"De Quincey" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "De Quincey, in his wild, metaphysical, and eloquent, yet, in many respects, fancy sketch, considers the great evil resulting from the use of opium to be the effect produced upon the mind during the hours of sleep, the fearful ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... signal service, during the last half century, has been rendered to the lovers of genuine books, than the collection and republication of the fragmentary writings of Thomas de Quincey. Cast, for the most part, upon the swollen current of periodical literature, at the summons of chance or necessity, during a career protracted beyond the allotted threescore years and ten, the shattered hand of the Opium Eater was powerless to arrest their flight to silence ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... best measures of Leopold, the most intelligent reformer in the era of repentant monarchy, were vitiated and frustrated by want of adaptation to custom. Common party divisions represented nothing scientific to his mind; and he was willing, like De Quincey, to accept them as corresponding halves of a necessary whole. He wished that he knew half as much as his neighbour, Mrs. Somerville; but he possessed no natural philosophy, and never acquired the emancipating ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... knew Cairo as well as Antoun did, and was as likely to be right. "I don't see why we shouldn't go, if others do," she persisted, "and I've always longed to know what a hasheesh dream was like, ever since I read De Quincey. A little, just once, could do us ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... Marguerite before her final expiation—of a Juliet before her final immolation. Laughter and cheers there were in abundance during this portion of Mr. Gladstone's speech; but the general demeanour was one of deadly stillness and rapt emotion—the stillness one can imagine on that Easter morning when De Quincey went forth and washed the fever from his forehead with the ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... genius more significant than those which describe imaginary worlds which were, for a time, as real as the actual world in which the boy lived. Goethe entertained and mystified his playmates with accounts of a certain garden in which he wandered at will, but which they could not find; and De Quincey created a kingdom, with all its complex relations and varied activities, which he ruled with beneficence and affection until, in an unlucky hour, he revealed his secret to his brother, who straightway usurped his authority, and governed his subjects with such ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... a very few hooks in his library, but they were of the best—Homer, Virgil, Dante, Camoens, Tasso, and Milton. De Quincey's favourite few were Donne, Chillingworth, Jeremy Taylor, Milton, South, Barrow, and Sir Thomas Browne. He described these writers as "a pleiad or constellation of seven golden stars, such as in their class no literature can match," and from whose works he would undertake ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... large folio, with which we were familiar in boyhood, but have not seen since. De Quincey says, alluding partly to them, and partly to his poetry,—'Few writers have shewn a more extraordinary compass of powers than Donne, for he combined—what no other man has ever done—the last sublimation of dialectical subtlety and address with the most impassioned majesty. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... thousand generations, the Suez Canal was dug. Clive, during his first trip, was a year and a half en route from England to India; were he alive to-day he could journey to Calcutta in twenty-two days. After reading De Quincey's hyperbolical description of the English mail-coach, one cannot down the desire to place that remarkable man on the pilot of the White Mail or of the ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... a new world of thought and sentiment was that in which Coleridge was living from any of which the generation before him had experience. The band of poets and essayists represented by Coleridge and Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb, De Quincey, and we may add Blake, were in many respects separated by a wider gulf, except only in time, from the authors of twenty years before, than they were from the writers of the Elizabethan age. New hopes and aspirations as to the capabilities of human life, new ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... says, "is the sum total of wretchedness to man;" and, doubtless, the idea which he means to convey is just. "But," in the words of De Quincey, "no man can be truly great, without at least chequering his life with solitude." Separation from his kind, of course, deprives a man of the humanizing influences, which are the consequences of association; but it may, at the same time, strengthen ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... to a treatment of the stagecoach of the West would be Thomas De Quincey's "The English Mail-Coach." The proper place to read about the coaches would be in Doctor Lyon's Pony Express Museum, out from Pasadena, California. May it never perish! Old Monte drives up now and then in Alfred Henry Lewis' Wolfville tales, and Bret Harte made Yuba Bill crack the ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... merely manual task, leaving my thoughts free. It was in June, a sultry night, and about midnight a wind arose, pouring in through the open windows, full of mournful reminiscence, not of this, but of other summers,—the same wind that De Quincey heard at noonday in midsummer blowing through the room where he stood, a mere boy, by the side of his dead sister, —a wind centuries old. As I wrote on mechanically, I became conscious of a presence in the room, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... tried to echo the laugh, but the attempt fell flat. "Oh, I merely speak from—from De Quincey. But I believe this fog is shifting—I really believe it is shifting. Can you oblige me with a light? I had almost forgotten that a man may still smoke though he has been deprived of sight." He spoke fast and disjointedly. He was overwhelmed by the idea ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... word in the sense of unfounded, unwarranted, unreasonable, untrue. Its use in this sense, however, has the sanction of abundant authority. "Weak and gratuitous conjectures."