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He was stung, and threw
Twelve days have passed
I hear he has been seen

him I was poor, and he knew it. himself upon my neck, and wept. since, and only three rainy ones. upon the knoll yonder, but hither he hath not come. I trust he knows at last the value of time, and I shall be heartily glad to see him after this accession of knowledge. Twelve days, it is true, are rather a chink than a gap in time; yet, O gentle sir! they are that chink which makes the vase quite valueless. There are light words which may never be shaken off the mind they fall on. My child, who was hurt by me, will not let me see the marks.' 'Lady!' said I, 'none are left upon him. Be comforted! thou shalt see him this hour. All that thy God hath not taken is yet thine.' "She looked at me earnestly, and would have then asked something, but her voice failed her. There was no agony,

no motion, save in the lips and cheeks. Being the widow of one who fought under Hawkins, she remembered his courage and sustained the shock, saying calmly, 'God's will be done! I pray that he find me as worthy as he findeth me willing to join them.'

""Now, in her unearthly thoughts, she had led her only son to the bosom of her husband; and in her spirit (which often is permitted to pass the gates of death with holy love) she left them both with their Creator.

"The curate of the village sent those who should bring home the body; and some days afterward he came unto me, beseeching me to write the epitaph. Being no friend to stone-cutter's charges, I entered not into biography, but wrote these few words:

" JOANNES WELLERBY

LITERARUM QUAESIVIT GLORIAM,

VIDET DEI.'

LVI.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

1785-1859.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY was born at Manchester in 1785, and died in Edinburgh in 1859. In 1800 he went to Eton, and in 1803 he was entered at Oxford, where he studied intermittently for the space of five years. In 1808, after encountering some of those strange adventures which he commemorates, and perhaps embellishes, in his Confessions of an Opium Eater, he became for some time a permanent resident in the Lake Country, near his friends Wordsworth and Southey. Later in life he went to Scotland, where he remained till his death.

De Quincey is one of the most eloquent prose writers of the nineteenth century. His best passages will bear comparison with those of Milton, Taylor, or Hooker: they have the same gorgeous music, the same passionate abundance of thought. He is an unreliable critic, an erratic writer, an unscrupulous inventor of history, but as a rhetorician he is almost unrivalled.

The records of his learning and controversial power may pass with other curiosities and fleeting interests of the age; but the dreams and fantasies he has connected with the earlier epochs of his life, his solemn rhapsodies, the simple pathos of his best sketches, and the bright flashes of his humour are imperishable memorials of a peculiar genius.

1. His Sister's Death.

FROM the gorgeous sunlight I turned round to the corpse. There lay the sweet childish figure; there the angel face;

and, as people usually fancy, it was said in the house that no features had suffered any change. Had they not? The forehead indeed - the serene and noble forehead-that might be the same; but the frozen eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal from beneath them, the marble lips, the stiffening hands, laid palm to palm, as if repeating the supplications of closing anguish-could these be mistaken. for life? Had it not been so wherefore did I not spring to those heavenly lips with tears and never-ending kisses? But so it was not. I stood checked for a moment; awe, not fear, fell upon me; and whilst I stood a solemn wind began to blow-the saddest that ear ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand centuries. Many times since, upon summer days, when the sun is about the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow, solemn, Memnonian but saintly swell: it is in this world the one great audible symbol of eternity. And three times in my life have I happened to hear the same sound in the same circumstances, viz., when standing between an open window and a dead body on a summer day. Instantly, when my ear caught this vast Æolian intonation, when my eye filled with the golden fulness of life, the pomps of the heavens above, or the glory of the flowers below, and turning when it settled upon the frost which overspread my sister's face, instantly a trance fell upon me. A vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up for ever. I, in spirit, rose as if on billows that also ran up the shaft for ever and the billows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but that also ran before us, and fled away continually. The flight and the pursuit seemed to go on for ever and ever. Frost gathering frost, some Sarsar wind of death, seemed to repel me: some mighty relation between God

and death dimly struggled to evolve itself from the dreadful antagonism between them; shadowy meanings even yet continue to exercise and torment, in dreams, the deciphering oracle within me. I slept-for how long I cannot say ; slowly I recovered my self-possession; and when I awoke, 'found myself standing, as before, close to my sister's bed.

2. Solitude.

O BURDEN of solitude, that cleavest to man through every stage of his being! in his birth which has been-in his life which is in his death which shall be-mighty and essential solitude! that wast, and art, and art to be; thou broodest like the spirit of God, moving upon the surface of the deeps, over every heart that sleeps in the nurseries of Christendom. Like the vast laboratory of the air, which, seeming to be nothing, or less than the shadow of a shade, hides within itself the principles of all things, solitude for the meditating child is the Agrippa's mirror of the unseen universe. Deep is the solitude of millions who, with hearts welling forth love, have none to love them. Deep is the solitude of those who, under secret griefs, have none to pity them. But deeper than the deepest of these solitudes is that which broods over childhood under the passion of sorrow, bringing before it at intervals the final solitude which watches for it, and is waiting for it within the gates of death. O mighty and essential solitude, that wast, and art, and art to be, thy kingdom is made perfect in the grave; but even over those that kept watch outside the grave, like myself an infant of six years old, thou stretchest out a sceptre of fascination.

3. Joan of Arc.

WHAT is to be thought of her? What is to be thought of the poor shepherd girl from the hills and forests of Lor

raine, that—like the shepherd boy from the hills and forests of Judæa-rose suddenly out of the quiet, out of the safety, out of the religious inspiration, rooted in deep pastoral solitudes, to a station in the van of armies, and to the more perilous station at the right hand of kings? The Hebrew boy inaugurated his patriotic mission by an act, by a victorious act, such as no man could deny. But so did the girl of Lorraine, if we read her story as it was read by those who saw her nearest. Adverse armies bore witness to the boy as no pretender; but so they did to the gentle girl. Judged by the voices of all who saw them from a station of goodwill, both were found true and loyal to any promises involved in their first acts. Enemies it was that made the difference between their subsequent fortunes. The boy rose to a splendour and a noonday prosperity, both personal and public, that rang through the records of his people, and became a by-word amongst his posterity for a thousand years, until the sceptre was departing from Judah. The poor, forsaken girl, on the contrary, drank not herself from that cup of rest which she had secured for France. She never sang together with the songs that rose in her native Domrémy, as echoes to the departing steps of invaders. She mingled not in the festal dances at Vaucouleurs which celebrated in rapture the redemption of France. No! for her voice was then silent: no! for her feet were dust. Pure, innocent, noble-hearted girl! whom, from earliest youth, ever I believed in as full of truth and self-sacrifice, this was amongst the strongest pledges for thy truth, that never once -no, not for a moment of weakness-didst thou revel in the vision of coronets and honour from man. Coronets for thee! O no! Honours, if they come when all is over, are for those that share thy blood. Daughter of Domrémy, when the gratitude of thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be

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