In his _Confessions_ the same constructive power bears its part in
the author's triumph. A peculiar end was to be reached in that
narrative,--an end in which the writer had a deep personal interest.
What is an opium-eater? Says a character in a recent work of fiction,
of a social wreck: "If it isn't whisky with him, it's opium; if it
isn't opium, it's whisky." This speech establishes the popular category
in which De Quincey's habit had placed him. Our attention was to be
drawn from these degrading connections. And this is done not merely by
the correction of some widespread fallacies as to the effects of the
drug; far more it is the result of narrative skill. As we follow with
ever-increasing sympathy the lonely and sensitive child, the wandering
youth, the neuralgic patient, into the terrible grasp of opium, who
realizes, amid the gorgeous delights and the awful horrors of the tale,
that the writer is after all the victim of the worst of bad habits? We
can hardly praise too highly the art which even as we look beneath it
throws its glamour over us still.

Nor is it only in this constructive power, in the selection and
arrangement of details, that De Quincey excels as a narrator; a score
of minor excellences of his style, such as the fine Latin words or the
sweeping periodic sentences, contribute to the effective progress of
his narrative prose. Mr. Lowell has said that "there are no such vistas
and avenues of verse as Milton's." The comparison is somewhat
hazardous, still I should like to venture the parallel claim that there
are no such streams of prose as De Quincey's. The movement of his
discourse is that of the broad river, not in its weight or force
perhaps, but in its easy flowing progress, in its serene, unhurried
certainty of its end. To be sure, only too often the waters overflow
their banks and run far afield in alien channels. Yet, when great power
over the instrument of language is joined to so much constructive