"De Quincey" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ever having occasion to use a number as great as 500, and as a result he might have respecting that number an idea less distinct than a trained mathematician would have of the distance from the earth to the sun. De Quincey[50] incidentally mentions this characteristic in narrating a conversation which occurred while he was at Carnarvon, a little town in Wales. "It was on this occasion," he says, "that I learned how vague are ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... human heart was capable—praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties; and the great mass of worldly men and of learned men he pronounced absolutely incapable of praying." 'Mr. De Quincey in ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... our experience, within the whole Mail Coach service, was on those occasions when we went down from London with the news of Victory. Five years of life it was worth paying down for the privilege of an outside place. DE QUINCEY.] ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... Fortunately it turned out to be only a severe sprain, but I am still conscious of the wrench it gave me. To crown the whole pleasant catalogue, I was worn to a shadow by a constant diarrhoea, and consumed as much opium as would have done credit to my father-in-law [Thomas De Quincey]. However, thank God, I have a good share of Tapleyism in me and come out strong under difficulties. I think I may confidently say that no man ever saw me out of heart, or ever heard one croaking word from me even when our prospects were gloomiest. We were ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... friend, begging permission to introduce to me, a clever young man of her acquaintance, whom she even so honoured as to call "A little John Henderson;" concerning whom, this young man wished to make inquiries. An invitation immediately followed, and the lady introduced to me, young Mr. De Quincey. Several interviews followed, each exhibiting his talents in a more favourable view, till I was satisfied he would either shine in literature, or, with steady perseverance, acquire eminence in either of ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... and emotions, which give us aesthetic pleasure or the reverse. As action must follow excitement, or despair satiety, so the relation of parts, the order of presentation, must be adapted to mutual reinforcement. Thus the porter's scene in "Macbeth" is related to the neighboring scenes, as De Quincey has shown in his famous essay. And just as in music the feeling of "rightness" ensues when the awaited note slips into place, so the feeling of "rightness" comes when the inevitable consequences follow the premise of ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... shame to hate him and edit him too. The Rev. Mr. Elwin unravels the web of Pope's follies with too rough a hand for my liking; and he was, besides, far too apt to believe his poet in the wrong simply because somebody has said he was. For example, he reprints without comment De Quincey's absurd strictures on the ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... live principally by the labor of their brains, will subscribe to the sentiment expressed by Thomas De Quincey, in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, when he said that—"Tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally of coarse nerves, or are become so from wine drinking, and are not susceptible of influence ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... as particularly as should be allowable. Accordingly, after taking rooms at Brown's Hotel, we drove back in our return car, and, reaching the head of Rydal Water, alighted to walk through this familiar scene of so many years of Wordsworth's life. We ought to have seen De Quincey's former residence and Hartley Coleridge's cottage, I believe, on our way, but were not aware of it at the time. Near the lake there is a stone-quarry, and a cavern of some extent, artificially formed, probably by taking out the stone. Above the shore of the lake, not a great way from Wordsworth's ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... faces eastward, they spent a whole year of fearful suffering and privation in reaching the confines of Ili, a terribly diminished host. There they received a district, and were placed under the jurisdiction of a khan. This journey has been dramatically described by De Quincey in an essay entitled "Revolt of the Tartars, or Flight of the Kalmuck Khan and his people from the Russian territories to the Frontiers of China." Of this contribution to literature it is only necessary ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... Thieves, the "forty" martyr-monks of the convent of El Arbain—not to speak of a similar use of this numeral in more important cases—have often been understood as expressions of a known number, when in fact they mean simply MANY. The number "fifteen thousand" has found its way to Rome, and De Quincey seriously informs us, on the authority of a lady who had been at much pains to ascertain the EXACT truth, that, including closets large enough for a bed, the Vatican contains fifteen thousand rooms. Any one who has observed the vast dimensions of most of the apartments of that structure ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... days we have quite a crowd of writers who have written with enthusiasm on the Maid of Domremy. It is sufficient to name the most prominent of these—Landor, Sir James Mackintosh, John Sterling, Lord Mahon, De Quincey, ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... in a garret, Byron courted a widow, Keats starved to death, Poe mixed his drinks, De Quincey hit the pipe, Ade lived in Chicago, James kept on doing it, Dickens wore white socks, De Maupassant wore a strait-jacket, Tom Watson became a Populist, Jeremiah wept, all these authors did these things for the sake of literature, but thou didst cap them all; thou marriedst a wife for to carve ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... fine silvery hairs of the flying summer; and the coccus that fall from the fruit trees to float on their buoyant cottony down—a summer snow. Fils de la Vierge are these, and sacred. The man who can needlessly set his foot on a worm is as strange to my soul as De Quincey's imaginary Malay, or even his "damned crocodile." The worm that one sees lying bruised and incapable on the gravel walk has fallen among thieves. These little lives do me good and not harm. I smell the acid ants to strengthen my memory. I know that if I set ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... they really produce only a state of nervous action which causes their subject to feel appreciation of otherwise trifling mental pictures that in themselves are flimsy nothings. Let a man so affected try to impart to another his fancies, and—well, who has not been bored by a drunken man? Did De Quincey, with that superb mind, succeed in fancying anything that even he could tell? He speaks of glowing drug-born fancies, but he describes nothings. Now Milton, the old Puritan—the cold-water man—he had fancies which he was able to transmit, and which are worthy ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... the West. Over almost the same ground where had toiled the caravans of a thousand generations, the Suez Canal was dug. Clive, during his first trip, was a year and a half en route from England to India; were he alive to-day he could journey to Calcutta in twenty-two days. After reading De Quincey's hyperbolical description of the English mail-coach, one cannot down the desire to place that remarkable man on the pilot of the White Mail ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... were several novels by Balzac, which conversation with Harding had led him to purchase and to read. He likewise possessed a few volumes of modern poetry, but he freely confessed that he preferred Pope, Dryden, and Johnson; and it was impossible to bring him to understand