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LITERARY LEAFLETS.
BY SIR NATHANIEL.
No. X—The Pathos of Thomas de Quincey.
The English Opium-eater, l'Allegro, was the theme of the first of these literary fly-leaves. To-day we take him as Il Penseroso. We are to mark nis spirit as it flows, "like fabled Lethe,"
In creeping sadness, through oblivious shades
Of death and night,[1]
yet destined to "catch at every turn the colours of the sun"[2] of a diction unrivalled in imaginative splendour. That fluent stream, ever sinnous in its course, often majestically broad in its expanse, is vocal with a burden of utterance most musical, most melancholy, so that by its waters we are fain to sit down and weep.
Anything like a systematic illustration, however, of De Quinoey's power of pathos, and of the matchlessness of his impassioned prose, is wholly beyond our aim. This "leaflet," like its forerunners, is a thing of shreds and patches; more fragmentary, indeed, more desultory and wayward, than usual. Granted (and lamented), that such a crumpled literaiurblatt is ill suited to do justice, much less honour, to its illustrious theme. But even the bricks, or broken brickbats, to be now proffered as types of the parent edifice, may be admired as beautiful rains, or rather as suggestive samples of the architect's art, and may, perchance, move some, not hitherto conversant with him, to pilgrimise to the shrine whence they have been rudely displaced.—Without other apology, then, we turn to the autobiography, wherein
We love to hear that eloquent old Man
Pour forth his meditations, and descant
On human life from infancy to age.
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'Tis sixty years since: a gorgeous summer day; and a young child is stealthily creeping into a solemnly still chamber, and wistfully peering around, to take a farewell vision of the corpse of another young child, his elder sister. Through an open window the midsummer sun is showering down torrents of splendour—the blue depths of a cloudless sky pathetically symbolise life and the glory of life. But death rules in that hushed chamber—death, and the shadow of death. Reclines on the bed a sweet childish figure—all the tokens of whose angel face the baby-brother scans with "agony that cannot be remembered"—the serene and noble forehead, the frozen eyelids, the darkness that seems to steal from beneath them, the marble lips, the stiffening hands, laid palm to palm, as if repeating the supplications of closing anguish.
And now the same mourner, time-stricken with sixty years, sorrow-laden with incommunicable griefs, turns back in spirit to that Affliction
