adsomely, nor bring disgrace on the tator's memory by niggardliness. And this giggling alternates with flashes revealing intuition, which rectify your ery idea regarding human history, with aths which open up to you the vista of the st, and enable you to define the posin of humanity in the present. It is intermingled dance of northern lights, id far-illumining gleams of precious raance: the writer is as one sitting in a ariot at a Roman carnival, and flinging, m the same hand, crackers, and sugarums, and lumps of pure gold. Ill is it r him who sees the crackers and sugar(ums, and thinks there can be no gold: ad the remark applies more or less to e whole range of De Quincey's writings. n the one hand, no man can fail to pereive the jocularity of the paper we have een describing; on the other, if it is nportant or indicative of high powers > see beneath all the superficial phenoena of war, and discern its true function human history, if it is a proof of proindity, that a clear, indubitable light is ast into regions where Foster and Carlyle tumbled about as if blindfold, then we an appeal to this same article, as a riumphant vindication of the sterling alue of De Quincey's intellectual powers. How strongly, last of all, does it confirm vhat we have said respecting the perfect case, the absolute want of effort, the free careless naturalness with which he writes. De Quincey has devoted several papers o an attempted proof, that the sect of Essenes, mentioned by Josephus, were one other than the early Christians. The series is distinguished by great acuteless of argument, and possess that fascination of style which characterises every production of their author. The whole ogic of the case is brought out in a figure, so simple, so precise, and yet so tasteful, that we may quote it: 'If, in an ancient palace, re-opened after it had been shut up for centuries, you were to find a hundred golden shafts or pillars, for which nobody could suggest a place or a use; and if, in some other quarter of the palace, far remote, you were afterwards to find a hundred golden sockets fixed in the floor-first of all, pillars which nobody could apply to any purpose, or refer to any place; secondly, sockets which nobody could fill;-probably even "wicked Will Whiston" might be capable of a glimmering suspicion that the hundred golden shafts belonged to the hundred golden sockets. And if it should turn out that each several shaft screwed into its own peculiar socket, why, in such a case, not "Whiston, Ditton, and Co.," could resist the evidence, that each enigma had brought a key to the other; and that by means of two mysteries there had ceased even to be one mystery.' The unoccupied sockets are the several heads in the description of the Essenes by Josephus; the missing pillars, the early Christians. Thus is the whole argument seen at a glance. But we cannot say that we have been convinced. We indeed think it remarkably probable that the early Christians and the Essenes were one and the same; but we cannot bring ourselves to regard Mr De Quincey's manner of accounting for the name satisfactory. We cannot admit the theory of an assumed disguise on the part of the Christians. The plain command to confess Christ before men; the almost excessive valour of the early Christians, prompting them even to court martyrdom; the contrariety of such a method of defence to the whole genius of the opposition of the true religion to all that is false in every age, which has always been to unsheath the sword in the face of the foe, to fling away the scabbard, and to defy him in the name of the Lord; the scarcely conceivable possibility of Christians suddenly, as it were, ducking their heads before the wave of persecution, and emerging again, unrecognised, as Essenes; these and similar considerations close the avenues of our mind to the most plausible array of proofs which could be adduced against them. But not only are these papers marked by high ingenuity; they contain striking gleams of insight into the whole course of the development of Christianity. We think, for instance, that the following remark is not more daring than it is important:-'In strict philosophic truth, Christianity did not reach its mature period, even of infancy, until the days of the Protestant Reformation.' This casts a light before and after. And it is a sublime idea to which it leads us;-the idea of the whole human race through long millenniums gazing upon the handwriting of God, and only in the slow course of centuries spelling it out. There is also an exactness of conception as to what Christianity really is, which sets De Quincey at a quite immeasurable distance from your general Christian litterateur. He does not confound it with 'virtue,' or any conceivable ethical theory; he does not, with a mouth homage which is but disguised atheism, lay artistic hands on Christianity, and take it, like any old mythology, to play a part, or to act as a background, in an art novel; he recognises the perennial supernatural element which is inseparably involved in its very idea, the continual action from age to age of the Spirit of God on the mind of man. In various parts of his works, indeed, De Quincey exhibits a profound insight into the spirit and nature of Christianity,-its essential distinction from Paganism, as a system of doctrines, and not a mere ritual, and its absolute agreement with what is darkest and deepest in the human heart and history. We have lingered perhaps too long on the subject of De Quincey's strictly intellectual powers; but we regret the less having done so, because it is here that our remarks may be of the greatest practical value. All men acknowledge De Quincey's genius; all men appreciate, more or less, the grandeur and the delicacy