not be quenched.  Nay, through just these instrumentalities, oftentimes, is genius fostered.  We need not the instance of Romulus and Remus, or of the Persian Cyrus, to prove that men have sometimes been nourished by bears or by she-wolves.  Nevertheless, this is essentially a Roman nurture.  The Greeks, on the contrary, laid their infant heroes on beds of violets,—­if we may believe the Pindaric odes,—­set over them a divine watch, and fed them with angels’ food.  And this Grecian nurture De Quincey had.

And not the least important element of this nurture is that of perfect leisure.  Through this it is that we pass from the outward to the subjective relations of De Quincey’s childhood; for only in connection with these has the element just introduced any value, since leisure, which is the atmosphere, the breathing-place of genius, is also cap and bells for the fool.  In relation to power, it is, like solitude, the open heaven through which the grandeurs of eternity flow into the penetralian recesses of the human heart, after that once the faculties of thought, or the sensibilities, have been powerfully awakened.  Sensibility had been thus awakened in De Quincey, through grief occasioned by the loss of a sister, his favorite and familiar playmate,—­a grief so profound, that he, somewhere, in speaking of it, anticipates the certainty of its presence in the hour of death; and thought, also, had been prematurely awakened, both under the influence of this overmastering pathos of sorrow, and because of his strong predisposition to meditation.  Both the pathos and the meditative tendencies were increased by the halcyon peace of his childhood.  In a memorial of the poet Schiller, he speaks of that childhood as the happiest, “of which the happiness has survived and expressed itself, not in distinct records, but in deep affection, in abiding love, and the hauntings of meditative power.”  His, at least, was the felicity of this echoless peace.

In no memorial is it so absolutely requisite that a marked prominence should be given to its first section as in De Quincey’s.  This is a striking peculiarity in his life.  If it were not so, I should have seriously transgressed in keeping the reader’s attention so long upon a point which, aside from such peculiarity, would yield no sufficient, at least no proportionate value.  But, in the treatment of any life, that cannot seem disproportionate which enters into it as an element only and just in that ratio of prominence with which it enters into the life itself, No stream can rise above the level of its source.  No life, which lacks a prominent interest as to its beginnings, can ever, in its entire course, develop any distinguishing features of interest.  This is true of any life; but it is true of De Quincey’s above all others on record, that, through all its successive arches, ascending and descending, it repeats the original arch of childhood.  Repeats,—­but with what marvellous transformations!  For hardly is its earliest section passed, when, for all its future course, it is masked by a mighty trouble.  No longer does it flow along its natural path, and beneath the open sky, but, like the sacred Alpheus, runs