that De Quincey was more subtle and suggestive than the ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... Irish people if they killed their children like sheep and ate them instead of mutton—Captain Paton felt himself compelled to record the glorious deeds of some of the most valiant of the Thugs. He gave details which would have rejoiced the imagination of a de Quincey or an Edgar Allan Poe. About 5200 murders had been committed by a company of forty people, all highly thought of and commanding general respect. At their head was the venerable Buhram, who laid claim to 931 assassinations during his forty years of religious ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... a successful man of business; he died, most unfortunately, when Thomas was quite young. Very soon after our author's birth the family removed to The Farm, and later to Greenhay, a larger country place near Manchester. In 1796 De Quincey's mother, now for some years a widow, removed to Bath and placed him in the grammar ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... what Rousseau wished to be, if not exactly what he was, himself. Bomston is more of a lay figure; but then the Anglais philosophe de qualite of the French imagination in the eighteenth century was a lay figure, and, as has been excellently said by De Quincey in another matter, nothing can be wrong which conforms to the principles of its own ideal. As for Julie and Claire, they ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... of Coleridge be anywhere near the truth, we lost in him a potential philosopher of a very high order, as we more clearly lost a poet of singular fascination. Coleridge naturally suggests the name of De Quincey, whose works are as often tantalising as satisfying. And to make, it is true, a considerable drop from the greatest of these names, we often feel when we take up one of Hazlitt's glowing Essays, that here, too, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... justify its name; but at that time there it still was, in Greek Street, a few doors from Soho Square, and almost opposite to that house where, in the first years of the century, a little girl, and with her a boy named De Quincey, made nightly encampment in darkness and hunger among dust and rats and old legal parchments. The Vingtieme was but a small whitewashed room, leading out into the street at one end and into a kitchen at the ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... myself here principally with literature, because, in England at all events, literature plays the largest part in general culture. It may be said that we owe some of the best literature we have to amateurs. To contrast a few names, taken at random, Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, Dr. Johnson, De Quincey, Tennyson, and Carlyle were professionals, it is true; but, on the other hand, Milton, Gray, Boswell, Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, Shelley, Browning, and Ruskin were amateurs. It is not a question of how much a man writes or publishes, it is a question of the spirit in which ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... restlessly about the deck. "How could any man with a palate for the rarest flavours of life resist the temptation of taking that woman down to dinner? And, besides, hadn't he eaten salt with her? Hadn't he smoked the social cigarette with her? Shade of De Quincey! are we to treat like a vulgar criminal a mistress of the finest of the fine arts? Shall we be such crawling creatures as to seek to lay by the heels a Muse of Murder? Are we a generation of detectives, that we should do this thing?" "So my friend put it to me," said the Critic dryly, "not quite ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... time; but sooner or later they come back with a sharp rebound to the simple elementary passions—anger, desire, regret, [222] pity, and fear: and what corresponds to them in the sensuous world—bare, abstract fire, water, air, tears, sleep, silence, and what De Quincey has ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... remarkable tirade, which was offered in a voice by no means angry, but even something contemptuous, and without a word I left him. I went, as I had promised, at once to the captain, whom I found in his cabin with a volume of De Quincey. ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... the grave. The day may come when Burns will be forgotten, but till that day arrives—and the eastern sky as yet gives no token of its approach—him they must attend as satellites the sun, as courtiers their king. Then there are the Lakers,—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey burdened with his tremendous dream, Wilson in his splendid youth. What talk, what argument, what readings of lyrical and other ballads, what contempt of critics, what a hail of fine things! Then there is Charles Lamb's room in Inner Temple Lane, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... half of their number died. The story of their sufferings, their homesickness and their despair on the outward journey, and of how still later some thirty of them returned on foot, carrying the bones of those who had died to lay them in their old homes, is one of the most dramatic pages in history. De Quincey's "Flight of a Tartar Clan" does not equal it in pathos or as a story of heroism and endurance. At the end of their homeward journey, when almost within sight of their homes, the heroic little band were seized by order of the ruler of their enclosure and committed to prison. The tribe are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... {32} is indeed an unsatisfactory thing: I believe that everybody thinks so. You seem to think that it is purposely unsatisfactory, or rather dissatisfactory: but it seems to me to proceed from a kind of enervation in De Quincey. However, I don't know how he supports himself in ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... sanguinary story of a murder hole—an inn of assassins in a lonely district of the United States, which Mr. Louis Stevenson heard in his travels there, and told to me some years ago. The details have escaped my memory, but, as Mr. Stevenson narrated them, they rivalled De Quincey's awful story of Williams's murders in the ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... the days of Sir Walter Scott and the Ettrick Shepherd, to those of Bulwer and Charles Mackay, have appeared in its columns. Maginn, Lockhart, Gillies, Moir, Landor, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Bowles, Barry Cornwall, Gleig, Hamilton, Aird, Sym, De Quincey, Allan Cunningham, Mrs. Hemans, Jerrold, Croly, Warren, Ingoldsby (Barham), Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Milnes, and many others, of scarcely less note, found in Blackwood scope for their productions, whether of prose or verse. In its early days much of personality ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... The result is not altered, if you come nearer our own time. That galaxy of talent and genius which shone with such brilliancy in the Scottish capital at the beginning of the century,—Sydney Smith, Lord Jeffrey, Christopher North, Macaulay, Mackintosh, De Quincey, Brougham,—all these, with scarcely an exception, have lived far beyond the average of human life. So was it with the great poets and romancers of that period. Wordsworth, living the life of a recluse near the beautiful lakes of Westmoreland, lasted to fourscore. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... exquisite white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different from others. There was something in him of Balzac's Lucien de Rubempre. At times he reminds us of Julien Sorel. De Quincey saw him once. It was at a dinner at Charles Lamb's. 