"De Quincey" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of majestic prose, under whose touch words became as living things; Flaubert, who believed there was one and one only best word with which to express a given thought; De Quincey, who exercised a weird-like power over words; Ruskin, whose rhythmic prose enchanted the ear; Keats, who brooded over phrases like a lover; Newman, of pure and melodious style; Stevenson, forever in quest of the scrupulously precise word; Tennyson, graceful and exquisite as the limpid stream; ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... the table were several novels by Balzac, which conversation with Harding had led him to purchase and to read. He likewise possessed a few volumes of modern poetry, but he freely confessed that he preferred Pope, Dryden, and Johnson; and it was impossible to bring him to understand that De Quincey was more subtle and suggestive than the ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... 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 nympholepts ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... the suicide of his mistress, he followed the example which he was falsely informed she had given (30 B.C.). Antony had been married in succession to Fadia, Antonia, Fulvia, and Octavia, and left behind him a number of children. A short but vivid sketch of Antony is given by De Quincey in his "Essay ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... south than this in my life," he replied. "I know only the London of De Quincey and Lamb-London with the halo ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... De Quincey, whose Confessions of an Opium-Eater were appearing in its pages, has left a record of a visit to the Lambs about this time. See ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... to the scene of their bucolic pastimes in the P.R. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to remark that Mr. GREELEY'S Recollections of a Busy Life were inspired almost directly by frequent collusion with the pages of DE QUINCEY and COLERIDGE, whose wild lives and turbulent experiences possess a peculiar charm for the Triton of the Tribune. When Mr. GREELEY wishes to write against capital punishment—which he does about every time the moon changes—he naturally turns over a few pages of Thirty Years in Washington. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 1, Saturday, April 2, 1870 • Various
... art. De Quincey wrote an essay on the subject. If you'd read it, you'd know better than to mix up artistic murder with the commonplace assassinations of the ordinary burglar. You might just as well say that Beethoven is the same sort of person as the Italian organ-grinder ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... discovered. Mr. Pinkham, who was taking tea that evening at the Danas', threw the family into a panic by asserting his belief that this was merely the first of a series of artistic assassinations in the manner of those Memorable Murders recorded by De Quincey. Mr. Pinkham may have said this to impress the four Dana girls with the variety of his reading, but the recollection of De Quincey's harrowing paper had the effect of so unhinging the young school-master that when he found himself, an hour ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 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 series ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... picturesqueness, in color, in wealth of episode and peripeteia, Scott's career will not compare for a moment with the career of Coleridge, for instance. Yet who could endure to read the life of Coleridge in six volumes? De Quincey, in an essay first published the other day by Dr. Japp, calls the story of the Coleridges "a perfect romance ... a romance of beauty, of intellectual power, of misfortune suddenly illuminated from heaven, of prosperity suddenly overcast by the waywardness of the individual." ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... retold is decidedly a good one. I greatly like the notion of that series. Of course you know De Quincey's paper on the Ratcliffe Highway murderer? Do you know also the illustration (I have it at Gad's Hill), representing the horrible creature as his dead body lay on a cart, with a piece of wood for a pillow, and a stake lying by, ready to be driven ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... subject to feel appreciation of otherwise trifling mental pictures that in themselves are flimsy nothings. Let a man so affected try to impart to another his fancies, and—well, who has not been bored by a drunken man? Did De Quincey, with that superb mind, succeed in fancying anything that even he could tell? He speaks of glowing drug-born fancies, but he describes nothings. Now Milton, the old Puritan—the cold-water man—he had fancies which he was able to transmit, and which are worthy to be forever ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... De Quincey "with a deep expression of horror at the hideous bondage." It was this "conspiracy of himself against himself" that was the poison of his life. He describes it with frantic pathos as "the scourge, the curse, the one almighty blight, which had desolated his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... 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
