Had De Quincey liberated our minds from suspense by first presenting the thought which first arose in his own mind,—­namely, that we are thrown back upon scenes and remembrances by phantoms of lost power, &c.—­the beauty of his language in its pregnant suggestiveness would have been felt at once.  Instead of that, he makes us accompany him in darkness, and when the light appears we have to travel backwards over the ground again to see what we have passed.  The passage continues:—­

“In solitudes, and chiefly in the solitudes of nature, and, above all, amongst the great and enduring features of nature, such as mountains and quiet dells, and the lawny recesses of forests, and the silent shores of lakes—­features with which (as being themselves less liable to change) our feelings have a more abiding associatlon,—­under these circumstances it is that such evanescent hauntings of our forgotten selves are most apt to startle and waylay us.”

The beauty of this passage seems to me marred by the awkward yet necessary interruption, “under these circumstances it is,” which would have been avoided by opening the sentence with “such evanescent hauntings of our forgotten selves are most apt to startle us in solitudes,” &c.  Compare the effect of directness in the following:—­

“This was one of the most common shapes of extinguished power from which Coleridge fled to the great city.  But sometimes the same decay came back upon his heart in the more poignant shape of intimations and vanishing glimpses recovered for one moment from the Paradise of youth, and from fields of joy and power, over which for him too certainly he felt that the cloud of night was settling for ever.”

Obedience to the law of Sequence gives strength by giving clearness and beauty of rhythm; it economises force and creates music.  A very trifling disregard of it will mar an effect.  See an example both of obedience and trifling disobedience in the following passage from Ruskin:—­

“People speak in this working age, when they speak from their hearts, as if houses and lands and food and raiment were alone useful, and as if Sight, Thought, and Admiration were all profitless, so that men insolently call themselves Utilitarians, who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables; men who think, as far as such can be said to think, that the meat is more than life and the raiment than the body, who look on earth as a stable and to its fruit as fodder; vinedressers and husbandmen who love the corn they grind and the grapes they crush better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden.”

It is instinctive to contrast the dislocated sentence, “who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race,” with the sentence which succeeds it, “men who think, as far as such men can be said to think, that the meat,” &c.  In the latter the parenthetic interruption is a source of power:  it dams the current to increase its force; in the former the inversion is a loss of power:  it is a dissonance to the ear and a diversion of the thought.