'Amongst the company, all literary men, sat a murderer,' he tells us, and he goes on to describe how on that day he had been ill, and had hated the face of man and woman, and yet found himself ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... special visit by the Royal Society. He was an antiquary and a naturalist, and deeply read in the schoolmen and the Christian fathers. He was {138} a mystic, and a writer of a rich and peculiar imagination, whose thoughts have impressed themselves upon many kindred minds, like Coleridge, De Quincey, and Emerson. Two of his books belong to literature, Religio Medici, published in 1642, and Hydriotaphia; or, Urn Burial, 1658, a discourse upon rites of burial and incremation, suggested by some Roman funeral urns, dug up in Norfolk. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... hall, so weird and ghostly, we glance along the shelves at a long row of volumes which bear De Quincey's name, and we need not open a page to feel the mysterious spell of the opium-eater. Like one of those strange dreams of his seems a remembrance which comes back to us with his name. A quaint, tall house in the old part of Edinburgh has admitted us into a quiet apartment, where, as the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... Hazlitt the London Magazine had more or less regular contributions, in its best days, from De Quincey, Allan Cunningham (Nalla), T.G. Wainewright, afterwards the poisoner, but in those days an amusing weaver of gay artificial prose, John Clare, Bernard Barton, H.F. Cary, Richard Ayton, George Darley, Thomas Hood, John Hamilton Reynolds, Sir John Bowring, John Poole, B.W. Procter; while among occasional ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... proclaimed him an Agnostic. Nor is it surprising that she remained obdurate, seeing that the popular imagination still continued to run riot over his supposed enormities. The midnight hallucinations of De Quincey seemed to be repeating themselves in a whole nation. He had committed crimes worthy of the Borgias. He had done a deed which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. Miss Arundell boldly defended him against her mother, though she admitted afterwards that, circumstances ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... at large, though, of course, the police had every reason to expect his speedy capture. Certainly the incident seems to support Harton's theory, though it may be a mere whim of Gorings, or, as I suggested to Harton, he may be collecting materials for a book which shall outvie De Quincey. In any case it is no business ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the truth that is in him has resulted in a beauty of prose which for individual quality must be ranked with the prose of such masters as De Quincey and Lamb, and, to make a not irrelevant comparison, above the very fine prose of his contemporary Stevenson, by virtue of its greater ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... friends, the Meynells, saying so much more than their few public words, tender but so careful. What they knew, and what the walls of the monastery of Storrington must have heard in that so pained stillness, there, is probably beyond repetition for pathos. De Quincey had taught him much in the knowledge of hardship. Whether it is just similarity of experience or a kind of imitation in nature, is not easy to say. It was hardly the example to repeat. It is singular enough also, that ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... the principle of the pendulum in the swing lamp in the cathedral at Pisa. Peel was in Parliament at twenty-one. Gladstone was in Parliament before he was twenty-two, and at twenty-four he was Lord of the Treasury. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was proficient in Greek and Latin at twelve; De Quincey at eleven. Robert Browning wrote at eleven poetry of no mean order. Cowley, who sleeps in Westminster Abbey, published a volume of poems at fifteen. Luther was but twenty-nine when he nailed his famous thesis to the door of the bishop and defied the pope. Nelson was a lieutenant in the British ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... do think of—murder's no joke, though it's more of a fine art than it was when De Quincey wrote. I'm perfectly serious. I would shoot the scoundrel Boone. Why, do you know the man has cleared a million dollars on rotten blankets since he came here? McClellan ordered a report made out showing his rascalities ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... Connie, and I am glad you suggested it. The spread of socialism in London is a grand subject. Of course I know all about the arguments of the wretched crew of demagogues engaged in this propaganda. I could easily, to quote De Quincey's words, 'bray their fungous heads to powder with a lady's fan, and throttle them between heaven and earth with my finger and thumb.' But we want to know just how far their doctrines, or whatever they call their crack-brained fantasies, have taken root ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... periodicals. Poe, who was older than Whitman by ten years, was fifteen when Byron died, in 1824. He was untouched by the nobler mood of Byron, though his verse was colored by the influence of Byron, Moore, and Shelley. His prose models were De Quincey, Disraeli, and Bulwer. Yet he owed more to Coleridge than to any of the Romantics. He was himself a sort of Coleridge without the piety, with the same keen penetrating critical intelligence, the same lovely opium-shadowed dreams, and, alas, with ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... written but a few months before, is almost entirely free from the peculiarity. "Wilhelm Meister," in its English dress, was better received by the English reading public than by English critics. De Quincey, in one of his dyspeptic fits, fell upon the book, its author, and the translator,[B] and Lord Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh Review, although admitting Carlyle to be a talented person, ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... objection the answer has been supplied by De Quincey. To Milton the personages of the heathen Pantheon were not merely familiar fictions or established poetical properties; they were evil spirits. That they were so was the creed of the early interpreters. In their demonology, the Hebrew and the Greek poets had a common ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... profession was literature. Through the London Magazine, he got to know John Hamilton Reynolds (author of the Garden of Florence and other poems, and a contributor to this serial under the pseudonym of Edward Herbert), Charles Lamb, Allan Cunningham, De Quincey, and other writers of reputation. To Hood the most directly important of all these acquaintances was Mr. Reynolds; this gentleman having a sister, Jane, to whom Hood was introduced. An attachment ensued, and shortly terminated in marriage, the wedding ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Dorothy—-was inspiration, critic, friend. But who inspired Dorothy? Coleridge perhaps more than all others, and we know somewhat of their relationship as told in Dorothy's diary. There is a little Wordsworth Library in Dove Cottage, and I sat at the window of "De Quincey's room" and read for an hour. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... world had a right to expect from him! A wonderful testimony is this as to the man's character; but surely the universal belief in his own account of his own governorship is more wonderful. "The conduct of Cicero in his command was meritorious," says De Quincey. "His short career as Proconsul in Cilicia had procured for him well-merited honor," says Dean Merivale.[71] "He had managed his province well; no one ever suspected Cicero of being corrupt or unjust," says Mr. Froude, who had, however, said (some ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... treated as an art. De Quincey wrote an essay on the subject. If you'd read it, you'd know better than to mix up artistic murder with the commonplace assassinations of the ordinary burglar. You might just as well say that Beethoven is the same sort of person as ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... higher reason, and it is efficient only as a servant of the will. Imagination, as it is too often misunderstood, is mere fantasy, the image-making power, common to all who have the gift of dreams, or who can afford to buy it in a vulgar drug as De Quincey bought it. