BY WORDSWORTH,
COLERIDGE, AND DE QUINCEY.]

Works.--Nearly all De Quincey's writings were contributed to
magazines. His first and greatest contribution was _The Confessions of
an English Opium-Eater_, published in the _London Magazine_. These
_Confessions_ are most remarkable for the brilliant and elaborate
style in which the author's early life and his opium dreams are
related. His splendid, yet melancholy, dreams are the most famous in
the language.

De Quincey's wide reading, especially of history, supplied the
material for many of them. In these dreams he saw the court ladies of
the "unhappy times of Charles I.," witnessed Marius pass by with his
Roman legions, "ran into pagodas" in China, where he "was fixed, for
centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms," and "was buried for a
thousand years, in stone coffins, in narrow chambers at the heart of
eternal pyramids" in Egypt.

His dreams were affected also by the throngs of people whom he had
watched in London. He was haunted by "the tyranny of the human face."
He says:--

"Faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands,
by myriads, by generations, by centuries: my agitation was infinite,
my mind tossed, and surged with the ocean."

Sound also played a large part in the dreams. Music, heart-breaking
lamentations, and pitiful echoes recurred frequently in the most
magnificent of these nightly pageants. One of the most distressing
features of the dreams was their vastness. The dreamer lived for
centuries in one night, and space "swelled, and was amplified to an
extent of unutterable infinity."

To present with such force and reality these grotesque and weird
fancies, these vague horrors, and these deep oppressions required a
powerful imaginative grasp of the intangible, and a masterly command
of language.

In no other work does De Quincey reach the eminence attained in the
_Confessions_, although his scholarly acquirements enabled him to
treat philosophical, critical, and historical subjects with wonderful
grace and ease. His biographer, Masson, says, "De Quincey's sixteen
volumes of magazine articles are full of brain from beginning to end."
The wide range of his erudition is shown by the fact that he could
write such fine literary criticisms as _On Wordsworth's Poetry_ and
_On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth_, such clear, strong, and
vivid descriptions of historical events and characters as _The
Caesars, Joan of Arc_, and _