Thomas De Quincey: His Life and Writings, Volume 2J. Hogg & Company, 1877 |
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amongst Autobiographic Baird Smith believe Casuistry cause character Coleridge Confessions course critic daughter DEAR SIR,-I doubt dreams Edinburgh effect Emily Encyclopædia Britannica English experience expression fact faculty fancied feeling Florence gastric ulcer give Grasmere heard hour human humour imagination instance intellect interest labour Lasswade laudanum letter literature little Eva London Lord Advocate Lothian Street Madeline Smith Mavis Bush means mind Miss morning nature necessity never night object occasion once opium Opium-Eater ordinary original pain papers passage peculiar perhaps Plato Political Economy present question Quincey's racter reader reason reference regard remark Ricardo Saturday Scotland seems sense sister Sketches speak stomach strychnia style suffering suggested suppose Suspiria sympathy thing Thomas de Quincey thought Thucydides tion Tipperary volume whilst whole Wilson wish word Wordsworth write
Popular passages
Page 242 - Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof, In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.
Page 236 - And a magic voice and verse Hath baptized thee with a curse; And a spirit of the air Hath begirt thee with a snare; In the wind there is a voice Shall forbid thee to rejoice; And to thee shall Night deny All the quiet of her sky; And the day shall have a sun, Which shall make thee wish it done.
Page 246 - Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind, generally increases, of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are able to construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure.
Page 241 - His talk was like a stream, which runs With rapid change from rocks to roses: It slipped from politics to puns, It passed from Mahomet to Moses; Beginning with the laws which keep The planets in their radiant courses, And ending with some precept deep For dressing eels, or shoeing horses.
Page 235 - ... issue. I, as is usual in dreams (where of necessity we make ourselves central to every movement), had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it, and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. "Deeper than ever plummet sounded,
Page 206 - By which last is meant — not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination; bringing together from the four winds, like the angel of the resurrection, what else were dust from dead men's bones, into the unity of breathing life.
Page 235 - I often heard in dreams — a music of preparation and of awakening suspense, a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day — a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread extremity.
Page 314 - Marcus Aurelius) I should return thanks to Providence for all the separate blessings of my early situation, these four I would single out as worthy of special commemoration — that I lived in a rustic solitude ; that this solitude was in England ; that my infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of sisters, and not by horrid, pugilistic brothers ; finally, that I and they were dutiful and loving members of a pure, holy, and magnificent church.
Page 324 - I grew much worse. I had been leaning my head against her bosom, and all at once I sank from her arms and fell backwards on the steps. From the sensations I then had, I felt an inner conviction of the liveliest kind, that without some powerful and reviving stimulus I should either have died on the spot, or should at least have sunk to a point of exhaustion from which all reascent under my friendless circumstances would soon have become hopeless.
Page 67 - At length all is over; the redoubt has been recovered ; that which was lost is found again; the jewel which had been made captive is ransomed with blood.