of his imagination; all own the supremacy of his command over the English tongue. But we think it is not so generally conceded, that he is a substantially valuable thinker; that there is not only intellectual amusement, that there are not only masterpieces of style within the compass of his works, but that there is much also of that intellectual stuff, with which one might build up his system of opinion, or on which he might nourish his highest powers. Even this we have not so much proved, as partially indicated the means of proving. We might have enlarged on the vast stores of his learning, and still more on the perfect command he has over it all: how with the true poetic might he can fling a subject into the furnace of his genius, shapeless, rugged, and drossy as it may be, and show us it again flowing out in the purity and brightness of molten gold: how at eleven he was a brilliant Latin scholar, and at fifteen could talk Greek with such fluency and correctness, that his master said he could address an Athenian mob better than his instructor an English: how he studied mathematics, and metaphysics, and theology, and scholastic logic, and all which could give exercise to his soul in the herculean youth of its powers. But we say no more. We think we have said enough to make good our point. We differ from De Quincey in several respects: we fear that, in theology, we march nearer to the standard of Calvin than he would approve; we have already intimated our discontent with certain of his arguments on the identity of the early Christians and Essenes; we think he has underrated John Foster, and he has certainly outstripped our charity in the matter of Judas: but yet we esteem him, and we think our readers will agree with us in esteeming him, a really powerful thinker, whose criticism upon human knowledge, and whose direct contributions to its stores, are worthy of being eagerly seized and earnestly scrutinised by thoughtful minds. We have spoken hitherto of what may be figured as the skeleton or bare framework of De Quincey's mind. We have found him here comparable with Ricardo. But now we pass to a different delineation; now we leave Ricardo and all dry algebraists, geometricians, metaphysicians, and scholastics behind; we come to look upon the glorious garment of sympathy in which De Quincey's mind is robed, and the grand imaginative eye which is his, and which can clothe every algebraic formula in light as of the stars. He himself speaks of the 'two hemispheres, as it were, that compose the total world of human power-mathematics on the one hand, poetry on the other;' and we must think that he was born a denizen of both. It is our belief, indeed, that every mind of a very high order is. It is of beneficent arrangement that men in general are furnished with several classes of tendencies and powers: it is well that each man does his own work best, and even has a certain suppressed feeling that his special work is the most important in this world. But it is a positive and confounding error to apply the general rule to the few individual minds which rise far above the common level. Of these minds we think no assertion can be made with less of hesitancy or qualification, than that their powers and sympathies are diverse. We can trace the smothered gleams of a burning imagination through the works of Jonathan Edwards, like volcanic fires kept under by the solid ground, and towered cities and stable mountains of some Italy or Trinacria. Plato was the greatest prose poet that ever lived; the softening ra whom we treat, great importance is to be attached, that he was the first, or among the first, to hail the rising, in quarters of the literary heaven so widely apart, and with such an antithetic diversity of radiance, two such stars as Wordsworth and Ricardo. The light of Ricardo is perhaps, in every sense, good and bad, the driest in English literature; the general intellect even of practical England turns away from it. Wordsworth is, of all poets, the farthest removed from the practical world: he is the listener to the voice of woods, the watcher of the wreathing of the clouds; he can drink a tender and intense pleasure from the waving of the little flower, from the form of its star-shaped shadow; he can even enter, by inexpressible delicacy of poetic sympathy, into the feelings which his own creative power imparts, and wish that little flower tiance of poetic light which played over he massive intellect of Luther, gave it a beauty which will never fade; and we lave no doubt that imaginative fire urned in the unwavering, far-searching eye of Calvin. To borrow a suggestion rom those words of De Quincey regardng the hemispheres, we would say, that ll great men have an intellectual night nd an intellectual day: in the still, vast ight, when no colour rests on the earth, nd the stars in their courses are treadag the fields of immensity, they look up, almly and abstractedly, to learn, by pure animpassioned thought, their motions and heir laws; in the blaze of day's sunlight, when the world is arrayed in its robe of many colours, and clouds, waves, and forests are rejoicing in their beauty, then they also share the joy, and can take of the glories of nature to clothe the thoughts revealed to them in the silent night. We are not prepared to say that 'Conscious of half the pleasure that it gives;' what De Quincey has actually accomplished will prove sufficient to vindicate from him, too, the general intellect of for him a place among the mighty ones practical England, as well proved in the of bygone ages, among the few who oc- case of Arnold, turns away dissatisfied. cupy the intellectual thrones of the world; In the range of De Quincey's sympathies but we do say, that there are unmistake--and