—Porson. "A gratuitous assumption."—Godwin. "The gratuitous theory."—Southey. "A gratuitous invention."—De Quincey. "But it is needless to dwell on the improbability of a hypothesis which has been shown to be ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... writings of De Quincey has just been published by Ticknor, Reed & Fields, of Boston. It contains, with other admirable papers, those "On the Knocking at the Gate, in Macbeth," "Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts," "Joan of Arc," and "Dinners, Real and Reputed." ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... been so much admired have exercised so little influence. The reason for this is not far to seek. His style defies imitation, and he would have been the last man to endeavour to win disciples to his opinions. Another essayist who belongs to the same group of writers as Coleridge and Lamb is Thomas de Quincey. He wrote both for Blackwood's and for the London Magazine, in the latter of which appeared in 1821 his best known work, the Confessions of an English Opium Eater. He excelled in what was the dominant characteristic of English prose of ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... habitually restful state of mind, was the Awakening of the Will, which I found as interesting as any novel or drama, or series of active adventures which I have ever read or experienced. I can remember when most deeply engaged in it, re-reading DE QUINCEY'S "Confessions of an Opium Eater." I took it by chance on my birthday, August 15, which was also his, and as I read I longed from my very heart that he were alive, that I might consult with him on the marvelous Fairyland which it seemed to me had been discovered—and then I remembered ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... listening to this remarkable tirade, which was offered in a voice by no means angry, but even something contemptuous, and without a word I left him. I went, as I had promised, at once to the captain, whom I found in his cabin with a volume of De Quincey. ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... noticed that a little while ago you suggested that it might be a good idea to begin a play with the last act; the idea is a mere hysteron-proteron, absolutely preposterous, prae-post-erous." This sounds as if the writer were the ghost of De Quincey. ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... whether he had any ordinary temptations; we do not know whether he ever fell in love. But the texture of his mind and the growth of his opinions have been laid bare to us with the candour of a saint and the accuracy of a dissector or analyst. He reminds us of De Quincey, who also could tell the story of his own life, but no other, and whose style, like his own, was modelled on the literary traditions of ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... intention of the publishers to issue, at intervals, a complete collection of Mr. De Quincey's Writings, uniform with this volume. The first four volumes of the ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... such things mean most to us. Together they had read Keats for the first wonderful time; together learned Shakespeare's Sonnets by heart; together rolled out over tavern-tables the sumptuous cadences of De Quincey. Wonderful indeed, and never to be forgotten, were those evenings when, the day at last over, they would leave their offices behind them, and, while the sunset was turning the buildings of Tyre into enchanted towers, and a clemency of release breathed ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... which it met with from the public may be gathered from the following letter which accompanied De Quincey's copy. {330} ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... could only be appropriately concluded by one great name, "the protagonist on the great arena of modern poetry, and the glory of the human intellect" (De Quincey). ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... mind." Yet it must be confessed that there does exist a woful ignorance or negligence concerning De Quincey in quarters from which better things might be expected. Misappreciation it cannot be called, where no trouble has been taken to estimate claims that needed only to be weighed to be truly valued. Up to this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Henry Crabb Robinson', in the 'Memorials of Coleorton' and my own 'Life' of the Poet, in the 'Prose Works', in the 'Transactions of the Wordsworth Society', in the 'Letters of Charles Lamb', in the 'Memorials of Thomas De Quincey', and other volumes; but many more, both of Wordsworth's and his sister's, have never before seen the light. More than a hundred and fifty letters from Dorothy Wordsworth to Mrs. Clarkson, the wife of the great "slave-liberator," were sent to me some time ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... clearing up of mistakes, cannot in the nature of things be without miracles, because it is not merely a discovery of ideas and rules of life, but of facts undiscoverable without it. It involves constituent miracles, to use De Quincey's phrase, as part of its substance, and could not claim a bearing without evidential or polemic ones. No other portion or form of proof, however it may approve itself to the ideas of particular periods or minds, can really make up for this. The alleged ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... added my lord, recovering the courtesy of his order by an effort that I could follow. "We should look fools. I don't know which of us it was, by the way, who seduced the rest from the main stream of blood into this burglarious backwater. Are you familiar with De Quincey's masterpiece on 'Murder as a ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... time; but sooner or later they come back with a sharp rebound to the simple elementary passions—anger, desire, regret, [222] pity, and fear: and what corresponds to them in the sensuous world—bare, abstract fire, water, air, tears, sleep, silence, and what De Quincey has called the "glory ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... the book-loving tastes of celebrated authors. Southey cared for his books, but Coleridge would cut the leaves of a book with a butter knife, and De Quincey's extraordinary treatment of books is well described by Mr. Burton in the Book Hunter. Charles Lamb's loving appreciation of his books is known to all readers ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... the swing lamp in the cathedral at Pisa. Peel was in Parliament at twenty-one. Gladstone was in Parliament before he was twenty-two, and at twenty-four he was Lord of the Treasury. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was proficient in Greek and Latin at twelve; De Quincey at eleven. Robert Browning wrote at eleven poetry of no mean order. Cowley, who sleeps in Westminster Abbey, published a volume of poems at fifteen. Luther was but twenty-nine when he nailed his famous thesis to the door of the bishop and ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... of his failures, his loneliness of soul, and solitude of life, that had made him invest those common streets with such grim and persistent terrors. He had perhaps yielded to a temptation without knowing that he had been tempted, and, in the manner of De Quincey, had chosen the subtle in exchange for the more tangible pains. Unconsciously, but still of free will, he had preferred the splendor and the gloom of a malignant vision before his corporal pains, before the hard reality of his own impotence. ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... object to epilepsy or apoplexy as a Greek word. It's a word for a specific disease or mania among the ancients, that mystical passion for an invisible nymph common to a certain class of visionaries. Indeed, I am not the first in referring to it in English literature. De Quincey has done so in prose, for instance, and Lord Byron talks of 'The nympholepsy of a fond despair,' though he never was accused of being overridden by his Greek. Tell me now if I am not justified, I also? We are all ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... brother, a lad "whose genius for mischief amounted to inspiration," who died in his sixteenth year, he spent much of his boyhood in imaginary worlds of their own creating. The amusements and occupations of the whole family, indeed, seem to have been mainly intellectual; and in De Quincey's case, emphatically, "the child was father to the man." "My life has been," he affirms in the Confessions, "on the whole the life of a philosopher; from my birth I was made an intellectual creature, and intellectual ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... of things, and no cause for blame, that, after this town passed from the provincial stage, there was so long a period when it had to be, as De Quincey said of Oxford Street, a stony-hearted mother to her bookmen and poets; that she had few posts for them and little of a market. Even her colleges had not the means, if they had the will, to utilize their talents ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... homesickness and their despair on the outward journey, and of how still later some thirty of them returned on foot, carrying the bones of those who had died to lay them in their old homes, is one of the most dramatic pages in history. De Quincey's "Flight of a Tartar Clan" does not equal it in pathos or as a story of heroism and endurance. At the end of their homeward journey, when almost within sight of their homes, the heroic little band were seized by order of the ruler of their enclosure and committed to prison. The tribe are still in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... convent of El Arbain—not to speak of a similar use of this numeral in more important cases—have often been understood as expressions of a known number, when in fact they mean simply MANY. The number "fifteen thousand" has found its way to Rome, and De Quincey seriously informs us, on the authority of a lady who had been at much pains to ascertain the EXACT truth, that, including closets large enough for a bed, the Vatican contains fifteen thousand rooms. Any one who has observed the vast dimensions of most of ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... De Quincey wrote a treatise on "Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts," and it is certainly the fine art which receives most attention in our schools. "So far as the body is concerned," said Horace Mann of these institutions, "they