awakening suspense; a music
like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like _that_,
gave the feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing
off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a
mighty day--a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature,
then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and laboring in some dread
extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where--somehow, I knew not how--by
some beings, I knew not whom--a battle, a strife, an agony, was
conducting--was evolving like a great drama, or piece of music,
with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion
as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I
had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the
power, if I could raise myself to will it; and yet again I had not
the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the
oppression of inexpiable guilt. 'Deeper than ever plummit sounded,'
I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some
greater interest was at stake; some mightier cause than ever yet
the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden
alarms; hurryings to and fro; trepidations of innumerable
fugitives. I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad;
darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and, at last, with
the sense that all was lost, female forms and the features that
were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed--and
clasped hands, and heartbreaking partings, and then--everlasting
farewells! and, with a sigh, such as the caves of hell sighed when
the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of
death--everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again
reverberated--everlasting farewells!'

O mighty magician!

In point of style and general method of treating subjects, De Quincey's
greatest faults are pedantry and discursiveness. Of the former we have
no defence to make; we think that, in writing avowedly for the public,
and not for any particular class, the use of technical terms merely
because they are technical, and of learned terms merely because they are
learned, is a positive blemish. But still greater offence is given to
many readers by the _occasional_ practice of discursiveness; we employ
the epithet intentionally, for the habit is by no means so inveterate as