play with him, be his faery, his page, his everything that love and poetry have invented; but watch him well; sport with his fancies; turn them about like the ringlets round his cheek; and if ever he meditate on power, go toss up thy baby to his brow, and bring back his thoughts into his heart by the music of thy discourse.

Teach him to live unto God and unto thee; and he will discover that women, like the plants in woods, derive their softness and tenderness from the shade.-Imaginary Conversations.

LVI.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

1785-1859.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY was born at Manchester in 1785. In 1800 he went to Eton, and in 1803 he was entered at Oxford, where he studied intermittently for the space of five years. While yet a very young man he adopted the baneful practice of opium eating, and thus shipwrecked both his fine intellect and his fortune. After encountering some of those strange adventures which he commemorates, and perhaps embellishes, in his Confessions of an Opium Eater, he retired from London and became for some time a resident in the Lake Country, near his friends Wordsworth and Southey. De Quincey did not turn to literature except as an amusement until he was nearly forty, when pecuniary embarrassments induced him to become a contributor to the London Magazine and other periodicals. In 1832 he went to reside in Scotland, living at Edinburgh for the most part, in the seclusion which his taste no less than his feeble health required, until his death, which took place in 1859.

De Quincey is one of the most eloquent prose writers of the nineteenth century. His best passages will bear comparison with those of Milton, Taylor, or Hooker: they have the same gorgeous music, the same passionate abundance of thought. He is an unreliable critic, an erratic writer, an unscrupulous inventor of history, but as a rhetorician he is almost unrivalled.

The records of his learning and controversial power may pass with other curiosities and fleeting interests of the age; but the

dreams and phantasies he has connected with the earlier epoch of his life, his solemn rhapsodies, the simple pathos of his best sketches, and the bright flashes of his humour are imperishable memorials of a peculiar genius.

1. A Sister's Death.

FROM the gorgeous sunlight I turned round to the corpse. There lay the sweet childish figure; there the angel face; and, as people usually fancy, it was said in the house that no features had suffered any change. Had they not? The forehead indeed-the serene and noble forehead-that might be the same; but the frozen eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal from beneath them, the marble lips, the stiffening hands, laid palm to palm, as if repeating the supplications of closing anguish-could these be mistaken for life? Had it been so wherefore did I not spring to those heavenly lips with tears and never-ending kisses? But so it was not. I stood checked for a moment; awe, not fear, fell upon me; and 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. Many times since, upon summer days, when the sun is about the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow, solemn, Memnonian but saintly swell: it is in this world the one great audible symbol of eternity. And three times in my life have I happened to hear the same sound in the same circumstances, viz., when standing between an open window and a dead body on a summer day. Instantly, when my ear caught this vast Eolian intonation, when my eye filled with the golden fulness of life, the pomps of the heavens

above, or the glory of the flowers below, and turning when it settled upon the frost which overspread my sister's face, instantly a trance fell upon me. A vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up for ever. I, in spirit, rose as if on billows that also ran up the shaft for ever and the billows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but that also ran before us, and fled away continually. The flight and the pursuit seemed to go on for ever 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 continue 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.—— Autobiographic Sketches.

2. Joan of Arc.

WHAT is to be thought of her? What is to be thought of the poor shepherd girl from the hills and forests of Lorraine, that

like the Hebrew shepherd boy from the hills and forests of Judæa-rose suddenly out of the quiet, out of the safety, out of the religious inspiration, rooted in deep pastoral solitudes, to a station in the van of armies, and to the more perilous station at the right hand of kings? The Hebrew boy inaugurated his patriotic mission by an act, by a victorious act, such as no man could deny. But so did the girl of Lorraine, if we read her story as it was read by those who saw her nearest. Adverse armies bore witness to the boy as no pretender; but so they did to the gentle girl. Judged by the voices of all who saw them from a station of good

will, both were found true and loyal to any promises involved in their first acts. Enemies it was that made the difference between their subsequent fortunes. The boy rose to a splendour and a noonday prosperity, both personal and public, that rang through the records of his people, and became a by-word amongst his posterity for a thousand years, until the sceptre was departing from Judah. The poor, forsaken girl, on the contrary, drank not herself from that cup of rest which she had secured for France. She never sang together with the songs that rose in her native Domrémy, as echoes to the departing steps of invaders. She mingled not in the festal dances at Vaucouleurs which celebrated in rapture the redemption of France. No! for her voice was then silent: no! for her feet were dust. Pure, innocent, noble-hearted girl! whom, from earliest youth, ever I believed in as full of truth and self-sacrifice, this was amongst the strongest pledges for thy truth, that never once -no, not for a moment of weakness-didst thou revel in the vision of coronets and honour from man. Coronets for thee! O no! Honours, if they come when all is over, are for those that share thy blood. Daughter of Domrémy, when the gratitude of thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be sleeping the sleep of the dead. Call her, King of France, but she will not hear thee! Cite her by thy apparitors to come and receive a robe of honour, but she will be found en contumace. When the thunders of universal France, as even yet may happen, shall proclaim the grandeur of the poor shepherd girl that gave up all for her country, thy ear, young shepherd girl, will have been deaf for five centuries. To suffer and to do, that was thy portion in this life; that was thy destiny; and not for a moment was it hidden from thyself. Life, thou saidst, is short: and the sleep which is in the grave is long! Let me use that life, so transitory, for