provide for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... circumstance that Henry conferred the chief butlership of Ireland on Theobald Fitzwater in 1177. It is also said that Wesley was the original form of the duke of Wellington's family name. On the other hand, De Quincey says that Wellesley was shortened to Wesley by the same process which leads people to pronounce Marjoribanks "Marshbanks," and St. Leger "Silliger." It was probably resumed to distinguish a particular branch of the family. However this may be, it is to be regretted that the "iron duke," who ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... is distinctly observable. We see a reaction setting in against the soulless poetry which culminated in Alexander Pope, whose 'Rape of the Lock' is the masterpiece of that poetry. It is, in fact, the most brilliant society-poem in the literature. De Quincey pronounces it to be, though somewhat extravagantly, "the most exquisite monument of playful fancy that universal literature offers." Bishop Warburton, one of the great critical authorities of the age, believed in the infallibility of Pope, if not ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... illumination, and was sought not only by those who were already his neighbours, but by some who became so mainly for his sake. Southey at Keswick was a valued friend, though Wordsworth did not greatly esteem him as a poet. De Quincey, originally attracted to the district by admiration for Wordsworth, remained there for many years, and poured forth a criticism strangely compounded of the utterances of the hero-worshipper and the valet-de-chambre. Professor Wilson, of the Noctes Ambrosianae, ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... the reverse. As action must follow excitement, or despair satiety, so the relation of parts, the order of presentation, must be adapted to mutual reinforcement. Thus the porter's scene in "Macbeth" is related to the neighboring scenes, as De Quincey has shown in his famous essay. And just as in music the feeling of "rightness" ensues when the awaited note slips into place, so the feeling of "rightness" comes when the inevitable consequences follow the premise ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... hoped for much companionship with the literary lions of the lakes, he was disappointed. Coleridge was absent, and missed making his acquaintance—a circumstance he afterwards regretted, saying that he could have been more useful to the young poet and metaphysician than Southey. De Quincey, though he writes ambiguously upon this point, does not seem to have met Shelley. Wordsworth paid him no attention; and though he saw a good deal of Southey, this intimacy changed Shelley's early liking for the man and poet into absolute contempt. It was not likely that the cold methodical ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... [163] De Quincey in his Confessions of an Opium Eater referred to the power that many, perhaps most, children possess of seeing visions in the dark. The phenomenon has been carefully studied by G.L. Partridge (Pedagogical Seminary, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... quotation will prove the injustice of De Quincey's attitude to Addison in his Essay on Shakespeare. De Quincey even makes the strange statement that "by express examination, we ascertained the curious fact that Addison has never in one instance quoted or made any reference to Shakespeare" (Works, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... Robinson's Diary extends over the greater part of three-quarters of a century. It contains personal reminiscences of some of the most distinguished characters of that period, including Goethe, Wieland, De Quincey, Wordsworth (with whom Mr. Crabb Robinson was on terms of great intimacy), Madame de Stael, Lafayette, Coleridge, Lamb, Milman, &c. &c.: and includes a vast variety of subjects, political, ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... the late Elias Whitney, D.D., Principal of the Theological College of St. George's, was much addicted to opium. The habit grew upon him, as I understand, from some foolish freak when he was at college; for having read De Quincey's description of his dreams and sensations, he had drenched his tobacco with laudanum in an attempt to produce the same effects. He found, as so many more have done, that the practice is easier to attain than to get rid of, and for many years he continued to be a slave to ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... Froude, when asked how he acquired his style, that a man sits down and says what he has to say, and there is an end of it. We must not write like Clarendon now, even if we could; our sentences must be brief. It would be affectation to write like Sir Thomas Browne, if we could; or like de Quincey; and nobody can write like Mr. Ruskin, when he is simple, or like the late Master of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to great names—Some typical crazes—Illustrations from George Eliot, Edison, Chatterton, Hawthorne, Whittier, Spencer, Huxley, Lyell, Byron, Heine, Napoleon, Darwin, Martineau, Agassiz, Madame Roland, Louisa Alcott, F.H. Burnett, Helen Keller, Marie Bashkirtseff, Mary MacLane, Ada Negri, De Quincey, Stuart Mill, Jefferies, and scores ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... trouveurs and minnesingers of their time; their like are the instruments of culture in any race during its pralayas. So you find the professional story-tellers in the East today. But the Homeridae may well have been—as De Quincey suggests—an order specially trained in the chanting of Homeric poems; perhaps a single school founded in