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... said, "are the far-famed CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM EATER! Take the book away with you, and read it. At the passage which I have marked, you will find that when De Quincey had committed what he calls 'a debauch of opium,' he either went to the gallery at the Opera to enjoy the music, or he wandered about the London markets on Saturday night, and interested himself in observing all the little shifts and bargainings ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... De Quincey says of caution money: "This is a small sum, properly enough demanded of every student, when matriculated, as a pledge for meeting any loss from unsettled arrears, such as his sudden death or his unannounced departure might else continually be inflicting upon his ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... the intention of the publishers to issue, at intervals, a complete collection of Mr. De Quincey's Writings, uniform with this volume. The first four volumes of the series ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... majestic prose, under whose touch words became as living things; Flaubert, who believed there was one and one only best word with which to express a given thought; De Quincey, who exercised a weird-like power over words; Ruskin, whose rhythmic prose enchanted the ear; Keats, who brooded over phrases like a lover; Newman, of pure and melodious style; Stevenson, forever in quest of the scrupulously precise word; Tennyson, graceful and exquisite as ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... the suicide of his mistress, he followed the example which he was falsely informed she had given (30 B.C.). Antony had been married in succession to Fadia, Antonia, Fulvia, and Octavia, and left behind him a number of children. A short but vivid sketch of Antony is given by De Quincey in his ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... ancestral estates. He met with no opposition until he was about to return with the spoils; then, as he passed through a defile, the chieftain set upon him in the rear, and slew several of his knights, carrying off the Norman standard. Robert de Quincey, who had just married a daughter of Strongbow's by a former marriage, was amongst the slain. The Earl had bestowed a large territory ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... privilege; he may have been the first American to look through an immersion lens with the famous Modena professor. Mr. Emerson says that his narrow and desultory reading had inspired him with the wish to see the faces of three or four writers, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, De Quincey, Carlyle. His accounts of his interviews with these distinguished persons are too condensed to admit of further abbreviation. Goethe and Scott, whom he would have liked to look upon, were dead; Wellington he saw at Westminster Abbey, at the funeral of Wilberforce. His impressions ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... existence long before Homer was born; they were the bards, trouveurs and minnesingers of their time; their like are the instruments of culture in any race during its pralayas. So you find the professional story-tellers in the East today. But the Homeridae may well have been—as De Quincey suggests—an order specially trained in the chanting of Homeric poems; perhaps a single school founded in some single island by or for the sake of Homer. We hear that Lycurgus was the first who brought Homer—the works, not the man—into continental Greece; importing them from ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... story of himself completely in his novels. It was said of de Quincey that in his writings he could tell the story of his own life and no other. This might be said ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... margin is worth all the marginalia of Poe, though he, to do him justice, seems chiefly to have written on volumes that were his own property. De Quincey, according to Mr. Hill Burton, appears to have lacked the faculty of mind which recognizes the duty of returning books. Mr. Hill Burton draws a picture of "Papaverius" living in a sort of cave or den, the walls of which were books, while books lay around in tubs. Who was to find a ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... retold is decidedly a good one. I greatly like the notion of that series. Of course you know De Quincey's paper on the Ratcliffe Highway murderer? Do you know also the illustration (I have it at Gad's Hill), representing the horrible creature as his dead body lay on a cart, with a piece of wood for a pillow, and a stake lying by, ready to ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... But if he hoped for much companionship with the literary lions of the lakes, he was disappointed. Coleridge was absent, and missed making his acquaintance—a circumstance he afterwards regretted, saying that he could have been more useful to the young poet and metaphysician than Southey. De Quincey, though he writes ambiguously upon this point, does not seem to have met Shelley. Wordsworth paid him no attention; and though he saw a good deal of Southey, this intimacy changed Shelley's early liking for the man and poet into absolute contempt. It was not likely that the cold ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... during the last half century, has been rendered to the lovers of genuine books, than the collection and republication of the fragmentary writings of Thomas de Quincey. Cast, for the most part, upon the swollen current of periodical literature, at the summons of chance or necessity, during a career protracted beyond the allotted threescore years and ten, the shattered hand of the Opium Eater was powerless to arrest their flight to silence and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... one. But Spenser likens an infuriate woman to a cow "That is berobbed of her youngling dere." Shakspeare also makes King Henry VI compare himself to the calf's mother that "Runs lowing up and down, Looking the way her harmless young one went." "Cows," says De Quincey, "are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate tenderness to their young, when deprived of them, and, in short, I am not ashamed to profess a deep love for these ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... sternly pursued Arn, "that if De Quincey had studied this identical fan, the opium-eater would have composed another gorgeous rhetorical plea for the man preelected to betray his Saviour, the apostle who spilt the salt." He sat down ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Fors Clavigera and Sesame and Lilies in Lovell's Library, at five-pence a volume, and, about the same time, Tolstoi's War and Peace in the Franklin Square Library, at the same price. Of older works, I can still remember Lamb and part of De Quincey, Don Quixote and Rasselas (those four for some reason stand out in my mind from their fellows in the row), all bought for the modest ten-cent piece per volume—the price of two daily newspapers (for all newspapers in America then cost five cents) or ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... under at least a week." In July, 1821, the London Magazine was purchased by Taylor and Hessey. Although Thomas Hood was made working-editor, the Blackwood idea of retaining editorial supervision in the firm was followed. Within a few months De Quincey contributed his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater—the most famous of all the articles that appeared in the magazine. Lamb[D] and De Quincey continued to write for the magazine for several years. Other contributors, especially of literary criticism, were Barry Cornwall, Carlyle, Hazlitt, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... further