... called "personalities" in everyday speech was the probable origin of satire. Conversely, also, satire, in the majority of those earlier types current at various periods in the history of literature, has shown an inclination to be personal in its character. De Quincey, accordingly, has argued that the more personal it became in its allusions, the more it fulfilled its specific function. But such a view is based on the supposition that satire has no other mission than to lash the vices of our neighbours, without recalling ...
— English Satires • Various
... ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly original had resulted from these measures; and the effects of the opium had convinced him that there was an entire dissimilarity between his constitution and De Quincey's. The superadded circumstance which would evolve the genius had not yet come; the universe had not yet beckoned. Even Caesar's fortune at one time was, but a grand presentiment. We know what a masquerade ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... home from an angling expedition in a hearse had an odd way of combining his amusements. He lived among poets and critics who were anglers—Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd (who cast but a heavy line, they say, in Yarrow), Aytoun, Christopher North, De Quincey— ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... {32} is indeed an unsatisfactory thing: I believe that everybody thinks so. You seem to think that it is purposely unsatisfactory, or rather dissatisfactory: but it seems to me to proceed from a kind of enervation in De Quincey. However, I don't know how he supports himself in other ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... only 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," ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... De Quincey quotes the criticism of some writer, who 'contends with some reason that this is saying in effect:—"Let observation with extensive observation observe mankind extensively."' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... of high-fangled nonsense written about genius. One man says it's in the head; another, that it comes from the heart, etc., etc. The fact is, they're all wrong. Genius lies in the stomach. Who ever knew a fat genius? Now there's De Quincey,—he says, in his outlandish way, that genius is the synthesis of the intellect with the moral nature. No such thing; and a man who sinned day and night against his stomach, and swilled opium as he did, couldn't be expected to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... calmer and 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 how Dr. TUCKEY, ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... 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, literary, ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... whose papers were first collected here, and their merits thus made known to his countrymen. Lamb's papers of "Elia" were first collected here. It is to the diligence of an American publisher that De Quincey owes the publication of a complete edition of his works, now to be followed by a similar one in England. The papers of Professor Wilson owe their separate republication to American booksellers. The value of Mr. Thackeray's copyrights has been greatly increased by ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey
... fill a 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 ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... to know what were Wordsworth's studies during his winter in Goslar. De Quincey's statement is mere conjecture. It may be guessed fairly enough that he would seek an entrance to the German language by the easy path of the ballad, a course likely to confirm him in his theories ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... "Spanish Student" Scott Lighter Fancies Pope Various Preferences Uncle Tom's Cabin Ossian Shakespeare Ik Marvel Dickens Wordsworth, Lowell, Chaucer Macaulay. Critics and Reviews. A Non-literary Episode Thackeray "Lazarillo De Tormes" Curtis, Longfellow, Schlegel Tennyson Heine De Quincey, Goethe, Longfellow. George Eliot, Hawthorne, Goethe, Heine Charles Reade Dante Goldoni, Manzoni, D'azeglio "Pastor Fido," "Aminta," "Romola," "Yeast," "Paul Ferroll" Erckmann-chatrian, Bjorstjerne Bjornson Tourguenief, Auerbach Certain Preferences and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... autobiography Goethe describes the door in the wall of a certain garden in Frankfort within which many marvellous things happened; a true romance of incident and adventure which became as real to the romancer as to his eager and credulous listeners. De Quincey created an imaginary kingdom, peopled with imaginary beings whom he ruled with benignant wisdom, amid universal prosperity and peace, until, in an unlucky hour, he admitted his brother into a partnership of authority; ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... stated to have been in the time of Henry II., the surname of Butler arising from the 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... 