So that it is better to be on the sly about saying “Good bye” to this host of yours.  When, however, it was absolutely necessary to be gone, De Quincey forthwith insisted on accompanying his guest.  What, then, was to be done?  Ominously the sky looked down upon them, momently threatening a storm.  No resource was there but to give the man his way, and accept his offer of companionship for a short distance, painfully conscious though you are of the fact that every step taken forwards must, during this same August night, be retraced by the weary-looking old man at your side, who now lacks barely four years of life’s average allotment.  Thus you move on:  and the heavens move on their hurricanes by nearer approaches, warnings of which propagate themselves all around you in every sound of the wind and every rustle of the forest-leaves.  Meanwhile, there is no rest to the silvery vocal utterances of your companion:  every object by the way furnishes a ready topic for conversation.  Just now you are passing an antiquated old mansion, and your guide stops to tell you that in this house may have been committed most strange and horrible murders, that, in spite of the tempestuous mutterings heard on every side, ought now and here to be specially and solemnly memorialized by human relation.  A woman passes by, a perfect stranger, but De Quincey steps entirely out of the road to one side, takes off his hat, and in the most reverent attitude awaits her passage,—­and you, poor astonished mortal that you are, lest you should yourself seem scandalously uncourteous, are compelled to do likewise.  In this incident we see what infinite majesty invested the very semblance of humanity in De Quincey’s thoughts:  and something of the same remarkable courtesy was manifested by Rufus Choate, who uniformly addressed the lowest of women in the witness-box as if they were every one of them worthy of the most queenly consideration.

Onward you proceed,—­one,—­two,—­three miles, and you can endure no longer the thought that your friend shall go on farther, increasing thus at every step the burden of his journey back.  You have, reached the Esk bank and the bridge which spans the stream; the storm so long threatened begins now to let loose its rage against all unsheltered mortals.  Here De Quincey consents to bid you good-bye,—­to you his last good-bye; and as here you leave him, so is he forever enshrined in your thoughts, together with the primal mysteries of night and of storm, of human tragedies and of the most pathetic human tenderness.

But this paper, already sufficiently prolonged, should draw to a close.  It is a source of great mortification to me that I cannot find some very disagreeable thing to say of De Quincey, merely as a matter of poetic justice; for assuredly he was in the habit of saying all the malicious things he could about his friends.  If there was anything in a man’s face or shape particularly uncouth, you might trust De Quincey for noticing that.  Even Wordsworth