Thomas De Quincey

“ A lover, I repeat, in any passionate sense of the word, Wordsworth could not have been. And, moreover, it is remarkable that a woman who could dispense with that sort of homage in her suitor is not of a nature to inspire such a passion. That same meekness which reconciles her to the tone of superiority and freedom in the manner of her suitor, and which may afterwards in a wife become a sweet domestic grace, strips her of that too charming irritation, captivating at once and tormenting, which lurks in feminine pride. ”

“ Still, though justice was done upon one great traitor to the cause, the cause itself was overcast with clouds too heavily to find support and employment for the hopes of a poet who had believed in a golden era ready to open upon the prospects of human nature. It gratified and solaced his heart that the indignation of mankind should have wreaked itself upon the chief monsters that had outraged their nature and their hopes; but for the present he found it necessary to comfort his disappointment by turning away from politics to studies less capable of deceiving his expectations. ”

“ These, or words like these, in which Wordsworth conveys the sudden apocalypse, as by an apparition, to an ardent and sympathising spirit, of the stupendous world of America, rising, at once, like an exhalation, with all its shadowy forests, its endless savannas, and its pomp of solitary waters—well and truly might I have applied to my first launching upon that vast billowy ocean of the German literature. As a past literature, as a literature of inheritance and tradition, the German was nothing. ”

“ In alluding to this latter, or negative form of suffering—that form, I mean, which presents not the too fugitive glimpses of past power, but its blank annihilation—Coleridge himself most beautifully insists upon and illustrates the truth that all which we find in Nature must be created by ourselves; and that alike whether Nature is so gorgeous in her beauty as to seem apparelled in her wedding-garment or so powerless and extinct as to seem palled in her shroud. ”

“ Meantime, until I write fully and deliberately upon this subject, I shall observe, simply, that all "the Lake Poets," as they are called, were not only in error, but most presumptuously in error, upon these subjects. They were ignorant of every principle belonging to every question alike in political economy, and they were obstinately bent upon learning nothing; they were all alike too proud to acknowledge that any man knew better than they, unless it were upon some purely professional subject, or some art remote from all intellectual bearings, such as conferred no honour in its possession. ”

“ For now comes in, as a sudden revelation, and as a sort of deus ex machina, for the vindication of the truth, the simple answer to that question proposed above, Wherefore, and to what end, are the vast edifices of Oxford? A University, as Universities are in general, needs not, I have shown, to be a visible body—a building raised with hands. Wherefore, then, is the visible Oxford? To what fifth end, refining upon the ordinary ends of such institutions, is the far-stretching system of Oxford hospitia, or monastic hotels, directed by their founders, or applied by their present possessors? ”

“ Wordsworth, I take it upon myself to say, had not the feelings within him which make this total devotion to a woman possible. There never lived a woman whom he would not have lectured and admonished under circumstances that should have seemed to require it; nor would he have conversed with her in any mood whatever without wearing an air of mild condescension to her understanding. To lie at her feet, to make her his idol, to worship her very caprices, and to adore [Pg 284] the most unreasonable of her frowns—these things were impossible to Wordsworth ”

“ Here I had an early opportunity of observing the natural character and tendencies of merely literary society—by which society I mean all such as, having no strong distinctions in power of thinking or in native force of character, are yet raised into circles of pretension and mark by the fact of having written a book, or of holding a notorious connexion with some department or other of the periodical press. No society is so vapid and uninteresting in its natural quality, none so cheerless and petrific in its influence upon others. ”

“ Let but one person enter the room of whose sympathy he did not feel secure, and his powers forsook him as suddenly as the buoyancy of a bird that has received a mortal shot in its wing. Accordingly, it is a fact that neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge ever suspected the amount of power which was latent in Lloyd; for he firmly believed that both of them despised him. Mrs. Lloyd thought the same thing. Often and often she has said to me, smiling in a mournful way—"I know too well that both Wordsworth and Coleridge entertain a profound contempt for my poor Charles." ”

