Now, with respect to this disposition:  Nature furnishes its basis; but it is the external structure of circumstance, built up or building about childhood,—­to shelter or imprison,—­which, more than all else, gives it its determinate character; and though this outward structure may in after-life be thoroughly obliterated, or replaced by its opposite,—­porcelain by clay, or clay by porcelain,—­yet will the tendencies originally developed remain and hold a sway almost uninterrupted over life.  And, generally, the happy influences that preside over the child may be reduced under three heads:  first, a genial temperament,—­one that naturally, and of its own motion, inclines toward a centre of peace and rest rather than toward the opposite centre of strife; secondly, profound domestic affections; and, thirdly, affluence, which, although of all three it is the most negative, the most material condition, is yet practically the most important, because of the degree in which it is necessary to the full and unlimited prosperity of the other two.  For how frequent are the cases in which the happiest of temperaments are perverted by the necessities of toil, so burdensome to tender years, or in which corroding anxieties, weighing upon parents’ hearts, check the free play of domestic love!—­and in all cases where such limitations are present, even in the gentlest form, there must be a cramping up of the human organization and individuality somewhere; and everywhere, and under all circumstances, there must be sensibly felt the absence of that leisure which crowns and glorifies the affections of home, making them seem the most like summer sunshine, or rather like a sunshine which knows no season, which is an eternal presence in the soul.

As regards all these three elements, De Quincey’s childhood was prosperous; afterwards, vicissitudes came,—­mighty changes capable of affecting all other transmutations, but thoroughly impotent to annul the inwrought grace of a pre-established beauty.  On the other hand, Byron’s childhood was, in all these elements, unfortunate.  The sting left in his mother’s heart by the faithless desertion of her husband, after the desolation of her fortunes, was forever inflicted upon him, and intensified by her fitful temper; and notwithstanding the change in his outward prospects which occurred afterwards, he was never able to lift himself out of the Trophonian cave into which his infancy had been thrust, any more than Vulcan could have cured that crooked gait of his, which dated from some vague infantile remembrances of having been rudely kicked out of heaven over its brazen battlements, one summer’s day,—­for that it was a summer’s day we are certain from a line of “Paradise Lost,” commemorating the tragic circumstance:—­

  “From morn till noon he fell, from noon till dewy eve—­
  A summer’s day.”