and again:—­

“Few—­none—­find what they love or could have loved,
Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
Necessity of loving having removed
Antipathies”?

This, then, is the nearest approach to human love,—­the removal of all antipathies!  But even these

                     “recur erelong,
  Envenomed with irrevocable wrong: 
  And circumstance—­that unspiritual god
  And miscreator—­makes and helps along
  Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,
  Whose touch turns hope to dust,—­the dust which all have trod.”

De Quincey, on the other hand, in whose heart there was laid no such hollow basis for infidelity toward the master-passions of humanity, repeated the pomps of joy or of sorrow, as evolved out of universal human nature, and as, through sunshine and tempest, typified in the outside world,—­but never for one instant did he seek alliance, on the one side, with the shallow enthusiasm of the raving Bacchante, or, on the other, with the overshadowing despotism of gloom; nor can there be found on a single page of all his writings the slightest hint indicating even a latent sympathy with the power which builds only to crush, or with the intellect that denies, and that against the dearest objects of human faith fulminates its denials and shocking recantations solely for the purposes of scorn.

Whence this marked difference?  To account for it, we must needs trace back to the first haunts of childhood the steps of these two fugitives, each of whom has passed thence, the one into a desert mirage, teeming with processions of the gloomiest falsities in life, and the other—­also into the desert, but where he is yet refreshed and solaced by an unshaken faith in the genial verities of life, though separated from them by irrecoverable miles of trackless wastes, and where, however apparently abandoned and desolate, he is yet ministered unto by angels, and no mimic fantasies are suffered to exercise upon his heart their overmastering seductions to

  “Allure, or terrify, or undermine.”

Whether the days of childhood be our happiest days, is a question all by itself.  But there can be no question as to the inevitable certainty with which the conditions of childhood, fortunate or unfortunate, determine the main temper and disposition of our lives.  For it is underneath the multitude of fleeting proposals and conscious efforts, born of reason, and which, to one looking upon life from any superficial stand-point, seem to have all to do with its conduct, that there runs the undercurrent of disposition, which is born of Nature, which is cradled and nurtured with us in our infancy, which is itself a general choice, branching out into our specific choices of certain directions and aims among all opposite directions and aims, and which, although we rarely recognize its important functions, is in all cases the arbiter of our destiny.  And in the very word disposition is indicated the finality of its arbitraments as contrasted with all proposition.