ntasy comes between the
percipient and the thing perceived, and it will be strange if the reader
does not feel that the later writer has a finer instinct for the choice
and use of words.

It would be untrue to say that Wilde's instinct was faultless. A garish
artificiality spoils much of his work; but this was through wilful
perversity. Even in his earlier work--in that wonderful book, _Dorian
Gray_, he realized the compelling charm of simplicity in style. His
fairy stories, _The Happy Prince_, for instance, are little masterpieces
of simple, restrained writing, and in the last things that came from his
pen there is a growing appreciation of the value of simplicity.

De Quincey never realized this; he recognized one form of art--the
decorative. And although he became a master of that form, it was
inevitable that at times this mode of art should fail in its effect.

Here is a passage from _Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow_:--

"The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of
Tears. She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for
vanished faces. She stood in Rama, where a voice was heard of
lamentation--Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be
comforted. She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the night when
Herod's sword swept its nurseries of Innocents, and the little feet
were stiffened for ever which were heard at times as they trotted
along floors overhead, woke pulses of love in household hearts that
were not unmarked in heaven. Her eyes are sweet and subtle; wild and
sleepy by turns; often times rising to the clouds, often times
challenging the heavens. She wears a diadem round her head. And I
knew by childish memories that she could go abroad upon the winds,
when she heard the sobbing of litanies or the thundering of organs,
and when she beheld the mustering of summer clouds."

And here is Oscar Wilde in _De Profundis_:--

"Prosperity, pleasure, and success, may be rough of grain and common
in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things.
There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which
sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. . . .
It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it,
and even then must bleed again, though not in pain. Behind joy and
laughter there may be a temperament coarse, hard, and callous.