“ But the point in which Miss Wordsworth made the most ample amends for all that she wanted of more customary accomplishments, was this very originality and native freshness of intellect, which settled with so bewitching an effect upon some of her writings, and upon many a sudden remark or ejaculation, extorted by something or other that struck her eye, in the clouds, or in colouring, or in accidents of light and shade, of form or combination of form. To talk of her "writings" is too pompous an expression, or at least far beyond any pretensions that she ever made for herself. ”

“ Let a subject arise—and almost in any path there is a ready possibility that it should—in which a higher tone is required, of splendid declamation, or of impassionate fervour, and Southey's style will immediately betray its want of the loftier qualities as flagrantly as it now asserts its powers in that unpretending form which is best suited to his level character of writing and his humbler choice of themes. ”

“ Profusion and extravagance had no hold over him, by any one passion or taste. He was not luxurious in anything; was not vain or even careful of external appearances (not, at least, since he had left Cambridge, and visited a mighty nation in civil convulsions) ; was not even in the article of books expensive. Very few books sufficed him; he was careless habitually of all the current literature, or indeed of any literature that could not be considered as enshrining the very ideal, capital, and elementary grandeur of the human intellect. ”

“ It is too much to expect of any woman (or man either) that her mind should support itself in a pleasurable activity, under the drooping energies of life, by resting on the past or on the present; some interest in reversion, some subject of hope from day to day, must be called in to reinforce the animal fountains of good spirits. Had that been opened for Miss Wordsworth, I am satisfied that she would have passed a more cheerful middle-age, and would not, at any period, have yielded to that nervous depression (or is it, perhaps, nervous irritation?) ”

“ Wordsworth, therefore, enjoyed this labyrinth of valleys in a perfection that no one can have experienced since the opening of the present century. The whole was one paradise of virgin beauty; the rare works of man, all over the land, were hoar with the grey tints of an antique picturesque; nothing was new, nothing was raw and uncicatrized. Hawkshead, in particular, though tamely seated in itself and its immediate purlieus, has a most fortunate and central locality, as regards the best (at least the most interesting) scenes for a pedestrian rambler. ”

“ In short, what I mean to say is, that a dinner party, or any meal which is made the meal for intellectual relaxation, must for ever offer the advantages of a palæstra in which the weapons are foils and the wounds not mortal: in which, whilst the interest is that of a real, the danger is that of a sham fight: in which whilst there is always an opportunity for swimming into deep waters, there is always a retreat into shallow ones. And it may be laid down as a maxim, that no nation is civilized to the height of its capacity until it has one such meal. ”

“ It there appears that, on no other ground whatever than that of his connexion with the London newspaper press, some friend of Mr. Scott's had been courted most assiduously by Napoleon during the Hundred Days. Assuredly Coleridge deserved, beyond all other men that ever were connected with the daily press, to be regarded with distinction. Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to be disentombed or restored to human admiration. Like the sea, it has swallowed treasures without end, that no diving-bell will bring up again. ”

“ To those who live in the tame scenery of Cockermouth, the blue mountains in the distance, the sublime peaks of Borrowdale and of Buttermere, raise aloft a signal, as it were, of a new country, a country of romance and mystery, to which the thoughts are habitually turning. Children are fascinated and haunted with vague temptations, when standing on the frontiers of such a foreign land; and so was Wordsworth fascinated, so haunted. ”

“ Indeed, let a man consider merely this one notion of causation; let him reflect on its origin; let him remember that, agreeably to this origin, it follows that we have no right to view anything in rerum naturâ as objectively, or in itself, a cause; that, when, upon the fullest philosophic proof, we call A the cause of B, we do in fact only subsume A under the notion of a cause—we invest it with that function under that relation; that the whole proceeding is merely with respect to a human understanding, and by way of indispensable nexus to the several parts of our experience ”

“ No night, I might almost say, of my whole life, remains so profoundly, painfully, and pathetically imprinted on my remembrance as this very one, on which I tried prelusively, as it were, that same road in solitude, and lulled by the sweet carollings of the postilion, which, after an interval of ten years, and through a period of more than equal duration, it was destined that I should so often traverse in circumstances of happiness too radiant, that for me are burned out for ever. ”