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 ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... and English Literature. Wordsworth. Coleridge. Southey. The Revolutionary Poets. Byron and Shelley. Keats. The Minor Poets. Campbell, Moore, Keble, Hood, Felicia Hemans, Leigh Hunt and Thomas Beddoes. The Fiction Writers. Walter Scott. Jane Austen. The Critics and Essayists. Charles Lamb. De Quincey. Summary of the ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... days of Sir Walter Scott and the Ettrick Shepherd, to those of Bulwer and Charles Mackay, have appeared in its columns. Maginn, Lockhart, Gillies, Moir, Landor, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Bowles, Barry Cornwall, Gleig, Hamilton, Aird, Sym, De Quincey, Allan Cunningham, Mrs. Hemans, Jerrold, Croly, Warren, Ingoldsby (Barham), Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Milnes, and many others, of scarcely less note, found in Blackwood scope for their productions, whether of prose or ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... to protest that Bedr 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 no harm, ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... is by no means the "collection of independent maxims tied together by the printer, but having no natural order," which De Quincey pronounced it to be. It falls naturally into three parts. The first deals with the rules derived by classic critics from the practice of great poets, and ever since of binding force both in the composition and ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... fishes, but what 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 should he ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... was generally recognised as one of the best English renderings of any foreign author; and Jeffrey, in his absurd review of Goethe's great prose drama, speaks in high terms of the skill displayed by the translator. The virulent attack of De Quincey—a writer as unreliable as brilliant—in the London Magazine does not seem to have carried much weight even then, and has none now. The Wanderjahre, constituting the third volume of the English edition, first appeared as the last of four on German Romance—a series of admirably selected ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... though, of course, the police had every reason to expect his speedy capture. Certainly the incident seems to support Harton's theory, though it may be a mere whim of Gorings, or, as I suggested to Harton, he may be collecting materials for a book which shall outvie De Quincey. In any case it is no ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ending with a long snaky flourish. Years passed by, and I was at the University, when one evening, dropping in at an auction, I bought for six cents, or threepence, "a blind bundle" of six books tied up with a cord. It was a bargain, for I found in it in good condition the first American editions of De Quincey's "Opium-Eater," "The Rejected Addresses," and the Poems of Coleridge. But what startled me was a familiar-looking copy of Mrs. Trimmer's "Natural History," in which at the end was ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... 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 ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... truth that is in him has resulted in a beauty of prose which for individual quality must be ranked with the prose of such masters as De Quincey and Lamb, and, to make a not irrelevant comparison, above the very fine prose of his contemporary Stevenson, by virtue of ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... economics of the Fabian Essays are, as regards value, the economics of Jevons. As regards rent they are the economics of Ricardo, which I, having thrown myself into the study of abstract economics, had learnt from Ricardo's own works and from De Quincey's Logic of Political Economy. I maintained, as I still do, that the older economists, writing before Socialism had arisen as a possible alternative to Commercialism and a menace to its vested interests, were far more candid in their statements and thorough in their reasoning than their ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... Mr. Stoddart was always rhyming of goblin, ghost, fairy, and all Sir Walter's themes. At Edinburgh University he was a pupil of Christopher North (John Wilson), who pooh-poohed The Death-Wake in Blackwood. He also knew Aytoun, Professor Ferrier, De Quincey, Hartley Coleridge, and Hogg, and was one of the first guests of Tibbie Sheils, on the spit of land between St. Mary's and the Loch of the Lowes. In verses of this period (1827) Miss Stoddart detects traces of Keats and Byron, but the lines quoted are ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... for me to say by way of Preface is that, as in the case of the first volume, I have received much aid from Mrs. Baird Smith and Miss De Quincey, and that Mr. J. R. McIlraith has repeated his friendly service of reading ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... that only the most staccato and least happy notes ever reached their dulness, George Meredith did, before the age of seventy, reap a little of his reward. I am told that the movement in favour of him began in America; if so, more praise to American readers, who had to teach us to appreciate De Quincey and Praed before we knew the value of those men. Yet is there much to do. Had George Meredith been a Frenchman, what monographs had ere this been called forth by his work; in Germany, or Italy, or Denmark ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... will be sufficient to mention the novelists, Dickens, Thackeray, Bronte, and "George Eliot"; the historians, Stubbs, Hallam, Arnold, Grote, Macaulay, Alison, Buckle, Froude, Freeman, and Gardiner; the essayists, Carlyle, Landor, and De Quincey; the poets, Browning and Tennyson; the philosophical writers, Hamilton, Mill, and Spencer; with Lyell, Faraday, Carpenter, Tyndall, Huxley, Darwin, Wallace, and Lord Kelvin in science; John Ruskin, the eminent art critic; and, in addition, the ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... 