the sympathies are the voices or able traces that his natural endowment the ministers of the powers, the leaves by was of this royal order, that, in the two which the strong plant drinks in the air great forms of intellect the imaginative of heaven-there was compass for both. and the abstractive—he was magnificently It is no fable of poetry or dream of a gifted. The reader has seen how he was fevered brain, that the human mind is a affected by Ricardo's political economy macrocosm of nature; it is a fact to which it was a case of positive rapturous delight. even physiological science is now accordBut now hear this:-'A little before that ing her assent, and which a psychological time (1799), Wordsworth had published comparison of the intellects of the great the first edition (in a single volume) of and the small in all ages would irresisthe "Lyrical Ballads;” and into this had tibly demonstrate. Weakness of intelbeen introduced Mr Coleridge's poem of lect and littleness of intellect are found, the "Ancient Mariner," as the contribu- when well examined, to mean narrowness tion of an anonymous friend. It would of intellect; trace men through all their be directing the reader's attention too grades, from those humble forms of the much to myself, if I were to linger upon world-school,' where sit the artisan, the this, the greatest event in the unfolding of husbandman, and the private soldier, unmy own mind. Let me say, in one word, til you reach that august region where that, at a period when neither the one nor human history and all time seem to be the other writer was valued by the public spread out, one imperial domain, be-both having a long warfare to accom- neath the sky-like dome of the mind of plish of contumely and ridicule, before Shakspere; you will find every increase they could rise into their present estima- of greatness, accompanied by, we had tion-I found in their poems "the ray almost said synonymous with, expansion of a new morning," and an absolute reve- of range. We certainly know of nothing lation of untrodden worlds, teeming with in modern literary history so boldly and power and beauty as yet unsuspected strikingly demonstrative of a superb naamong men.' These are the words of tural endowment, as the delight, which De Quincey. Now we think it a very his own words show to have been rapremarkable fact, and one to which, in turous, with which De Quincey watched, forming any estimate of the author of on the one hand, the unimpassioned Ricardo threading with his safety-lamp the unexplored sunless labyrinths of political economy; and gazed, on the other, on nature in the dewy light cast over it by Wordsworth, or on the magician Coleridge, as he blended the glories of chaos and creation in one wondrous phantasmagoria around his spectral ship and his spectral mariner. I am a man, and nothing human do I think foreign to me: the sentiment is too true to grow old; it is also a fact that the more human I am, the nearer I approach to what a man may be, the less is there, in all that can be seen or heard, thought or imagined, in air, earth, or ocean, in literature, science, or art, in all this universe, which will be foreign to me. And since the sympathies are but the ministers of the powers, since sympathy is the reconciling, and winning, and gathering invitation, at whose voice all that there is of beauty, in stars, and clouds, and dewdrops, and the golden leaflets with which summer fringes her robe of green, comes obsequiously to the intellect which can marshal them in a new order, or bid a new creation arise from their combination, the question here presses itself upon us -What has De Quincey himself done, what new field of truth has he opened up, what great poetic structure has he built? The answer is one which can be easily rendered, but which must create sad reflections. We unhesitatingly say, De Quincey has done much, but we profoundly and sorrowfully feel that he might have done much, incalculably much, more. How gloriously Coleridge rose sunward in his mighty youth, sweeping at once into fields of the poetic heaven which had not been entered since Milton! But, as if some maddening or bewildering enchantment had fallen on him, it was seen that the aerial poise of his wings became unsteady, he seemed to stagger in the sky, and never again, however grand his convulsive flappings, however determined his efforts to sustain his upward flight, did he sail with aught of the Miltonic strength or the Miltonic majesty. That maddening enchantment was opium; under its tremendous sway fell also De Quincey. The English tongue seems somewhat too practically framed to serve well the purpose of lamenting; it affects rather the battle melody, or the song of the worker; and whatever its powers may be in this direction, we shall not here tune it to elegaic murmurings. It is a truly British sentiment which Carlyle expresses, when he says:— "Tis a thriftless thing to be sad, sad; 'Tis a thriftless thing to be sad.' We shall abandon then the language of regret, and endeavour rather to find cause of rejoicing in what has actually been realised for us by De Quincey. And truly, if it may appear startling or absurd to speak of the English language as inexpressive of sorrow, when it is the language in which De Quincey has written, while yet what we allege remains true, since it is a grand, an elevating sorrow, a sorrow which makes us weep no weak or ignoble tears, and is immeasurably removed from whining, to which De Quincey has given expression, we may say that the sorrow with which we regard the influence exerted over De Quincey by opium, is one which is unusually and wondrously chequered by gleams of gladness. We confess that sorrow is, on the whole, the prevailing emotion in our