south than this in my life," he replied. "I know only the London of De Quincey and Lamb-London with the ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... commenced to go through a regular University curriculum. So far as the Scottish metropolis was concerned, the first quarter of the present century was the Augustan age of literature. Sir Walter Scott was in his meridian. De Quincey, under the influence of the "Circean spells" of opium, was making Blackwood a power in the land. Sir William Hamilton, the greatest British supporter of a priori philosophy in this century, had just been ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... critical essay, as he had intimated, for the frame of each picture; in this sort of thing we had an endless choice, both new and old. If he had any preference it would be for the older-fashioned critics, like Hazlitt or perhaps like De Quincey; he was not sure, speaking without the book, whether De Quincey treated authors so much as topics, but he had the sense of wonderful things in him about the eighteenth-century poets: things that made you think you knew them, and that yet made you burn to be on the same intimate terms ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... that Henry conferred the chief butlership of Ireland on Theobald Fitzwater in 1177. It is also said that Wesley was the original form of the duke of Wellington's family name. On the other hand, De Quincey says that Wellesley was shortened to Wesley by the same process which leads people to pronounce Marjoribanks "Marshbanks," and St. Leger "Silliger." It was probably resumed to distinguish a particular branch of the family. However this may be, it is to be regretted ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... nothing in English corresponding to Heine's fascinating sketch "Die Romantische Schule," or to Theophile Gautier's almost equally fascinating and far more sympathetic "Histoire du Romantisme." If we can imagine a composite personality of Byron and De Quincey, putting on record his half affectionate and half satirical reminiscences of the contemporary literary movement, we might have something nearly equivalent. For Byron, like Heine, was a repentant romanticist, with "radical notions under his cap," and a critical theory at odds with his practice; ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... a saucer on the table with the request to use it as an ash-tray, and taking down a volume of De Quincey from the hanging shelf, held ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... that the boy does not shudder. They are made fearful that he may be fearless, not that he may fear. As long as that limit is kept, the barbaric dreamland is decent; and though individuals like Coleridge and De Quincey mixed it with worse things (such as opium), they kept that romantic rudiment upon the whole. But the one disadvantage of a forest is that one may lose one's way in it. And the one danger is not that we may meet devils, but that we may worship ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... made by De Quincey, in pointing out the spontaneous origin of some of his essays: "Performers on the organ," he says, "so far from finding their own impromptu displays to fall below the more careful and premeditated ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... with Bea. When she attended her second meeting of the Thanatopsis she said nothing about remaking the town. She listened respectably to statistics on Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Scott, Hardy, Lamb, De Quincey, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, who, it seemed, constituted the writers of English Fiction ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... Somnambulism? What about musical or literary creation? Are not our ideas made for us in the kitchen of our Sub-Consciousness? Our Consciousness is only a small part of ourselves. What produced De Quincey's opium dreams was certainly not Consciousness. I can see visions, myself, without opium. In certain excited states of the brain I can travel in my chair, or bed, perfectly awake, through an endless and variegated ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... land—for ever, as the melancholy event proved—to join Mr and Mrs Spring in a European tour. Her letters home contain much pleasant gossip about some of the Old-World notabilities. Thus she records her interviews with Wordsworth in his Rydal retreat, with Dr Chalmers, Dr Andrew Combe, Mr De Quincey, the Howitts, &c. She visited Paris in the winter, and became acquainted with Lamennais, Beranger, Mme Dudevant, and others. Thence, in the spring of 1847, she went to Italy, where she remained until she embarked in 1850 on board that ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... tale. In Boswell it runs: "Mr. Fitzherbert, who loved buttered muffins, but durst not eat them because they disagreed with his stomach, resolved to shoot himself, and then eat three buttered muffins for breakfast, knowing that he should not be troubled with indigestion." We find that De Quincey, in one of his essays, reports the case of an officer holding the rank of lieutenant- colonel who could not tolerate a breakfast without muffins. But he suffered agonies of indigestion. "He would stand the nuisance no longer, but yet, being a just ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... to the breathless terror of the Cask of Amontillado, or the Red Death. Poe's masterpiece in this kind is the fateful tale of the Fall of the House of Usher, with its solemn and magnificent close. His prose, at its best, often recalls, in its richly imaginative cast, the manner of De Quincey in such passages as his Dream Fugue, or Our Ladies of Sorrow. In descriptive pieces like the Domain of Arnheim, and stories of adventure like the Descent into the Maelstrom, and his long sea-tale, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1838, he displayed, a realistic ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... or three hours at a time among those delightful books. I have arranged a course of reading upon Art, which I hope to have time to pursue, and then I have made selections from some such authors as Kingsley, Ruskin, De Quincey, Hawthorne,—and Mrs. Jameson, for which I hope to find time. Besides all this you can't imagine what domestic work has been given me. It is in the library where I am to spend 3/4 of an hour a day in arranging "studies" in Shakespeare. The work will ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... to know what were Wordsworth's studies during his winter in Goslar. De Quincey's statement is mere conjecture. It may be guessed fairly enough that he would seek an entrance to the German language by the easy path of the ballad, a course likely to confirm him in his theories as to the language of poetry. The Spinosism with which he has been not ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... chivalry of sentiment and her complacent disposition, and the inexperience of both, and how little entitled or disposed she felt herself to complain of his behavior." "Shelley and his girl-wife visited Windermere," we think are the words of De Quincey in alluding to their sudden apparition in the Lake district just after their union. And two more discordant natures could hardly have been bound together ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... [163] De Quincey in his Confessions of an Opium Eater referred to the power that many, perhaps most, children possess of seeing visions in the dark. The phenomenon has been carefully studied by G.L. Partridge (Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1898) in ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Galloway Herald. In 1848 he published a collected edition of his poems, which met with much favour. Carlyle said that he found in them "a healthy breath as of mountain breezes.'' Among Aird's other friends were De Quincey, Lockhart, Stanley (afterwards dean of Westminster) and