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 Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... his Greek environment and the interjection of Roman references—what De Quincey calls "anatopism"—is another item of careless composition too well known to need more than passing mention. The repeated appearance of the Velabrum,[179] or Capitolium,[180] or circus,[181] or senatus, or dictator,[182] or centuriata ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... got to know John Hamilton Reynolds (author of the Garden of Florence and other poems, and a contributor to this serial under the pseudonym of Edward Herbert), Charles Lamb, Allan Cunningham, De Quincey, and other writers of reputation. To Hood the most directly important of all these acquaintances was Mr. Reynolds; this gentleman having a sister, Jane, to whom Hood was introduced. An attachment ensued, and shortly terminated in ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... of Mr Forsyth I must, in justice both to him and to Cicero, quote one passage from the work: "Let those who, like De Quincey,[26] Mommsen, and others, speak disparagingly of Cicero, and are so lavish in praise of Caesar, recollect that Caesar never was troubled by a conscience." Here it is that we find that advance almost to Christianity of which I have spoken, and that superiority ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... pity La Bruyere more than he pitied himself. It scandalizes the biographers that the Prince, on one occasion, made La Bruyere dance a pas seul before him, twanging a tune on the guitar. I suppose De Quincey would have been complaisant if the Duke of Wellington had asked him to whistle "Home, Sweet Home" to him. There is a limit, after all, to the modern theory ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... the spring cleaning with Bea. When she attended her second meeting of the Thanatopsis she said nothing about remaking the town. She listened respectably to statistics on Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Scott, Hardy, Lamb, De Quincey, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, who, it seemed, constituted the writers of ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... De Quincey, in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, gives a pleasing description of the easy motion and soothing influence of a well-equipped mail-coach running upon an even and kindly road. The period he refers to was about 1803, and the coach was that carrying the Bristol ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... its primary Idea 25 Gossiping History—De Quincey's Account of Hatfield 26 Notes upon the Names of some of the Early Inhabitants of Hellas 27 Shakspeare Readings, No. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... have just quoted are De Quincey's—whom I must needs esteem the greatest living master of our English tongue. And on the same matter Sir Francis Palgrave has expressed himself thus: "Upon the languages of Teutonic origin the Latin has exercised great influence, but most energetically on our own. The very early admixture ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... Cytherea's acceptance of her steward. Hemmed in and distressed, Cytherea's answers to his importunities grew less uniform; they were firm, or wavering, as Owen's malady fluctuated. Had a register of her pitiful oscillations been kept, it would have rivalled in pathos the diary wherein De Quincey tabulates his combat with Opium—perhaps as noticeable an instance as any in which a thrilling dramatic power has been given to mere numerals. Thus she wearily and monotonously lived through the month, listening on ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... fascinated by his 'Alexander's Feast' that he wrote it off in a night. Cowper had a similar experience with 'John Gilpin,' and Burns's powerful dramatic tale, 'Tam O'Shanter,' was produced with great ease and rapidity. De Quincey records that, in his own case, his very best work was frequently done when he was writing against time. Scott's energy and fluency of composition are clearly indicated in the following passage in Lockharts Life, ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 his private vices. Don't you ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... any thinking 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 time, there has never been published ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the extreme rigor of study law. Once installed, he discovered, as others have done before him, that his duty was to do the work while his friends criticized. Stalky christened it the "Swillingford Patriot," in pious memory of Sponge—and McTurk compared the output unfavorably with Ruskin and De Quincey. Only the Head took an interest in the publication, and his methods were peculiar. He gave Beetle the run of his brown-bound, tobacco-scented library; prohibiting nothing, recommending nothing. There Beetle found a fat arm-chair, a silver inkstand, and unlimited ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... of a Universal History on a Cosmo-Political Plan. It was translated by De Quincey, and is to be found in vol. xiii. of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... had toiled the caravans of a 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 ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... 