I say now; but in Oxford I said, "One fied in the crystallisation of languages) from of whom I know, and the others too surely I the word educo, with the penultimate long. shall know." For already, in my fervent youth, Whatsoever educes, or develops, educates. By I saw (dimly relieved upon the dark background the education of Levana, therefore, is meant, of my dreams) the imperfect lineaments of the not the poor machinery that moves by spelling- awful sisters. These sisters-by what name books and grammars, but that mighty system of shall we call them? If I say simply, "The central forces hidden in the deep bosom of Sorrows,' ," there will be a chance of mistaking human life, which by passion, by strife, by the term; it might be understood of individual temptation, by the energies of resistance, works sorrow,-separate cases of sorrow, whereas I for ever upon children,-resting not day or want a term expressing the mighty abstractions night, any more than the mighty wheel of day that incarnate themselves in all individual sufand night themselves, whose moments, like rest-ferings of man's heart; and I wish to have less spokes, are glimmering for ever as they these abstractions presented as impersonations, revolve. that is, as clothed with human attributes of life, If, then, these are the ministries by which and with functions pointing to flesh. Let us Levana works, how profoundly must she rever-call them, therefore, Our Ladies of Sorrow. ence the agencies of grief! But you, reader, I know them thoroughly, and have walked in think that children generally are not liable to grief such as mine. There are two senses in the word generally, the sense of Euclid, where it means universally (or in the whole extent of the genus), and a foolish sense of this word, where it means usually. Now, I am far from saying that children universally are capable of grief like mine. But there are more than you ever heard of who die of grief in this island of ours. I will tell you a common case. The rules of Eton require that a boy on the foundation1 should be there twelve years: he is superannuated at eighteen, consequently he must come at

six.

Children torn away from mothers and sisters at that age not unfrequently die. I speak of what I know. The complaint is not entered by the registrar as grief; but that it is. Grief of that sort, and at that age, has killed 1 holding a scholarship provided by the foundation,

or endowment

all their kingdoms. Three sisters they are, of one mysterious household; and their paths are wide apart; but of their dominion there is no end. Them I saw often conversing with Levana, and sometimes about myself. Do they talk, then? O, no! Mighty phantoms like these disdain the infirmities of language. They may utter voices through the organs of man when they dwell in human hearts, but amongst themselves is no voice nor sound; eternal silence reigns in their kingdoms. They spoke not, as they talked with Levana; they whispered not; they sang not; though oftentimes methought they might have sung: for I upon earth had heard their mysteries oftentimes deciphered by harp and timbrel, by dulcimer and organ. Like God, whose servants they are, they utter their pleasure, not by sounds that perish, or by words that go astray, but by signs in

2 Fates