No. 768.-12 February, 1859.-Third Series, No. 46. 4. Sir Howard Douglas on Naval Warfare with Steam, Spectator, 415 5. Life and Remains of Douglas Jerrold, . Athenæum, 420 6. Fiji and the Fijians, 7. The Double Widowhood, Chambers's Journal, 433 8. The Pilgrimage of Man, Saturday Review, 444 POETRY.-Rhyme for Christmas Time, 414. Young Mother and Child, 414. New Year's Eve, 447. After the Battle, 448. Wee Willie Winkie, 448. SHORT ARTICLES.-Fox, 398. A Plague of Mice, 405. Street Scene, by Mrs. Child, 413. Italian Marriages, 413. The Pope and Miss Dix, 419. Walking on the Water, 419. Gladstone, 429. Maurice, 429. Prince Albert's Speeches, 443. "Lay by me till Morning," 446. Bulwer, 446. THOMAS DE QUINCEY. THOMAS DE QUINCEY. To the Editor of the "Instructor :" MY DEAR SIR,—I am much obliged to you for communicating to us (that is, to my daughters and myself) the engraved portrait, enlarged from the daguerreotype original. The engraver, at least, seems to have done his part ably. As to one of the earlier artists concerned, viz., the sun of July, I suppose it is not allowable to complain of him, else my daughters are inclined to upbraid him with having made the mouth too long. But, of old, it was held audacity to suspect the sun's veracity:-" Solem quis dicere falsum audeat!" And I remember that, half a century the "Sun" newspaper, in London, used ago, to fight under sanction of that motto. But it was at length discovered by the learned, that Sun junior; viz., the newspaper, did sometimes indulge in fibbing. The ancient prejudice about the solar truth broke down, therefore, in that instance; and who knows but Sun senior may be detected, now that our optical glasses are so much improved, in similar practices? in which case he may have only been "keeping his hand in " when operating upon that one feature of the mouth. The rest of the portrait, we all agree, does credit to his talents, showing that he is still wide-awake, and not at all the superannuated old artist that some speculators in philosophy had dreamed of his becoming. the great fields of biography, that any one A better plan will be-to detach some single chapter from the experience of childhood, which is likely to offer, at least, this kind of value-either that it will record some of the deep impressions under which my childish sensibilities expanded, and the ideas which at that time brooded continually over my mind, or else will expose the traits of character that slumbered in those around me. This plan will have the advantage of not being liable to the suspicion of vanity or egotism; for I beg the reader to understand distinctly, that I do not offer this sketch as deriving any part of what interest it may have from myself, as the person concerned in it. If the particular experience selected is really interesting, in virtue of its own circumstances, then it matters hot to whom it happened. Suppose that a man should record a perilous journey, it will be no fair inference that he records it as a journey performed by himself. Most sincerely he may be able to say, that he records it not for that relation to himself, but in spite of that relation. The incidents, being absolutely independent, in their power to amuse, of all personal reference, must be As an accompaniment to this portrait, your equally interesting [he will say] whether they wish is that I should furnish a few brief occurred to A. or to B. That is my case. chronological memoranda of my own life. Let the reader abstract from me as a person That would be hard for me to do, and, when that by accident, or in some partial sense, may done, might not be very interesting for others have been previously known to himself. Let to read. Nothing makes such dreary and him read the sketch as belonging to one who monotonous reading as the old hackneyed wishes to be profoundly anonymous. I offer roll-call, chronologically arrayed, of inevitable it not as owing any thing to its connection facts in a man's life. One is so certain of the with a particular individual, but as likely to be man's having been born, and also of his hav-amusing separately for itself; and if I make ing died, that it is dismal to lie under the necessity of reading it. That the man began by being a boy-that he went to school-and that, by intense application to his studies, "which he took to be his portion in this life," he rose to distinction as a robber of orchards, seems so probable upon the whole, that I am willing to accept it as a postulate. That he married-that, in fulness of time, he was hanged, or (being a humble, un ambitious man) that he was content with deserving itthese little circumstances are so naturally to be looked for, as sown broadcast up and down