twisted like a wisp of straw, opening his door, and advancing
toward you with hurried movement and half-recognizing glance,
saluting you in low and hesitating tones, and without looking at
you, beginning to pour into your willing ear a stream of learning
and wisdom, as long as you are content to listen. . . . His head is
small; how can it carry all he knows? His brow is singular in
shape, but not particularly large or prominent; where has nature
expressed his majestic intellect? His eyes--they sparkle not, they
shine not, they are lustreless; there is not even the glare which
lights up sometimes dull eyes into eloquence; and yet, even at
first, the _tout ensemble,_ strikes you as that of no common man,
and you say, ere he has opened his lips, 'He is either mad or
inspired.'"

In all literary history there is scarcely a man about whose life and
character hang so peculiar an interest and fascination as about De
Quincey. He has himself given a most vivid account of his childhood, in
his "Autobiographic Sketches," and in the "Opium Eater." From these we
learn that he was born in Manchester, August 15, 1785. His father was a
very wealthy merchant of that city, who was inclined to pulmonary
consumption, and lived mostly abroad, in the West Indies and other warm
climates. Thomas had several brothers and sisters, all of whom seem to
have been rather peculiar and remarkable children. He was a very
precocious child himself, sensitive, excitable, and given to dreams and
visions,--living largely in a world of imagination, and for many years
ruled over with absolute despotism by an older brother. The loss of a
favorite sister in very early childhood seems to have been a blow from
which it took him years to recover. He writes of it thus:--

"Inevitable sometimes it is, in solitude, that this should happen
to minds morbidly meditative,--that when we stretch out our arms in
darkness, vainly striving to draw back the sweet faces that have
vanished, slowly arises a new stratagem of grief, and we say, 'Be
it that they no more come back to us, yet what hinders but we
should go to _them_?' Perilous is that crisis for the young. In its
effect perfectly the same as the ignoble witchcraft of the poor
African _Obeah_, his sublimer witchcraft of grief will, if left to
follow its own natural course, terminate in the same catastrophe of