admiration
of Wordsworth was thought to have led him to imitation of the latter, in
his _Isle of Palms_, 1812, and his other poetry.

One of Wilson's companions, in his mountain walks, was Thomas De
Quincey, who had been led by his reverence for Wordsworth and Coleridge
to take up his residence, in 1808, at Grasmere, where he occupied for
many years the cottage from which Wordsworth had removed to Allan Bank.
De Quincey was a shy, bookish man, of erratic, nocturnal habits, who
impresses one, personally, as a child of genius, with a child's
helplessness and a child's sharp observation. He was, above all things,
a magazinist. All his writings, with one exception, appeared first in
the shape of contributions to periodicals; and his essays, literary
criticisms, and miscellaneous papers are exceedingly rich and varied.
The most famous of them was his _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_,
published as a serial in the _London Magazine_, in 1821. He had begun to
take opium, as a cure for the toothache, when a student at Oxford, where
he resided from 1803 to 1808. By 1816 he had risen to eight thousand
drops of laudanum a day. For several years after this he experienced the
acutest misery, and his will suffered an entire paralysis. In 1821 he
succeeded in reducing his dose to a comparatively small allowance, and
in shaking off his torpor so as to become capable of literary work. The
most impressive effect of the opium habit was seen in his dreams, in the
unnatural expansion of space and time, and the infinite repetition of
the same objects. His sleep was filled with dim, vast images;
measureless cavalcades deploying to the sound of orchestral music; an
endless succession of vaulted halls, with staircases climbing to heaven,
up which toiled eternally the same solitary figure. "Then came sudden
alarms, hurrying to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives;
darkness and light; tempest and human faces." Many of De Quincey's
papers were autobiographical, but there is always something baffling in
these reminiscences. In the interminable wanderings of his pen--for
which, perhaps, opium was responsible--he appears to lose all trace of
facts or of any continuous story. Every actual experience of his life
seems to have been taken up into a realm of dream, and there distorted
till the reader sees not the real figures, but the enormous, grotesque
shadows of them, executing wild dances on a screen. An instance of this
process is desc