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 defied the pope. Nelson was ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... under ground, and thin walls of clay, outworn all the strong and spacious buildings above it; and quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests; what prince can promise such diuturnity unto his relicks." ... He wondered if Milton, De Quincey, Walter Pater or even Jeremy Taylor had made such sustained music. He marvelled at the lofty structures of old seventeenth century prose-men, and compared them with the chippy staccato of the modern perky style, its smug smartness, its eternal chattering ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... generally supposed, in the course of his development, and, though never thought of as a thing apart from what it expresses, was with him a constant preoccupation. Let writers, he said, 'make time to write English more as a learned language.' It has been said that Ruskin, De Quincey, and Flaubert were among the chief 'origins' of Pater's style; it is curiously significant that matter, in Pater, was developed before style, and that in the bare and angular outlines of the earliest fragment, Diaphaneite, there is already the substance ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... not merely the barbaric fanatics that are taken down by it. Did you ever read De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium-Eater?" He says that during the first ten years the habit handed to him all the keys of Paradise, but it would take something as mighty as De Quincey's pen to describe the consequent horrors. There is nothing that I have ever read about the tortures of the damned that ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... that does not tell of vague rebellion against that power, and all the beautiful things they have seen get something of their charm from the pathos of fragility. This poet who has imagined colours, ceremonies and incredible processions that never passed before the eyes of Edgar Allen Poe or of De Quincey, and remembered as much fabulous beauty as Sir John Mandeville, has yet never wearied of the most universal of emotions and the one most constantly associated with the sense of beauty; and when we come to ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... annual book publication of the world is estimated to reach the enormous figure of more than 130,000 volumes. In view of this prodigious literary output, what progress can the reader hope to make in "keeping up with the new books"? De Quincey figured that a man might possibly, in a long lifetime devoted to nothing else, read 20,000 volumes. The estimate is easy. Suppose we start with one book a day—surely a large supposition—and count a man's reading years from 20 to 80, 60 years in all; 60 times ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... cultivated amusement, and knowledge rather sought as a pastime and an accomplishment than as a power. The favourite reading must contain matter or sense, not too deep or exacting; and it must possess a style. Perhaps writers as various as Dryden, Pope, Horace Walpole, Samuel Johnson, De Quincey, Macaulay, or, on a lower platform, the authors of collections like the Curiosities of Literature would have been quite at home in this period: but it would have produced no Shakespeare, Milton, or Wordsworth. The agreeable poem, the well-expressed essay, are the approved reading ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... "now we are touching on a point of crucial importance. If anyone should ever write a treatise on the art of murder—not an exhibition of literary fireworks like De Quincey's, but a genuine working treatise—he might leave all other technical details to take care of themselves if he could describe some really practicable plan for disposing of the body. That is, and always has been, the great ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... De Quincey says that the best English is to be found in the letters of the cultivated gentlewoman, because she has read only a few good books and has not been corrupted by the style of newspapers and the jargon of street, ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... intuition of Coleridge; the marvellous if capricious sympathy and the more marvellous phrase of Lamb; the massive and masculine if not always quite trustworthy or well-governed intellect of Hazlitt, had left no likes behind. Two survivors of this great race, Leigh Hunt and De Quincey, were indeed critics, and no inconsiderable ones; but the natural force of both had long been much abated, and both had been not so much critics as essayists; the tendency of Hunt to flowery sentimentality or familiar chat, and that ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... in one's mind with darkness, the still hours of night, and bestiality. It is the outcome of the fierce animal lust for blood, provoked by low passions working in low minds. De Quincey's brilliant attempt to elevate it to a place among the fine arts has only enriched its horrors as an abstract idea. Even detached from its usual environment of darkness, and ignorance, and vice, it is an ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... (known in literature at this date and for some time afterwards under his pseudonym H. A. Page; later under his own name the biographer of De Quincey) had written to R. L. S. criticising statements