This is a record unique in English literature. It tells
in De Quincey's usual style, with many tedious digressions, the story
of his neglected boyhood, his revolt at school discipline and monotony
that had shattered his health, his wanderings in Wales, his life as a
common vagrant in London, his college life, his introduction to opium
and the dreams that came with indulgence in the drug. The gorgeous
beauty of De Quincey's pictures of these opium visions has probably
induced many susceptible readers to make a trial of the drug, with
deep disappointment as the result. No common mind can hope to have
such visions as De Quincey records.
His imagination has well been called Druidic; it played about the
great facts and personages of history and it invested these with a
background of the most solemn and imposing natural features. These
dreams came to have with him the very semblance of reality. Read the
terrible passages in the _Confessions_ in which the Malay figures;
read the dream fugues in "Suspira," the visions seen by the boy when
he looked on his dead sister's face, or the noble passages that
picture the three Ladies of Sorrow. Here is a passage on the vision of
eternity at his sister's death bier, which gives a good idea of De
Quincey's style:
Whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow--the saddest that
ear ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept the fields
of mortality for a thousand centuries.
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