some single island by or for the sake of Homer. We hear that Lycurgus was the first who brought Homer—the works, not the man—into ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Fonthill, the Angerstein pictures, and the Elgin marbles—pages wealthy with thought. Lamb contributed in three years all the matchless essays of "Elia." Mr. Thomas Carlyle, then only a promising young Scotch philosopher, wrote several articles on the "Life and Writings of Schiller." Mr. de Quincey, that subtle thinker and bitter Tory, contributed his wonderful "Confessions of an Opium-Eater." That learned and amiable man, the Rev. H.F. Cary, the translator of Dante, wrote several interesting notices of early French poets. Allan Cunningham, the vigorous Scottish ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... are they among so many?' hit off the spirit in which a minister was regarded at the universities. The memoirs of Bishop Watson illustrate the same sentiment. He lived in his pleasant country house at Windermere, never visiting his diocese, and according to De Quincey, talking Socinianism at his table. He felt himself to be a deeply injured man, because ministers had never found an opportunity for translating him to a richer diocese, although he had written against Paine and Gibbon. If they would not reward their friends, he argued, why ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... experience, within the whole Mail Coach service, was on those occasions when we went down from London with the news of Victory. Five years of life it was worth paying down for the privilege of an outside place. DE QUINCEY.] ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... gossamer spider clinging to the fine silvery hairs of the flying summer; and the coccus that fall from the fruit trees to float on their buoyant cottony down—a summer snow. Fils de la Vierge are these, and sacred. The man who can needlessly set his foot on a worm is as strange to my soul as De Quincey's imaginary Malay, or even his "damned crocodile." The worm that one sees lying bruised and incapable on the gravel walk has fallen among thieves. These little lives do me good and not harm. I smell the acid ants to strengthen ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... Wordsworth and Aubrey de Vere; and worthily do they illustrate—those on Wordsworth at least—Mr Taylor's composite faculty of depth and delicacy in poetical exposition. Of Wordsworth's many and gifted commentators—among them Wilson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Lamb, Moir, Sterling—few have shewn a happier insight into the idiosyncrasy, or done more justice to the beauties of the patriarch of the Lakes. With Wordsworth for a subject, and the Quarterly Review for a 'door of utterance,' Mr Taylor is quite ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... Bough—and as such is referred to in 'The Waggoner'—from which circumstance it was for a long time, and is now usually, called "Dove Cottage." A small two storied house, it is described somewhat minutely—as it was in Wordsworth's time—by De Quincey, in his 'Recollections of the Lakes', and by the late Bishop of Lincoln, in the 'Memoirs' of ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... great gusto and to whom they returned again and again. These were Victor Hugo, Dumas, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Coleridge, Edgar Poe, and one or two others. If the lawyer added a new name, like Walter Pater, to his list, the real-estate man would hasten to trot out De Quincey, for example. For the rest they would parade a whole array of writers rather than refer to any one of them in particular. The more they fulminated and fumed and bullied Miss Tevkin the firmer grew my conviction that they had scarcely read the books for which they seemed ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... "Quite so. Yet because de Quincey was an opium-fiend, Poe a drunkard and Oscar Wilde a pervert, it does not follow that every clever writer is unfit for decent society. Even if he were, his popularity would not suffer. Few things help a man's public reputation so much as ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... enough to justify its name; but at that time there it still was, in Greek Street, a few doors from Soho Square, and almost opposite to that house where, in the first years of the century, a little girl, and with her a boy named De Quincey, made nightly encampment in darkness and hunger among dust and rats and old legal parchments. The Vingtieme was but a small whitewashed room, leading out into the street at one end and into a kitchen at the other. The proprietor and cook was a Frenchman, known to us as Monsieur Vingtieme; ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... occupied in watching the lions at the table, like the fair women in the street, from a convenient bird's-eye view. The view, altogether, was highly attractive, for the lions were numerous, and of a more or less superior kind. Among the first who visited Mr. Taylor's evening parties was Thomas De Quincey. Clare had read with the deepest interest the 'Confessions of an English Opium-eater,' which appeared in the 'London Magazine,' of September and October, 1821; and the picture of the outcast Ann haunted his ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... I do think of—murder's no joke, though it's more of a fine art than it was when De Quincey wrote. I'm perfectly serious. I would shoot the scoundrel Boone. Why, do you know the man has cleared a million dollars on rotten blankets since he came here? McClellan ordered a report made out showing his rascalities a ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... literature