any mistake in that, it is not a mistake of vanity exaggerating the consequence of what relates to my own childhood, but a simple mistake of the judgment as to the power of amusement that may attach to a particular succession of reminiscences. Excuse the imperfect development which in some places of the sketch may have been given to my meaning. I suffer from a most afflicting derangement of the nervous system, which at times makes it difficult for me to write at all, and always makes me impatient, in a degree not easily understood, of recasting what may seem insufficiently, or even incoherently, expressed. Believe me, ever yours, THOMAS DE QUINCY. A SKETCH FROM CHILDHOOD. quest of beseeching looks. I tormented the blue depths with obstinate scrutiny, sweeping them with my eyes, and searching them forever, after one angelic face, that might perhaps have permission to reveal itself for a moment. The faculty of shaping images in the distance, out of slight elements, and grouping them after the yearnings of the heart, grew upon me at this time. And I ABOUT the close of my sixth year, suddenly the first chapter of my life came to a violent termination; that chapter which, and which only, in the hour of death, or even within the gates of recovered Paradise, could merit a re-recall at the present moment one instance of membrance. "It is finished," was the secret that sort, which may show how merely shadmisgiving of my heart, for the heart even of ows, or a gleam of brightness, or nothing at infancy is as apprehensive as that of maturest all, could furnish a sufficient basis for this wisdom, in relation to any capital wound in- creative faculty. On Sunday mornings I was flicted on the happiness; "it is finished, and always taken to church. It was a church on the life is exhausted." How? Could it be ex- the old and natural model of England, havhausted so soon? Had I read Milton, had I ing aisles, galleries, organ, all things ancient seen Rome, had I heard Mozart? No. The and venerable, and the proportions majestic. "Paradise Lost" was yet unread, the Coli- Here, whilst the congregation knelt through seum and St. Peter's were unseen, the melo- the long Litany, as often as we came to that dies of Don Giovanni were yet silent for me. passage, so beautiful amongst the many that Raptures there might be in arrear. But rap- are so, where God is supplicated on behalf of tures are modes of troubled pleasure; the peace, all sick persons and young children,' and the rest, the lull, the central security, which that he would show his pity upon all prisbelong to love, that is past all understand-oners and captives,' I wept in secret; and, ing, those could return no more. Such a love, raising my streaming eyes to the windows of so unfathomable, subsisting between myself the galleries, saw, on days when the sun was and my eldest sister, under the circumstances of our difference in age (she being above eight years of age, I under six), and of our affinities in nature, together with the sudden foundering of all this blind happiness, I have described elsewhere.* I shall not here repeat any part of the narrative. But one extract from the closing sections of the paper I shall make; in order to describe the depth to which a child's heart may be ploughed up by one overmastering storm of grief, and as a proof that grief, in some of its fluctuations, is not uniformly a depressing passion-but also by possibility has its own separate aspirations, and at times is full of cloudy grandeur. The point of time is during the months that immediately succeeded to my sister's funeral. "The awful stiliness of summer noons, when no winds were abroad-the appealing silence of gray or misty afternoons-these were to me, in that state of mind, fascinations, as of witchcraft. Into the woods, or the desert air, I gazed as if some comfort lay in them. I wearied the heavens with my in shining, a spectacle as affecting as ever There deep chords of some accompaniment in the bass, I saw through the wide central field of the window, where the glass was uncolored, white fleecy clouds sailing over the azure depths of the sky; were it but a fragment or a hint of such a cloud, immediately, under the flash of my sorrow-haunted eye, it grew *Elsewhere; viz., in the introductory part of and shaped itself into a vision of beds with the "Suspiria de Profundis." published in "Black-white lawny curtains; and in the beds lay wood," during the early part of the year 1845. The work is yet unfinished as regards the publica tion. sick children, dying children, that were tossing in anguish, and weeping clamorously for death. God, for some mysterious reason, | from year to year? "If," as my good angel could