best of authority in our study of this period, namely, the author
himself, who in the _Sketches_ already mentioned, and in his most
noted work, _The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, has told the
story of these early years in considerable detail and with apparent
sincerity. De Quincey was not a sturdy boy. Shy and dreamy,
exquisitely sensitive to impressions of melancholy and mystery, he was
endowed with an imagination abnormally active even for a child. It is
customary to give prominence to De Quincey's pernicious habit of
opium-eating, in attempting to explain the grotesque fancies and weird
flights of his marvellous mind in later years; yet it is only fair to
emphasize the fact that the later achievements of that strange
creative faculty were clearly foreshadowed in youth. For example, the
earliest incident in his life that he could afterwards recall, he
describes as "a remarkable dream of terrific grandeur about a favorite
nurse, which is interesting to myself for this reason--that it
demonstrates my dreaming tendencies to have been constitutional, and
not dependent upon laudanum."[1] Again he tells us how, when six years
old, upon the death of a favorite sister three years older, he stole
unobserved upstairs to the death chamber; unlocking the door and
entering silently, he stood for a moment gazing through the open
window toward the bright sunlight of a cloudless day, then turned to
behold the angel face upon the pillow. Awed in the presence of death,
the meaning of which he began vaguely to understand, he stood
listening to a "solemn wind" that began to blow--"the saddest that ear
ever heard." What followed should appear in De Quincey's own words: "A
vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a shaft which
ran up forever. I, in spirit, rose as if on billows that also ran up
the shaft forever; and the billows seemed to pursue the throne of God;
but _that_ also ran on before us and fled away continually. The flight
and the pursuit seemed to go on forever and ever. Frost gathering