seeks to communicate power." [Footnote: De Quincey, "Letters to a Young Man."] Here the power communicated is that of sympathizing with God's "lesser children." The humanitarian story is a long step in advance of the fable. It recognizes the true relations of the animal world to man, and insists ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... apt to forsake you in the scene of it and come lagging hack afterward; and you cannot hope always to have an archaeologist at your elbow to remind you of things you have forgotten or possibly have not known. Suetonius, Plutarch, De Quincey, Gibbon, these are no bad preparations for a visit to the Palatine, but it is better to have read them yesterday than the day before if you wish to draw suddenly upon them for associations with any specific ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... he may have been the first American to look through an immersion lens with the famous Modena professor. Mr. Emerson says that his narrow and desultory reading had inspired him with the wish to see the faces of three or four writers, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, De Quincey, Carlyle. His accounts of his interviews with these distinguished persons are too condensed to admit of further abbreviation. Goethe and Scott, whom he would have liked to look upon, were dead; Wellington he saw at Westminster Abbey, at the funeral of Wilberforce. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... were Wedgwood's exhibition-rooms. In No. 27 De Quincey used to sleep on the floor by permission of ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... of a Universal History on a Cosmo-Political Plan. It was translated by De Quincey, and is to be found in vol. xiii. of his ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... hundred pages of each. We have minutely noted and recorded what these men by habitual use declare to be good English. Among the fifty are such men as Ruskin, Froude, Hamerton, Matthew Arnold, Macaulay, De Quincey, Thackeray, Bagehot, John Morley, James Martineau, Cardinal Newman, J. R. Green, and Lecky in England; and Hawthorne, Curtis, Prof. W. D. Whitney, George P. Marsh, Prescott, Emerson, Motley, Prof. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... literary life, for instance, compared with the noble simplicity which, a half-century ago, made the Lake Country an enchanted land forever! Is it worth a voyage to England to sup with Thackeray in the Pot Tavern? Compare the "enormity of pleasure" which De Quincey says Wordsworth derived from the simplest natural object with the serious protest of Wilkie Collins against the affectation of caring about Nature at all. "Is it not strange", says this most unhappy man, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... defended Bell in the Quarterly,[12] undertook to be Bell's biographer[13] and literary executor. Coleridge was so vehement in the cause that when lecturing upon 'Romeo and Juliet' in 1811, he plunged by way of exordium into an assault upon Lancaster's modes of punishment.[14] De Quincey testifies that he became a positive bore upon Bell's virtues. In 1812 Lancaster had got deeply into debt to the trustees of the Society, who included besides Allen, Joseph Fox—a 'shallow, gloomy bigot' according to ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... Turning their faces eastward, they spent a whole year of fearful suffering and privation in reaching the confines of Ili, a terribly diminished host. There they received a district, and were placed under the jurisdiction of a khan. This journey has been dramatically described by De Quincey in an essay entitled "Revolt of the Tartars, or Flight of the Kalmuck Khan and his people from the Russian territories to the Frontiers of China." Of this contribution to literature it is only necessary to remark that the scenes described, and especially the numbers mentioned, ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... place, there is another reason against narrowing our conception of the riddle story to the degree which the alternative appellation would imply. And that is, that it would exclude not a few of the most captivating riddle stories in existence; for in De Quincey's "Avenger," for example, the interest is not in the unraveling of the web, but in the weaving of it. The same remark applies to Bulwer's "Strange Story"; it is the strangeness that is the thing. There is, in short, an inalienable ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... a true and noble man—no poet was ever warmed by a more genuine and unforced aspiration.—De Quincey says, "Shelley would, from his earliest manhood, have sacrificed all that he possessed for any comprehensive purpose of good for the race of man. He dismissed all insults and injuries from his memory. He was the sincerest and most ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... some critical essays, witty and satirical in tone, in which his genius appears in another light. It is not generally known that he was the translator into French of De Quincey's 'Confessions of an Opium Eater' (1828). He was also a prominent contributor to the 'Revue des Deux Mondes.' In 1852 he was elected to the French Academy, but hardly ever appeared at the sessions. A confrere once made the remark: ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... [37] De Quincey defines picturesque as "the characteristic pushed into a sensible excess." The word began to excite discussion in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. See vol. i., p. 185, for Gilpin's "Observations on Picturesque Beauty." See also Uvedale ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers |
