method lingered so long in my work that nearly ten
years afterwards Mr. Lowell wrote me about something of mine that
he had been reading: "You must sweat the Heine out of your bones as
men do mercury," and his kindness for me would not be content with less
than the entire expulsion of the poison that had in its good time saved
my life. I dare say it was all well enough not to have it in my bones
after it had done its office, but it did do its office.

It was in some prose sketch of mine that his keen analysis had found the
Heine, but the foreign property had been so prevalent in my earlier work
in verse that he kept the first contribution he accepted from me for the
Atlantic Monthly a long time, or long enough to make sure that it was not
a translation of Heine. Then he printed it, and I am bound to say that
the poem now justifies his doubt to me, in so much that I do not see why
Heine should not have had the name of writing it if he had wanted. His
potent spirit became immediately so wholly my "control," as the mediums
say, that my poems might as well have been communications from him so far
as any authority of my own was concerned; and they were quite like other
inspirations from the other world in being so inferior to the work of the
spirit before it had the misfortune to be disembodied and obliged to use
a medium. But I do not think that either Heine or I had much lasting
harm from it, and I am sure that the good, in my case at least, was one
that can only end with me. He undid my hands, which had taken so much
pains to tie behind my back, and he forever persuaded me that though it
may be ingenious and surprising to dance in chains, it is neither pretty
nor useful.

XXV. DE QUINCEY, GOETHE, LONGFELLOW

Another author who was a prime favorite with me about this time was De
Quincey, whose books I took out of the State Library, one after another,
until I had read them all. We who were young people of that day thought
his style something wonderful, and so indeed it was, especially in those
passages, abundant everywhere in his work, relating to his own life with
an intimacy which was always-more rather than less. His rhetoric there,
and in certain of his historical studies, had a sort of luminous
richness, without losing its colloquial ease. I keenly enjoyed this
subtle spirit, and the play of that brilliant intelligence which lighted
up so many ways of literature with its lambent glow or its tricksy
glimmer, and