not suddenly release them from their might have said to me, "thou art moving on pain; but he suffered the beds, as it seemed, a line of utter ruin, from mere palsy of one to rise slowly through the clouds; slowly the great vital force, and if that loss is past all beds ascended into the chambers of the air; restoration, then kindle a new supplementary slowly, also, his arms descended from the life by such means as are now possible-by heavens, in order that he and his young chil- the agitations, for instance, of strife and condren whom in Judea, once and forever, he flict "—yes, possible, on the wide stage of the had blessed, though they must pass slowly world, and for people who should be free through the dreadful chasm of separation, agents enough to make enemies, in case they might yet meet the sooner. These visions failed to find them; but for a child, not seven were self-sustained. These visions needed years old, to whom his medical advisers should not that any sound should speak to me, or prescribe a course of hatred, or continued music mould my feelings. The hint from the hostilities, by way of tonics, in what quarter Litany, the fragment from the clouds, the was he to look out for such luxuries? Who pictures on the storied windows were sufficient. would condescend to officiate as enemy to a But not the less the blare of the tumultuous child! And yet, as regarded my own particorgan wrought its own separate creations. ular case, had I breathed out any such queruAnd oftentimes in anthems, when the mighty lous demand, that same Harlequin Mephistoinstrument threw its vast columns of sound, pheles might have whispered in reply," Never fierce, yet melodious, over the voices of the you trouble yourself about that. Do you choir-high in arches when it rose, seeming furnish the patience that can swallow cheerto surmount and override the strife of the fully a long, course of kicking, and I'll find vocal parts, aud gathering by strong coercion those that shall furnish the kicks." In fact, the total storm of music into unity-some- at this very moment, when all chance of times I also seemed to rise and to walk quarrel, or opening for prolonged enmity, triumphantly upon those clouds, which so seemed the remotest of chimeras, mischief recently I had looked up to as mementoes of was already in the wind; and suddenly there prostrate sorrow. Yes; sometimes, under was let loose upon me such a storm of belthe transfigurations of music, I felt of grief ligerent fury as might, under good manageitself, as a fiery chariot for mounting victori-ment, have yielded a life-annuity of feuds. ously above the causes of grief." I had at that time at elder brother, in fact, the eldest of us all, and at least five years senior to myself. He, by original temperament, was a boy of fiery nature, ten times more active than I was inert, loving the ele The next (which was the second) chapter of my childish experience, formed that sort of fierce and fantastic contradiction to the first, which might seem to move in obedience to some incarnate principle of malicious pan-ment of feuds and stormy conflict more (if tomime. A spirit of love, and a spirit of rest, as if breathing from St. John the Evangelist, had seemed to mould the harmonies of that earliest stage in my childhood which had just vanished; but now, on the other hand, some wicked Harlequin Mephistopheles was apparently commissioned to vex my eyes and plague my heart, through the next succession of two or three years: a worm was at the roots of life. Yet in this, perhaps, there lurked a harsh beneficence. If, because the great vision of love had vanished, idiocy and the torpor of despondency were really creeping over my faculties, and strangling their energies, what better change for me than the necessity (else how miserable!) of fighting, wrangling, struggling, without pause, or promise of pause, from day to day, or even that were possible) than I detested it; and these constitutional tendencies had in him been nursed by the training of a public school. This accident in his life was indeed the cause of our now meeting as strangers. Singular, indeed, it seems, but, in fact, had arisen naturally enough, that both this eldest of my brothers, and my father, should be absolute strangers to me in my seventh year; so that, in the case of meeting either, I should not have known him, nor he me. In my father's case, this arose from the accident of his having lived abroad for a space that, measured against my life, was a very long one. First, he lived in Portugal, at Lisbon and at Cintra; next in Madeira; then in the West Indies; sometimes in Jamaica, sometimes in St. Kitt's, courting the supposed benefit of hot climates |