tical value and interest of isolated and excited personal feeling.

Like Dante, whose 'Vita Nuova' De Quincey's 'Confessions' greatly
resemble in their essential characteristics of method, he had lived from
childhood in a world of dreams. Both felt keenly the pleasures and
sorrows of the outer world, but in both contemplative imagination was so
strong that the actual fact--the real Beatrice, if you will--became as
nothing to that same fact transmuted through idealizing thought. De
Quincey was early impressed by the remarkable fashion in which dreams or
reveries weave together the separate strands of wakeful existence.
Before he was two years old he had, he says, "a remarkable dream of
terrific grandeur about a favorite nurse, which is interesting to myself
for this reason,--that it demonstrates my dreaming tendencies to have
been constitutional, and not dependent on laudanum." At the same age he
"connected a profound sense of pathos with the reappearance, very early
in the spring, of some crocuses." These two incidents are a key to the
working of De Quincey's mind. Waking or sleeping, his intellect had the
rare power of using the facts of life as the composer might use a song
of the street, building on a wandering ballad a whole symphony of
transfigured sound, retaining skillfully, in the midst of the new and
majestic music, the winning qualities of the popular strain. To such a
boy, with an imaginative mind, an impassioned nature, and a memory which
retained and developed powerfully year by year all associations
involving the feelings of grandeur, magnificence, or immensity,--to such
a boy, life and experience were but the storing up of material which the
creative mind might weave into literature that had the form of prose and
the nature of poetry.

De Quincey shared Dante's rare capacity for retaining strong visual
images, his rare power of weaving them into a new and wonderful fabric.
But De Quincey, though as learned and as acute as Dante, had not Dante's
religious and philosophical convictions. A blind faith and scholastic
reason were the foundations of the great vision of the 'Divine Comedy.'
De Quincey had not the strong but limited conception of the world on
which to base his imagination, he had not the high religious vision to
nerve him to higher contemplation, and his work can never serve in any
way as a guide and message to mankind. De Quincey's visions, however,
have the merit of not being forced. He did not