the Sketches already mentioned, and in his most noted work, The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, has told the story of these early years in considerable detail and with apparent sincerity.  De Quincey was not a sturdy boy.  Shy and dreamy, exquisitely sensitive to impressions of melancholy and mystery, he was endowed with an imagination abnormally active even for a child.  It is customary to give prominence to De Quincey’s pernicious habit of opium-eating, in attempting to explain the grotesque fancies and weird flights of his marvellous mind in later years; yet it is only fair to emphasize the fact that the later achievements of that strange creative faculty were clearly foreshadowed in youth.  For example, the earliest incident in his life that he could afterwards recall, he describes as “a remarkable dream of terrific grandeur about a favorite nurse, which is interesting to myself for this reason—­that it demonstrates my dreaming tendencies to have been constitutional, and not dependent upon laudanum."[1] Again he tells us how, when six years old, upon the death of a favorite sister three years older, he stole unobserved upstairs to the death chamber; unlocking the door and entering silently, he stood for a moment gazing through the open window toward the bright sunlight of a cloudless day, then turned to behold the angel face upon the pillow.  Awed in the presence of death, the meaning of which he began vaguely to understand, he stood listening to a “solemn wind” that began to blow—­“the saddest that ear ever heard.”  What followed should appear in De Quincey’s own words:  “A vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up forever.  I, in spirit, rose as if on billows that also ran up the shaft forever; and the billows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but that also ran on before us and fled away continually.  The flight and the pursuit seemed to go on forever and ever.  Frost gathering frost, some sarsar wind of death, seemed to repel me; some mighty relation between God and death dimly struggled to evolve itself from the dreadful antagonism between them; shadowy meanings even yet continued to exercise and torment, in dreams, the deciphering oracle within me.  I slept—­for how long I cannot say:  slowly I recovered my self-possession; and, when I woke, found myself standing as before, close to my sister’s bed."[2] Somewhat similar in effect were the fancies that came to this dreamy boy on Sunday mornings during service in the fine old English church.  Through the wide central field of uncolored glass, set in a rich framework of gorgeous color,—­for the side panes of the great windows were pictured with the stories of saints and martyrs,—­the lad saw “white fleecy clouds sailing over the azure depths of the sky.”  Straightway the picture changed in his imagination, and visions of young children, lying on white beds of sickness and of death, rose before his eyes, ascending slowly and softly into heaven, God’s arms descending from