minds, when we regard the total phenomenon; for we are convinced that nature in perfect health will always work more grandly than nature in any conceivable state of disease, and we doubt not that all the beauty which we now admire in the writings of De Quincey, had beensecured and enhanced, had he never known the delirious joys or sorrows of opium. Yet who that has looked in wondering admiration at what he has actually done, can pretend to say that he can know, by any effort of conceptive sight, and not solely by faith, what potentialities of grander performance De Quincey did possess? Are we sure that, had there been no opium in the case, such efforts had been suggested, as that a canvas would have been found for such picturings? The question can scarce be answered. We suppose it will be agreed that there is nothing in our language to be compared with De Quincey's dreams; nay, to speak of comparison is inadmissible, for they are absolutely alone; all other authors who have ventured on visionary delineations-and of these there are enough would grant that their dreams were generically different from his. In Germany, there have been two writers who can be put in comparison with him— Richter and Novalis. His own translations and Carlyle's have made us familiar with the terrors and the glories of Jean Paul's dreams. The 'Dream upon the Universe,' which De Quincey rendered into English in the 'London Magazine,' and various others which are widely known, enable us to form a definite opinion regarding his general manner; and we record it as our decided impression, that it may be maintained as a general truth, that there reigns over De Quincey's dreamcreations a taste more austerely classic, more chaste, more majestic, than ruled those of Richter. The 'Suspiria' have been much lauded; we acknowledge their surpassing power: but it is to the Dream Fugue,' founded on the 'Vision of Sudden Death,' that we point with calmest assurance, as illustrating our general remark, and demonstrating the superiority of De Quincey over Jean Paul. In the visions of the latter there is a certain barbaric splendour, a chaotic wildness, a bewildering accumulation of fearful or of gorgeous images, suggestive rather of the fury and might of the tempest than of the strength of light; the supremacy of order seems, as it were, questioned or questionable; the picture seems hidden by its own drapery; the melody scarce traceable in the immeasurable volume of sound. Right or wrong, the British intellect cannot tolerate indistinctness. Now, it seems to us that in that succession of dreams which we have mentioned, and which seem to us to constitute De Quincey's masterpiece, there is, over all the splendour and terror, a clear serenity of light which belongs to the very highest style of poetic beauty. The conceptions are very daring, but each form of spurious originality is absent the fantastic and the grotesque; there is the mystery of the land of dreams, yet so powerful is the imagination which strikes the whole into being, that the wondrous picture has the vividness and the truth of reality; while, with every change of scene and emotion, the language changes too-now rich, glowing, and bold, when the idea is free sunny joyousness-now melting into a gentle or spiritual melody of a more than Æolian softness and now rising to a Homeric swell, that echoes the everlasting gallop of the steeds which drag that triumphal demanding the very highest manifestation of order and harmony possible by man, we think we could maintain against all comers that this is, for its size, the noblest production in English prose. And we cannot but think that nothing so perfect ever rose before the imagination of Jean Paul Richter. The little we know of the dream-paintings of Novalis leads us to think that there is a closer similarity between his manner and De Quincey's, than subsists in the case we have mentioned. The delicacy, the mildness, and the powerful imagination of Novalis, remind us strongly of De Quincey; but we do not know enough of his writings to draw a detailed parallel. We are utterly unable to justify to our readers the above opinion respecting the Dream Fugue;' and we confess that we have a certain reluctance to associate any description we could give with the impressions which the original is fitted to produce in the minds of readers. But we feel it necessary to give at least something like positive proof that our words are not those of extravagance; and therefore we compel ourselves to attempt to extract one or two such pieces from the 'gorgeous mosaic' of this dream, as may, though faintly, suggest the idea of the whole. During the late war, De Quincey used to come down annually on the mail-coach from London to Lancashire. It was the office of the mail to spread the news of the great victories. On one occasion, he came down after a great battle; and an incident which occurred on the way was the occasion of the Dream Fugue.' It was a night which De Quincey alone was capable of describing :— 'Obliquely we were nearing the sea upon our left, which also must, under the present circumstances, be repeating the general state of halcyon repose. The sea, the atmosphere, the light, bore an orchestral part in this universal lull. Moonlight and the first timid tremblings of the dawn were now blending; and the blendings were brought into a still more exquisite state of unity by a slight silvery mist, motionless and dreamy, that covered the woods and fields; but with a veil of equable transparency. Still, in the confidence of children that tread without fear every chamber in their father's house, and to whom no door is closed, we, in that sabbatic vision which sometimes is revealed for an hour upon nights like this, ascend with easy steps |