“ Were it known that upon every path a barrier faces you insurmountable to human steps—like the barriers which fence in the Abyssinian valley of Rasselas—the popularity of this philosophy would expire at once; for no popular interest can long be sustained by speculations which, in every aspect, are known to be essentially negative and essentially finite. Man's nature has something of infinity within itself, which requires a corresponding infinity in its objects. ”

“ Thousands of books that have given rapturous delight to millions of ingenuous minds for Wordsworth were absolutely a dead letter—closed and sealed up from his sensibilities and his powers of appreciation, not less than colours from a blind man's eye. Even the few books which his peculiar mind had made indispensable to him were not in such a sense indispensable as they would have been to a man of more sedentary habits. ”

“ Few seek an academic life in Germany who have either money to throw away on superfluities and external show, or who have such a rank to support as might stimulate their pride to expenses beyond their means. Parsimony is, therefore, in these places, the governing law; and pleasure, not less fervently wooed than at Oxford or at Cambridge, putting off her robes of elegance and ceremony, descends to grossness, and not seldom to abject brutality. ”

“ Johnstone of Edinburgh has pursued the profession of literature—the noblest of professions, and the only one open to both sexes alike—with even more assiduity, and as a daily occupation; and, I have every reason to believe, with as much benefit to her own happiness as to the instruction and amusement of her readers; for the petty cares of authorship are agreeable, and its serious cares are ennobling. [125] More especially is such an occupation useful to a woman without children, and without any prospective resources—resources in objects that involve hopes growing and unfulfilled. ”

“ It is to the great honour, in my opinion, of our own country, that those often resort to her fountains who have no motive but that of disinterested reverence for knowledge; seeking, as all men perceive, neither emolument directly from University funds, nor knowledge as the means of emolument. Doubtless, it is neither dishonourable, nor, on a large scale, possible to be otherwise, that students should pursue their academic career chiefly as ministerial to their capital object of a future livelihood. ”

“ No case is more possible: even to apprehend complex explanation, a man cannot be passive; he must exert considerable energy of mind; and, in the fresh consciousness of this energy, it is the most natural mistake in the world for him to feel the argument which he has by considerable effort appropriated to be an argument which he has originated. Kant is the most unhappy champion of his own doctrines, the most infelicitous expounder of his own meaning, that has ever existed. Neither has any other commentator succeeded in throwing a moonlight radiance upon his philosophy. ”

“ We have one idea at least—viz. the idea of causation—which transcends our possible experience by one important element, the element of necessity, that never can have been derived from the only source of ideas recognised by the philosophy of this day. A Lockian never can find his way out of this dilemma. The experience (whether it be the experience of sensation or the experience of reflection) which he adopts for his master-key never will unlock this case; for the sum total of human experience, collected from all ages, can avail only to tell us what is, but never what must be. ”

“ In Mary of Buttermere it roused mere anger and disdain; which, meeting with the sense of her humble and dependent situation, gave birth to a most unhappy aspect of countenance. Men who had no touch of a gentleman's nature in their composition sometimes insulted her by looks and by words, supposing that they purchased the right to do this by an extra half-crown; and she too readily attributed the same spirit of impertinent curiosity to every man whose eyes happened to settle steadily upon her face. ”

“ Wordsworth, cousin of the poet, and, for the last five years or more, his wife. [94] She was now mother of two children, a son and a daughter; and she furnished a remarkable proof how possible it is for a woman neither handsome nor even comely according to the rigour of criticism—nay, generally pronounced very plain—to exercise all the practical fascination of beauty, through the mere compensatory charms of sweetness all but angelic, of simplicity the most entire, womanly self-respect and purity of heart speaking through all her looks, acts, and movements. ”

“ Great passions—passions pointing to the paths of love, of ambition, of glory, martial or literary—these in men—and in women, again, these, either in some direct shape, or taking the form of intense sympathy with the same passions as moving amongst contemporary men—will gleam out fitfully amongst the placid children of Fox and Penn, not less than amongst us who profess no war with the nobler impulses of our nature. And, perhaps, according to the Grecian doctrine of antiperistasis, strong untameable passions are more likely to arise even in consequence of the counteraction. ”