because superior minds only utter what all more inwardly feel. The arrangement
by nationality which follows gives no yet adequate basis for inference unless it
be the above American peculiarity.
In his autobiography from 1785-1803, De Quincey[30] remembered feeling that
life was finished and blighted for him at the age of six, up to which time the
influence of his sister three years older had brooded over him.
His first remembrance, however, is of a dream of terrific grandeur before he was
two, which seemed to indicate that his dream tendencies were constitutional and
not due to morphine, but the chill was upon the first glimpse that this was a
world of evil. He had been brought up in great seclusion from all knowledge of
poverty and oppression in a silent garden with three sisters, but the rumor that a
female servant had treated one of them rudely just before her death plunged him
into early pessimism. He felt that little Jane would come back certainly in the
spring with the roses, and he was glad that his utter misery with the blank
anarchy confusion which her death brought could not be completely
remembered. He stole into the chamber where her corpse lay, and as he stood, a
solemn wind, the saddest he ever heard, that might have swept the fields of
mortality for a thousand centuries, blew, and that same hollow Memnonian wind
he often had heard since, and it brought back the open summer window and the
corpse. A vault above opened into the sky, and he slept and dreamed there,
standing by her, he knew not how long; a worm that could not die was at his
heart, for this was the holy love between children that could not perish. The
funeral was full of darkness and despair for him, and after it he sought solitude,
gazed into the heavens to see his sister till he was tired, and realized that he was
alone. Thus, before the end of his sixth year, with a mind already adolescent,
although with a retarded body, the minor tone of life became dominant and his
awakening to it was hard.
As a penniless schoolboy wandering the streets of London at night, he was on
familiar and friendly terms of innocent relationship with a number of outcast
women. In his misery they were to him simply sisters in calamity, but he found
in them humanity, disinterested generosity, courage, and fidelity. One night,
after he had walked the streets for weeks with one of these friendless girls who
had not completed her sixteenth year, as they sat on the steps of a house, he grew
very ill, and had she not rushed to buy from her slender purse cordials and
tenderly ministered to and revived him, he would have died. Many years later he