Thomas De Quincey.
On the same page of that Diary—where I go to verify this quotation—is this entry:
“At four o’clock dined in the [Temple] Hall with De Quincey,[9] who was very civil to me, and cordially invited me to visit his cottage in Cumberland. Like myself, he is an enthusiast for Wordsworth. His person is small, his complexion fair, and his air and manner are those of a sickly and enfeebled man.”[10]
Some twenty-seven years before the date of this encounter, the sickly looking man was born near to Manchester, his father being a well-to-do merchant there—whose affairs took him often to Portugal and Madeira, and whose invalidism kept him there so much that the son scarce knew him;—remembers only how his father came home one day to his great country house—pale, and propped up with pillows in the back of his carriage—came to die. His mother, left with wealth enough for herself and children, was of a stern Calvinistic sort; which fact gives a streak of unpleasant color here and there to the son’s reminiscences. He is presently at odds with her about the Bath school—where he is taught—she having moved into Somersetshire, whereabout she knows Mistress Hannah More; the boy comes to know this lady too, with much reverence. The son is at odds with his mother again about Eton (where, though never a scholar, he has glimpses of George III.—gets a little grunted talk even, from the old king)—and is again at odds with the mother about the Manchester Grammar School: so much at odds here, that he takes the bit fairly in his mouth, and runs away with Euripides in his pocket. Then he goes wandering in Wales—gypsy-like—and from there strikes across country blindly to London, where he becomes gypsy indeed. He bargains with Jews to advance money on his expectations: and with this money for “sinker,” he sounds a depth of sin and misery which we may guess at, by what we know, but which in their fulness, even his galloping pen never told. Into some of those depths his friends traced him, and patched up a truce, which landed him in Oxford.
Quiet and studious here at first—he is represented as a rare talker, a little given to wine—writing admiring letters to Wordsworth and others, who were his gods in those days; falling somehow into taste for that drug which for so many years held him in its grip, body and soul. The Oxford career being finished after a sort, there are saunterings through London streets again—evenings with the Lambs, with Godwin, and excursions to Somersetshire and the Lake country, where he encounters and gives nearer worship to the poetic gods of his idolatry. Always shy, but earnest; most interesting to strangers—with his pale face, high brow and lightning glances; talking too with a winning flow and an exuberance of epithet that somewhiles amounts to brilliancy: no wonder he was tenderly entreated by good Miss Wordsworth; no wonder the poet of the “Doe of Rylstone” enjoyed the titillation of such fresh, bright praises!
So De Quincey at twenty-four became householder near to Grasmere—in the cottage I spoke of in the opening of the chapter—once occupied by Wordsworth, and later by Hartley Coleridge. There, on that pretty shelf of the hills—scarce lifted above Rydal-water, he gathers his books—studies the mountains—provokes the gossip of all the pretty Dalesmen’s daughters—lives there a bachelor, eight years or more—ranging round and round in bright autumnal days with the sturdy John Wilson (of the Noctes Ambrosianæ)—cultivating intimacy with poor crazy Lloyd (who lived nearby)—studying all anomalous characters with curious intensity, and finding anomalies where others found none. Meantime and through all, his sensibilities are kept wrought to fever heat by the opiate drinks—always flanking him at his table; and he, so dreadfully wonted to those devilish drafts, that—on some occasions—he actually consumes within the twenty-four hours the equivalent of seven full wine-glasses of laudanum! No wonder the quiet Dales-people looked dubiously at the light burning in those cottage windows far into the gray of morning, and counted the pale-faced, big-headed man for something uncanny.
In these days comes about that strange episode of his mad attachment to the little elfin child—Catharine Wordsworth—of whom the poet-father wrote:—
“Solitude to her
Was blithe society, who filled the air