[Footnote A:  Yet, marvellous as it may seem, he wrote the second without being distinctly conscious of having written a previous one.  It was no uncommon thing for him to forget his own writings.  In one case it is known that for a long time he persisted in disowning his production.  His American editor—­a fact which is little known—­selected, from among the mass of periodical writings in the various magazines for which De Quincey wrote, those which, having no other clue to guide him than, their peculiar style, he judged to have proceeded from De Quincey’s pen.  In one instance,—­as to the “Traditions of the Rabbins,”—­after considerable examination, he still hesitated, and finally wrote to De Quincey, to set himself right.  The latter disowned the essay:  he had forgotten it.  Mr. F., however, after another examination, concluded, that, notwithstanding De Quincey’s denial of the fact, he must have written it; accordingly, at his own risk, he published it.  Afterwards De Quincey owned up, and ever after that referred all disputed cases of this nature to his Boston publishers.]

“Klosterheim” is from beginning to end only the development, through regular stages, of an intricately involved mystery of this subtile nature.  Oftentimes De Quincey deals with the horrid tragedy of murder; but the mere fact of a murder, however shocking, was not sufficient to arrest him.  With the celebrated Williams murders, on the contrary, he was entirely taken up, since these proceeded in accordance with designs not traceable to the cursory glance, but which tasked the skill of a decipherer to interpret and reduce to harmony.  Here were murders that revolved musically, that modulated themselves to master-principles, and that at every stage of progress sought alliance with the hidden mysteries of universal human nature.  I know of no writer but De Quincey who invests mysteries of this tragic order with their appropriate drapery, so that they shall, to our imaginations, unfold the full measure of their capacities for striking awe into our hearts.

This sort of mystery is always connected with dreams.  They owe their very existence to darkness, which withdraws them from the material limitations of every-day life; they are shifted to an ideal proscenium; their dramatis personae, however familiar nominally, and however much derived from material suggestions, are yet in all their motions obedient to an alien centre as opposite as is possible to the ordinary centre about which the mere mechanism of life revolves.  We should therefore expect beforehand in De Quincey an overruling tendency towards this remote architecture of dreams.  The careful reader of his “Autobiographic Sketches” will remember, that, at the early age of seven, and before he knew of even the existence of opium, the least material hint which bordered on the shadowy was sufficient to lift him up into aerial structures, and to lead his infant footsteps amongst the clouds.  Such hints, after his little sister’s death, were furnished by certain expressions of the Litany, by pictures in the stained windows of the church, and by the tumult of the organ.  Nor were the dreams thus introduced mere fantasies, irregular and inconsistent.  Throughout, they were self-sustained and majestic.