of fact and opinion in his essay on Thoreau, and expressing the hope that they might meet and discuss their differences. In the interval between the last letter and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... well-authenticated cases on record in which death has been caused in children by the ingestion of a small fraction of a grain of opium. While exhibiting especial tolerance from peculiar disposition and long habit, Thomas De Quincey, the celebrated English litterateur, makes a statement in his "Confessions" that with impunity he took as much as 320 grains of opium a day, and was accustomed at one period of his life to call every day for "a glass of laudanum negus, warm, and without sugar," to use his own expression, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... of saying "He is in trouble," or "He is in an awkward position," or "He is perplexed," or embarrassed, employ the vulgarism, "He is in a fix." Although Shakespeare may say, "This was the most unkindest cut of all," and De Quincey may write, "Poor Aroar cannot live and cannot die— so that he is in an almighty fix," we lesser mortals ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of 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 ago by Mrs. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... was, himself. Bomston is more of a lay figure; but then the Anglais philosophe de qualite of the French imagination in the eighteenth century was a lay figure, and, as has been excellently said by De Quincey in another matter, nothing can be wrong which conforms to the principles of its own ideal. As for Julie and Claire, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... The 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 ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... Scott's poem yet. However, I am not sorry. I feel a sort of satisfaction that mine is going to the press first, though there is little danger that we should think on any subject alike, or stumble on any one character in the same track." De Quincey spoke of the hidden torture shown in Landor's play to be ever present in the mind of Count Julian, the betrayer of his country, as greater than the tortures inflicted in old Rome on generals who had committed treason. De Quincey's admiration of this play was more than once expressed. "Mr. Landor," ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... read three 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. Austin Phelps, Holmes, Edward Everett, ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... publicly, throughout a period of between thirty and forty years, whatever is known about him to any body; and in sketching the events of his life, the recorder has little more to do than to indicate facts which may be found fully expanded in Mr. De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium-eater" and "Autobiographic Sketches." The business which he, in fact, left for others to do is that which, in spite of obvious impossibility, he was incessantly endeavoring to do himself—that of analyzing ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... STUART MILL in his Principles of Political Economy, Book III chaps, i. and ii., makes some interesting and appreciative remarks on De Quincey's settlement of 'the phraseology of value;' also, concerning his illustrations of 'demand and supply, in ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... and "the Doctor," George Moir and Madame de Stael, Dr. Fracastorius and Professor Keble, Martinus Scriblerus and Sir Thomas Browne, Macaulay and the Bishop of Cloyne, Collins and Gray and Sir James Mackintosh, Hazlitt and John Ruskin, Shakspeare and Jackson of Exeter, Dallas and De Quincey, and the six Taylors, Jeremy, William, Isaac, Jane, John Edward, and Henry. We would have had great pleasure in quoting what these famous women and men have written on the essence and the art of poetry, and to have shown how strangely they differ, and how as strangely at times they agree. But ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... high character and great taste for literature as well as a successful man of business; he died, most unfortunately, when Thomas was quite young. Very soon after our author's birth the family removed to The Farm, and later to Greenhay, a larger country place near Manchester. In 1796 De Quincey's mother, now for some years a widow, removed to Bath and placed him ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... Spring in a European tour. Her letters home contain much pleasant gossip about some of the Old-World notabilities. Thus she records her interviews with Wordsworth in his Rydal retreat, with Dr Chalmers, Dr Andrew Combe, Mr De Quincey, the Howitts, &c. She visited Paris in the winter, and became acquainted with Lamennais, Beranger, Mme Dudevant, and others. Thence, in the spring of 1847, she went to Italy, where she remained until she embarked in 1850 on board that doomed ship, the Elizabeth. As a resident ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... "pulling Henry Walsh's red hair for his insolence," which he promised to do instantly. How absurd! Dreams! dreams! That pathetic "Miss Sarah, do you ever dream?" comes vividly back to me sometimes. Dream? Don't I! Not the dreams that he meant; but royal, purple dreams, that De Quincey could not purchase with his opium; dreams that I would not forego for all the inducements that could be offered. I go to sleep, and pay a visit to heaven or fairyland. I have white wings, and with another, float in rosy clouds, and look down on the moving world; ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... their seats with intoxication. Four hundred millions of our race are opium-eaters. India, Turkey, and China have groaned with the desolation; and by it have been quenched such lights as Halley and De Quincey. One hundred millions are the victims of the betelnut, which has specially blasted the East Indies. Three hundred millions chew hashish, and Persia, Brazil, and Africa suffer the delirium. The Tartars ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... 