Motherwell. He died at Dumfries on the 25th of April ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... explanation," said the Critic, "but, you know, De Quincey said practically the same thing more than fifty years ago in his essay on Oliver Goldsmith. Yet the sale of 'The Prude of Pimlico' exceeds the sale of the leading novel of De Quincey's day by at least five hundred per cent. How do ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... on another he says what he probably did not mean, that God inspires men to do evil, and on a third that 'all our knowledge is ourselves to know.' Nowhere in the argument does Pope seem to have a firm standing, and De Quincey is not far wrong in saying that it is 'the ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... only De Quincey or Bayard Taylor or Poe could have done justice to the thrilling effects of the drug, and not even they unless an amanuensis had been seated by them to take down what they dictated, for I defy anyone to remember anything but a fraction of the rapid march of changes ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... publication of the world is estimated to reach the enormous figure of more than 130,000 volumes. In view of this prodigious literary output, what progress can the reader hope to make in "keeping up with the new books"? De Quincey figured that a man might possibly, in a long lifetime devoted to nothing else, read 20,000 volumes. The estimate is easy. Suppose we start with one book a day—surely a large supposition—and count a man's reading years from 20 to 80, 60 ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... exuberant riches of the hour, when such visitors as Talfourd, Dickens, Moore, and Landor were the talkers." He also formed a warm friendship with Wordsworth, and, during his stay in Edinburgh, with Professor Wilson and De Quincey. The writings of the last-named author were published by Ticknor and Fields, in eighteen volumes, and were edited by Mr. Fields, at the ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... knew nothing—though our ignorance only argued ourselves unknown, for he named persons all famous in their day. He had seen George IV., Napoleon, Talleyrand, Wellington; he had been intimate with Coleridge, De Quincey, Wordsworth, Lamb, Monk Lewis; he was a sort of elder brother or deputy uncle to Tennyson, Browning, Dickens; he had quaffed mountain-dew with Walter Scott and had tramped the moors shoulder to shoulder with Kit ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... "In any thinking mind." Yet it must be confessed that there does exist a woful ignorance or negligence concerning De Quincey in quarters from which better things might be expected. Misappreciation it cannot be called, where no trouble has been taken to estimate claims that needed only to be weighed to be truly valued. Up to this time, there has never been published in England a single essay on the life or the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... side: carry the thing a step further, and you have a life, waking, and dreams, sleeping, of delight such as has never been—I think never could be expressed in words; not because, as with De Quincey and his laudanum, the coherent story of the dreams and visions cannot be remembered, but because the clear sunshine of personal happiness and confidence in the future—the pure joy of being alive—which the abuser of Ambrotox experiences in his whole daily life, is incommunicable. It is a period ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... Schmelzle's Journey to Flaetz are both translated by that ardent admirer of Richter's genius, Thomas Carlyle; a sufficient guarantee that the spirit and beauty of the original are fully rendered. The Analects are translated by the brilliant writer, Thomas de Quincey. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... ago a writer protested against the taboo on "beautiful prose." He asserted that the usual organs of publication, especially in America, reject with deadly certainty all contributions whose style suggests that melodious rhythm which De Quincey and Ruskin made fashionable for their generations, and Stevenson revived in the 'nineties. He complained that the writer is no longer allowed to write as well as he can; that he must abstract all unnecessary color of phrase, all warmth of connotation ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... [37] De Quincey defines picturesque as "the characteristic pushed into a sensible excess." The word began to excite discussion in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. See vol. i., p. 185, for Gilpin's "Observations on Picturesque ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... says, "is the sum total of wretchedness to man;" and, doubtless, the idea which he means to convey is just. "But," in the words of De Quincey, "no man can be truly great, without at least chequering his life with solitude." Separation from his kind, of course, deprives a man of the humanizing influences, which are the consequences of association; but it ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... generally associated in one's mind with darkness, the still hours of night, and bestiality. It is the outcome of the fierce animal lust for blood, provoked by low passions working in low minds. De Quincey's brilliant attempt to elevate it to a place among the fine arts has only enriched its horrors as an abstract idea. Even detached from its usual environment of darkness, and ignorance, and vice, it ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... people and books that never dreamed of being side by side." His tendency to fancy, so marked in his poetry, is seen also in his criticism, as for instance, his comparison of a sonnet to a little drama, or his statement that every poem has a plot, a crisis, and a hero. He had De Quincey's habit of digressing from the main theme, — what he himself called in speaking of an Elizabethan poet, the "constant temptation, to the vigorous and springy mind of the poet, to bound off wherever his momentary fancy may lead him." This is especially seen in his lectures ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... essays and sketches, Baudelaire published in prose a novelette; 'Fanfarlo,' 'Artificial Paradises,' opium and hashish, imitations of De Quincey's 'Confessions of an Opium Eater'; and 'Little Prose Poems,' also inspired by a book, the 'Gaspard de la Nuit' of Aloysius Bertrand, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... arpeggios, soft, great hummocks of tone, two giant chords are sounded, and the Ballade of Love and War is over. Who conquers? Is the Lady with the Green Eyes and Moon White Face rescued? Or is all this a De Quincey's Dream Fugue translated into tone—a sonorous, awesome vision? Like De Quincey, it suggests the apparition of the empire of fear, the fear that is secretly felt with dreams, wherein the spirit expands to ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... two fishes, but what are they among so many?' hit off the spirit in which a minister was regarded at the universities. The memoirs of Bishop Watson illustrate the same sentiment. He lived in his pleasant country house at Windermere, never visiting his diocese, and according to De Quincey, talking Socinianism at his table. He felt himself to be a deeply injured man, because ministers had never found an opportunity for translating him to a richer diocese, although he had written against Paine and Gibbon. If they would not reward their friends, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... seems to have made the most lasting impression. Hunger is a local disturbance, but when one is cold, every nerve in the body registers its call for help. Long before reading a certain passage of De Quincey's I had decided that cold could cause greater suffering than hunger; consequently, it was with great satisfaction that I read the following sentences from his "Confessions": "O ancient women, daughters of ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... biography