resolve to see what faith
and reason bade him.

While all controlled reasoning was suspended under the incantation of
opium, his quick mind, without conscious intent, without prejudice or
purpose, assembled such mysterious and wonderful sights and sounds as
the naked soul might see and hear in the world of actual experience. For
De Quincey's range of action and association was not as narrow as might
seem. He had walked the streets of London friendless and starving, saved
from death by a dram given by one even more wretched than he, only a few
months after he had talked with the king. De Quincey's latent images are
therefore not grotesque or mediaeval, not conditioned by any
philosophical theory, not of any Inferno or Paradise. The elements of
his visions are the simple elements of all our striking experiences: the
faces of the dead, the grieving child, the tired woman, the strange
foreign face, the tramp of horses' feet. And opium merely magnified
these simple elements, rendered them grand and beautiful without giving
them any forced connection or relative meaning. We recognize the traces
of our own transfigured experience, but we are relieved from the
necessity of accepting it as having an inner meaning. De Quincey's
singular hold on our affection seems, therefore, to be his rare quality
of presenting the unusual but typical dream or reverie as a beautiful
object of interest, without endeavoring to give it the character of an
allegory or a fable.

The greater part of De Quincey's writings however are historical,
critical, and philosophical in character rather than autobiographical;
but these are now much neglected. We sometimes read a little of 'Joan of
Arc,' and no one can read it without great admiration; the 'Flight of
the Tartars' has even become a part of "prescribed" literature in our
American schools; but of other essays than these we have as a rule only
a dim impression or a faint memory. There are obvious reasons why De
Quincey's historical and philosophical writings, in an age which devotes
itself so largely to similar pursuits, no longer recommend themselves to
the popular taste. His method is too discursive and leisurely; his
subjects as a rule too remote from current interest; his line of thought
too intricate. These failings, from our point of view, are the more to
be regretted because there has never been an English essayist more
entertaining or suggestive than De Quincey. His works cover a very wide