and with privileged eye and ear.  Many a nebulous mass of hieroglyphically inscribed meanings did he—­this Champollion, defying all human enigmas, this Herschel, or Lord Rosse, forever peering into the obscure chasms and yawning abysses of human astronomy—­resolve into orderly constellations, that, once and for all, through his telescopic interpretation and enlargement, were rendered distinct and commensurable amongst men.  The conditions of his power in this respect are psychologically inseparable from the remarkable conditions of his life, two of which are especially to be noticed.  First, a ruling disposition towards meditation, constituting him, in the highest sense of the word, a poet.  Secondly, the peculiar qualities which this singular mental constitution derived from his use of opium,—­qualities which, although they did not increase, or even give direction to his meditative power, at least magnified it, both optically, as to its visual capacity, and creatively, as to its constructive faculty.  These two conditions, each concurrent with the other in its ruling influence, impart to his life a degree of psychological interest which belongs to no other on record.  Nor is this all.  The reader knows how often a secondary interest will attach to the mightiest of conquerors or to the wisest of sovereigns, who is not merely in himself, and through his own deeds, magnificent, but whose glory is many times repeated and piled up by numerous reverberations of itself from a contemporary race of Titans.  Thus, doubtless, Charles V., although himself King of Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and a portion of Italy, gloried in the sublime empery of the Turkish Solyman, as by some subtile connection of fate sympathetic with his own.  A secondary interest of this nature belongs to the life of De Quincey,—­a life which inclosed, as an island, a whole period of English literature, one, too, which in activity and originality is unsurpassed by any other, including the names of Scott and Dickens, of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, and Southey, of Moore, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.  His connection with very many of these was not simply that of coexistence, but also of familiar intercourse.

Between De Quincey’s life and his writings it is impossible that there should be any distraction of interest, so intimately are the two interwoven:  in this case more so than in that of any known author.  Particularly is this true of his more impassioned writings, which are a faithful rescript of his all-impassioned life.  Hierophant we have called him,—­the prince of hierophants,—­having reference to the matter of his revelations; but in his manner, in his style of composition, he is something more than this:  here he stands the monarch amongst rhapsodists.  In these writings are displayed the main peculiarities of his life and genius.