A summer's day."
And this allusion to Vulcan reminds us that Byron, in addition to all his other early mishaps, had also the identical clubfoot of the Lemnian god. Among the guardians over Byron's childhood was a demon, that, receiving an ample place in his victim's heart, stood demoniacally his ground through life, transmuting love to hate, and what might have been benefits to fatal snares. Over De Quincey's childhood, on the contrary, a strong angel guarded to withstand and thwart all threatened ruin, teaching him the gentle whisperings of faith and love in the darkest hours of life: an angel that built happy palaces, the beautiful images of which, and their echoed festivals, far outlasted the splendor of their material substance.
"We,—the children of the house,—" says De Quincey, in his "Autobiographic Sketches," "stood, in fact, upon the very happiest tier in the social scaffolding for all good influences. The prayer of Agur—'Give me neither poverty nor riches'—was realized for us. That blessing we had, being neither too high nor too low. High enough we were to see models of good manners, of self-respect, and of simple dignity; obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes. Amply furnished with all the nobler benefits of wealth, with extra means of health, of intellectual culture, and of elegant enjoyment, on the other hand we knew nothing of its social distinctions. Not depressed by the consciousness of privations too sordid, nor tempted into restlessness by privileges too aspiring, we had no motives for shame, we had none for pride. Grateful, also, to this hour I am, that, amidst luxuries in all things else, we were trained to a Spartan, simplicity of diet,—that we fared, in fact, very much less sumptuously than the servants. And if (after the manner of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius) I should return thanks to Providence for all the separate blessings of my early situation, these four I would single out as worthy of special commemoration: that I lived in a rural solitude; that this solitude was in England; that my infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of sisters, and not by horrid pugilistic brothers; finally, that I and they were dutiful and loving members of a pure, holy, and magnificent church."
Let the reader suppose a different case from that here presented. Let him suppose, for instance, that De Quincey, now arrived at the age of seven, and having now at least one "pugilistic brother" to torment his peace, could annul his own infancy, and in its place substitute that of one of the factory-boys of Manchester, of the same age, (and many such could be found,) among those with whom daily the military predispositions of this brother brought him into a disagreeable conflict. Instead of the pure air of outside Lancashire, let there be substituted the cotton-dust of the Lancashire mills. The contrast, even in thought, is painful. It is true that thus the irrepressible fires of human genius could not be quenched. Nay, through just these instrumentalities, oftentimes, is genius fostered. We need not the instance of Romulus and Remus, or of the Persian Cyrus, to prove that men have sometimes been nourished by bears or by she-wolves. Nevertheless, this is essentially a Roman nurture. The Greeks, on the contrary, laid their infant heroes on beds of violets,—if we may believe the Pindaric odes,—set over them a divine watch, and fed them with angels' food. And this Grecian nurture De Quincey had.
And not the least important element of this nurture is that of perfect leisure. Through this it is that we pass from the outward to the subjective relations of De Quincey's childhood; for only in connection with these has the element just introduced any value, since leisure, which [pg 361] is the atmosphere, the breathing-place of genius, is also cap and bells for the fool. In relation to power, it is, like solitude, the open heaven through which the grandeurs of eternity flow into the penetralian recesses of the human heart, after that once the faculties of thought, or the sensibilities, have been powerfully awakened. Sensibility had been thus awakened in De Quincey, through grief occasioned by the loss of a sister, his favorite and familiar playmate,—a grief so profound, that he, somewhere, in speaking of it, anticipates the certainty of its presence in the hour of death; and thought, also, had been prematurely awakened, both under the influence of this overmastering pathos of sorrow, and because of his strong predisposition to meditation. Both the pathos and the meditative tendencies were increased by the halcyon peace of his childhood. In a memorial of the poet Schiller, he speaks of that childhood as the happiest, "of which the happiness has survived and expressed itself, not in distinct records, but in deep affection, in abiding love, and the hauntings of meditative power." His, at least, was the felicity of this echoless peace.
In no memorial is it so absolutely requisite that a marked prominence should be given to its first section as in De Quincey's. This is a striking peculiarity in his life. If it were not so, I should have seriously transgressed in keeping the reader's attention so long upon a point which, aside from such peculiarity, would yield no sufficient, at least no proportionate value. But, in the treatment of any life, that cannot seem disproportionate which enters into it as an element only and just in that ratio of prominence with which it enters into the life itself, No stream can rise above the level of its source. No life, which lacks a prominent interest as to its beginnings, can ever, in its entire course, develop any distinguishing features of interest. This is true of any life; but it is true of De Quincey's above all others on record, that, through all its successive arches, ascending and descending, it repeats the original arch of childhood. Repeats,—but with what marvellous transformations! For hardly is its earliest section passed, when, for all its future course, it is masked by a mighty trouble. No longer does it flow along its natural path, and beneath the open sky, but, like the sacred Alpheus, runs
"Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to the sunless sea."
Yet, amid the "briny tides" of that sea, amid turmoil and perplexity and the saddest of mysteries, it preserves its earliest gentleness, and its inward, noiseless peace, till once more it gushes up toward the sweet heaven through the Arethusan font of death. Easily, then, is it to be seen why De Quincey himself continually reverted, both in his conscious reminiscences and through the subconscious relapses of dreams, from a life clouded and disguised in its maturer years, to the unmasked purity of its earliest heaven. And what from the vast desert, what from the fatal wreck of life, was he to look back upon, for even an imaginary solace, if not upon the rich argosies that spread their happier sails above a calmer sea? We are forcibly reminded of the dream which Milton[8] gives to his Christ in the desert, hungry and tired:—
"There he slept,