“Through caverns measureless to man,
  Down to the sunless sea.”

Yet, amid the “briny tides” of that sea, amid turmoil and perplexity and the saddest of mysteries, it preserves its earliest gentleness, and its inward, noiseless peace, till once more it gushes up toward the sweet heaven through the Arethusan font of death.  Easily, then, is it to be seen why De Quincey himself continually reverted, both in his conscious reminiscences and through the subconscious relapses of dreams, from a life clouded and disguised in its maturer years, to the unmasked purity of its earliest heaven.  And what from the vast desert, what from the fatal wreck of life, was he to look back upon, for even an imaginary solace, if not upon the rich argosies that spread their happier sails above a calmer sea?  We are forcibly reminded of the dream which Milton[A] gives to his Christ in the desert, hungry and tired:—­

                      “There he slept,
  And dreamed, as appetite is wont to dream,
  Of meats and drinks, Nature’s refreshment sweet. 
  Him thought he by the brook of Cherith stood,
  And saw the ravens with their horny beaks
  Food to Elijah bringing even and morn,
  Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought: 
  He saw the prophet also, how he fled
  Into the desert, and how there he slept
  Under a juniper, then how, awaked,
  He found his supper on the coals prepared,
  And by the angel was bid rise and eat,
  And eat the second time after repose,
  The strength whereof sufficed him forty days;
  Sometimes that with Elijah he partook,
  Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse.”

[Footnote A:  Paradise Regained, Book II.]

If the splendors of divinity could be so disguised by the severe necessities of the wilderness and of brutal hunger as to be thus solicited and baffled even in dreams,—­if, by the lowest of mortal appetites, they could be so humiliated and eclipsed as to revel in the shadowy visions of merely human plenty,—­then by how much more must the human heart, eclipsed at noon, revert, under the mask of sorrow and of dreams, to the virgin beauties of the dawn! with how much more violent revulsion must the weary, foot-sore traveller, lost in a waste of sands, be carried back through the gate of ivory or of horn to the dewy, flower-strewn fields of some far happier place and time!

The transition from De Quincey’s childhood to his opium-experiences is as natural, therefore, as from strophe to antistrophe in choral antiphonies.  Henceforth, as the reader already understands, we are not permitted to look upon a simple, undisguised life, unless we draw aside a veil as impenetrable as that which covers the face of Isis or the poppy-sceptred Demeter.  Under this papaverian mask it is likely to be best known to the reader; for it is under the title of “Opium-Eater” that he is most generally recognized.  It was through