seeds. The blue depths were the colour of the darkest ultramarine;
not a cloud streaked the calm aether; only round the horizon's edge
streamed a light, warm film of misty vapour, against which the near
village with its ancient stone church showed sharply out with
blinding whiteness. I thought of Wordsworth's 'Lines written in
March.'


However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who
penned these lines, and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthian
influences, was also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir,
one of the most subtle and secret poisoners of this or any age.
How he first became fascinated by this strange sin he does not tell
us, and the diary in which he carefully noted the results of his
terrible experiments and the methods that he adopted, has
unfortunately been lost to us. Even in later days, too, he was
always reticent on the matter, and preferred to speak about 'The
Excursion,' and the 'Poems founded on the Affections.' There is no
doubt, however, that the poison that he used was strychnine. In
one of the beautiful rings of which he was so proud, and which
served to show off the fine modelling of his delicate ivory hands,
he used to carry crystals of the Indian nux vomica, a poison, one
of his biographers tells us, 'nearly tasteless, difficult of
discovery, and capable of almost infinite dilution.' His murders,
says De Quincey, were more than were ever made known judicially.
This is no doubt so, and some of them are worthy of mention. His
first victim was his uncle, Mr. Thomas Griffiths. He poisoned him
in 1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a place to which he had
always been very much attached. In the August of the next year he
poisoned Mrs. Abercrombie, his wife's mother, and in the following