of Mr Forsyth I must, in justice both to him and to Cicero, quote one passage from the work: "Let those who, like De Quincey,[26] Mommsen, and others, speak disparagingly of Cicero, and are so lavish in praise of Caesar, recollect that Caesar never was troubled by a conscience." Here it is that we find that advance almost to Christianity ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... to compare the effects of hypnotization with those of opium or other narcotic. Dr. Cocke asserts that there is a difference. His descriptions of dreams bear a wonderful likeness to De Quincey's dreams, such as those described in "The English Mail-Coach," "De Profundis," and "The Confessions of an English Opium Eater," all of which were presumably due ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... for me to say by way of Preface is that, as in the case of the first volume, I have received much aid from Mrs. Baird Smith and Miss De Quincey, and that Mr. J. R. McIlraith has repeated his friendly ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... world with his genius as a writer of romances. His influence may be traced in Cooper's work, although the American author occupies an original field. Readers are still charmed with the exquisite flavor and humor in the essays of CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834). The essays of DE QUINCEY (1785-1859) are remarkable for precision, stateliness, ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... are touching on a point of crucial importance. If anyone should ever write a treatise on the art of murder—not an exhibition of literary fireworks like De Quincey's, but a genuine working treatise—he might leave all other technical details to take care of themselves if he could describe some really practicable plan for disposing of the body. That is, and always has been, the great stumbling-block to the murderer: to ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... praised for its ingenuity, its wealth and comforts, its instruments, refinement and culture. But history tells of no man who has carried his genius up to such supreme excellence that society has forgotten his vice or forgiven the faults that marred his rare gifts. What genius had De Quincey! Marvelous the myriad-minded Coleridge! The opium-habit, however, was a vice that eclipsed their fame and robbed them of half their rightful influence. Voltaire's style was so faultlessly perfect that if the sentences lying ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... quotes the criticism of some writer, who 'contends with some reason that this is saying in effect:—"Let observation with extensive observation observe mankind extensively."' De Quincey's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... a London publisher for a very careful edition of the Spectator, and still more to that good bookman, Mr. Austin Dobson, for his admirable introduction. As the bookman's father was also a bookman, for the blessing descendeth unto the third and fourth generation, he was early taught to love De Quincey, and although, being a truthful man, he cannot swear he has read every page in all the fifteen volumes—roxburghe calf—yet he knows his way about in that whimsical, discursive, but ever satisfying writer, who will write on anything, or any person, always with freshness and in good English, from ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... Waterloo. . . . The grandest chapter of our experience, within the whole Mail-Coach service, was on those occasions when we went down from London with the news of Victory. Five years of life it was worth paying down for the privilege of an outside place.—(De Quincey.) ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... that one speech, and had become physically incapable of making a second; so that afterwards, when he really did make a second, everybody was naturally disgusted, and most people dropped his acquaintance.—De Quincey (1786-1859). ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... Keats; Crabbe, Moore, and others; Tennyson, Browning, Procter, and others. Fiction: the Waverley and other Novels; Dickens, Thackeray, and others. History: Arnold, Thirlwall, Grote, Macaulay, Alison, Carlyle, Freeman, Buckle. Criticism: Hallam, De Quincey, Macaulay, Carlyle, Wilson, Lamb, and others. Theology: Poster, Hall, Chalmers. Philosophy: Stewart, Brown, Mackintosh, Bentham, Alison, and others. Political Economy: Mill, Whewell, Whately, De Morgan, Hamilton. Periodical Writings: the Edinburgh, Quarterly, and Westminster Reviews, and Blackwood's ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... so characteristic of the excellent but bigoted Omar, is enough to cast suspicion upon it. De Quincey tells us that "if a saying has a proverbial fame, the probability is that it was never said." How many amusing stories stand a chance of going down to posterity as the inventions of President Lincoln, of which, nevertheless, he is doubtless wholly ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... of a lifetime are well aware that their careful choice of language betokens, far more often than not, a corresponding delicacy of mind. Landor saw it as a ridiculous trait that English people were so mealy-mouthed in speaking of their bodies; De Quincey, taking him to task for this remark, declared it a proof of blunted sensibility due to long residence in Italy; and, whether the particular explanation held good or not, as regards the question at issue, De Quincey was perfectly right. It is very good to be mealy-mouthed with respect to ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... De Quincey, whose Confessions of an Opium-Eater were appearing in its pages, has left a record of a visit to the Lambs about this time. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... "Spanish Student" Scott Lighter Fancies Pope Various Preferences Uncle Tom's Cabin Ossian Shakespeare Ik Marvel Dickens Wordsworth, Lowell, Chaucer Macaulay. Critics and Reviews. A Non-literary Episode Thackeray "Lazarillo De Tormes" Curtis, Longfellow, Schlegel Tennyson Heine De Quincey, Goethe, Longfellow. George Eliot, Hawthorne, Goethe, Heine Charles Reade Dante Goldoni, Manzoni, D'azeglio "Pastor Fido," "Aminta," "Romola," "Yeast," "Paul Ferroll" Erckmann-chatrian, Bjorstjerne Bjornson Tourguenief, Auerbach Certain Preferences and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the most part, agree with me that there are others besides untutored savages and illiterate peasant women to whom such a list is entirely impracticable. It indicates the enormous preference which on the whole Lord Acton gave to the Literature of Knowledge over the Literature of Power, to use De Quincey's famous distinction. With the exception of Dante's Divine Comedy there is practically not a single book that has any title whatever to a place in the Literature of Power, a literature which many of us think the only thing in the world of books worth consideration. ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... habitually restful state of mind, was the Awakening of the Will, which I found as interesting as any novel or drama, or series of active adventures which I have ever read or experienced. I can remember when most deeply engaged in it, re-reading DE QUINCEY'S "Confessions of an Opium Eater." I took it by chance on my birthday, August 15, which was also his, and as I read I longed from my very heart that he were alive, that I might consult with him on the marvelous ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Yet because de Quincey was an opium-fiend, Poe a drunkard and Oscar Wilde a pervert, it does not follow that every clever writer is unfit for decent society. Even if he were, his popularity would not suffer. Few things help a man's public reputation so much ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... much admired have exercised so little influence. The reason for this is not far to seek. His style defies imitation, and he would have been the last man to endeavour to win disciples to his opinions. Another essayist who belongs to the same group of writers as Coleridge and Lamb is Thomas de Quincey. He wrote both for Blackwood's and for the London Magazine, in the latter of which appeared in 1821 his best known work, the Confessions of an English Opium Eater. He excelled in what was the dominant characteristic of English prose of ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... coming to him: "I am surprised that Upham has not sent me Mr. Scott's poem yet. However, I am not sorry. I feel a sort of satisfaction that mine is going to the press first, though there is little danger that we should think on any subject alike, or stumble on any one character in the same track." De Quincey spoke of the hidden torture shown in Landor's play to be ever present in the mind of Count Julian, the betrayer of his country, as greater than the tortures inflicted in old Rome on generals who had committed treason. De Quincey's admiration of this play was more than once expressed. ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... that makes it safer," replied Mr. Calton, epigrammatically. "You read De Quincey's account of the Marr murders in London, and you will see that the more public the place the less risk there is of detection. There was nothing about the gentleman in the light coat who murdered Whyte to excite Royston's suspicions. He entered ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... "De Quincey, in his wild, metaphysical, and eloquent, yet, in many respects, fancy sketch, considers the great evil resulting from the use of opium to be the effect produced upon the mind during the hours of sleep, the fearful inquietude ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... eighteenth. The same is true of imaginative prose, particularly during the first half of the century, the late Georgian and early Victorian period. In contrast with Addison, Swift, and Goldsmith, De Quincey, Carlyle, and Ruskin are romanticists. In contrast with Hume, Macaulay is romantic, concrete, pictorial. The critical work of Hazlitt and Lamb was in line with Coleridge's. They praised the pre-Augustan ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Mr. Stoddart was always rhyming of goblin, ghost, fairy, and all Sir Walter's themes. At Edinburgh University he was a pupil of Christopher North (John Wilson), who pooh-poohed The Death-Wake in Blackwood. He also knew Aytoun, Professor Ferrier, De Quincey, Hartley Coleridge, and Hogg, and was one of the first guests of Tibbie Sheils, on the spit of land between St. Mary's and the Loch of the Lowes. In verses of this period (1827) Miss Stoddart detects traces of Keats and Byron, ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... Quarterly,[12] undertook to be Bell's biographer[13] and literary executor. Coleridge was so vehement in the cause that when lecturing upon 'Romeo and Juliet' in 1811, he plunged by way of exordium into an assault upon Lancaster's modes of punishment.[14] De Quincey testifies that he became a positive bore upon Bell's virtues. In 1812 Lancaster had got deeply into debt to the trustees of the Society, who included besides Allen, Joseph Fox—a 'shallow, gloomy bigot' according to Place—and some other Quakers. Lancaster resented ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... lecture is weak and watery compared to the travel stories we listen to. Were O. Henry alive, he could find material for a hundred new yarns, and William James numerous pointers for another work on psychology, while De Quincey might multiply his dreams ad infinitum. Doubtless alienists as well as fiction writers would find us worth studying. In France there's a saying that to be an aviator one must be ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... influence of any author she cared about, particularly if his style were mannered. Involuntarily, while she was reading Macaulay, for instance, her own thoughts took a dogmatic turn, and jerked along in short, sharp sentences. She caught the peculiarities of De Quincey too, of Carlyle, and also some of the simple dignity of Ruskin, which was not so easy; and she had written things after the manner of each of these authors before she perceived the effect they were having upon her. But it was unfortunate ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... age, Immanuel Kant, the great metaphysician, became extremely fond of coffee; and Thomas de Quincey relates a little incident showing Kant's great ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... in spite of mixed proposals, we were devoted friends. We read late in bed, sometimes till three in the morning, and said our prayers out loud to each other every night. We were discussing imagination one night and were comparing Hawthorne, De Quincey, Poe and others, in consequence of a dispute arising out of one of our pencil-games; and we argued till the housemaid came in with the hot water at ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... tendency to brood on horrors was no result of calculation. It belonged to his idiosyncrasy. He seems to have been suckled from birth at the breast of that Mater Tenebrarum, our Lady of Darkness, whom De Quincey in one of his 'Suspiria de Profundis' describes among the Semnai Theai, the august goddesses, the mysterious foster-nurses of suffering humanity. He cannot say the simplest thing without giving it a ghastly or sinister turn. If one of his characters draws ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... peoples, as a means of producing ecstasy from remote antiquity. Opium, it is well known, produces an extraordinary state of exaltation, intensifying the sense of one's personality, and inducing a pleasurable consciousness of mental strength and clarity. Under its influence, as De Quincey said, time lengthens to infinity and space swells to immensity.[26] Belladonna, a drug much used by medieval witches and sorcerers, has also had its vogue for purely religious purposes. With the Greeks ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... century witnessed the rise of an entirely new style of English prose. The ancient and universal restraints were swept away, the decorous stateliness of all the buried centuries was abandoned, and there arose a band of writers, to whom De Quincey and Ruskin were the leaders, who withdrew all veils from their emotions, threw away all the shackles of reserve, and poured their sobs and ecstasies upon us, in soaring periods of impassioned prose, glittering with decorative alliterations, ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... friends. Southey had made a home for himself and his beloved library a few miles over the hills, at Keswick. De Quincey, with his clever brains and shallow character, took up his abode in the cottage which Wordsworth had first lived in at Grasmere. Coleridge, born the most golden genius of them all, came to and fro in those fruitless unhappy wanderings which consumed a life that once promised to be so rich in blessing ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... flowers of hemp; there are the stupefying perfumes of charred frankincense and grated sandal-root. The music comes to the listener of western birth and mind, as the Malay who knocked among English mountains at De Quincey's door. You learn of Sinbad, the explorer, who is nearer to us than Nansen; of the Kalandar Prince who spent a mad evening with the porter and the three ladies of Bagdad, and told of his incredible adventures; and Scheherazade, the narrator, she too is merely a shape ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... forgetfulness of his Greek environment and the interjection of Roman references—what De Quincey calls "anatopism"—is another item of careless composition too well known to need more than passing mention. The repeated appearance of the Velabrum,[179] or Capitolium,[180] or circus,[181] or senatus, or dictator,[182] or centuriata comitio,[183] or plebiscitum,[184] ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke |