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 my memory. I know ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... should first decide what the artistic temperament means. Artistic is a large word. It includes painting, acting, poetry, music, literature, preaching. Whether the temperament is a blessing or a curse largely depends upon the health of the artist. If De Quincey was an artist, the artistic temperament was a curse. So also with Thomas Carlyle. So also with Charles Lamb. The artistic temperament is creative, sympathetic, responsive; it sees everything, feels ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Catholics, Burton professed no religion at all, and declared that his conversation and his books proclaimed him an Agnostic. Nor is it surprising that she remained obdurate, seeing that the popular imagination still continued to run riot over his supposed enormities. The midnight hallucinations of De Quincey seemed to be repeating themselves in a whole nation. He had committed crimes worthy of the Borgias. He had done a deed which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. Miss Arundell boldly defended him against her mother, though she admitted afterwards that, circumstances ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... is worth all the marginalia of Poe, though he, to do him justice, seems chiefly to have written on volumes that were his own property. De Quincey, according to Mr. Hill Burton, appears to have lacked the faculty of mind which recognizes the duty of returning books. Mr. Hill Burton draws a picture of "Papaverius" living in a sort of cave or den, the walls of which were books, while books lay around in tubs. Who was to find ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... supposed that he had exhausted himself in that one speech, and had become physically incapable of making a second; so that afterwards, when he really did make a second, everybody was naturally disgusted, and most people dropped his acquaintance.—De Quincey (1786-1859). ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... likens an infuriate woman to a cow "That is berobbed of her youngling dere." Shakspeare also makes King Henry VI compare himself to the calf's mother that "Runs lowing up and down, Looking the way her harmless young one went." "Cows," says De Quincey, "are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate tenderness to their young, when deprived of them, and, in short, I am not ashamed to profess a deep love ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... 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 imagination whenever ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... human progress, whose political institutions are the freest in the world, and whose inhabitants are the happiest and most virtuous. And despite its insoluble mysteries it has always received the assent of the highest intelligence to its divine origin. "My faith," said De Quincey, "is that though a great man may, by a rare possibility, be an infidel, an intellect of the highest order must build on Christianity." And Bacon's testimony is to the same effect. "It is only," he says, "when superficially tested that philosophy leads away from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... The day may come when Burns will be forgotten, but till that day arrives—and the eastern sky as yet gives no token of its approach—him they must attend as satellites the sun, as courtiers their king. Then there are the Lakers,—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey burdened with his tremendous dream, Wilson in his splendid youth. What talk, what argument, what readings of lyrical and other ballads, what contempt of critics, what a hail of fine things! Then there is Charles Lamb's room in Inner Temple Lane, the hush ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... at Selkirk,—Wordsworth having secured the promise of a visit from his friend, at Mount Ryedale, prior to his return to Edinburgh. The promise was duly fulfilled; and the Shepherd had the pleasure of meeting, during his visit, Lloyd, and De Quincey, and his dear friend Wilson. A portion of the autumn of 1815 was spent by the Shepherd at Elleray. In the letter inviting his visit (dated September 1815), the author of "The Isle of Palms" indicates his opinion of the literary influence of his correspondent, by writing ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... [C] Mr. De Quincey's immortal Connoisseur, who delivered the Williams Lecture on Murder, speaking of the supposed assassination of Gustavus Adolphus, at the Battle of Lutzen, says,—"The King of Sweden's assassination, by-the-by, is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... refinement and culture. But history tells of no man who has carried his genius up to such supreme excellence that society has forgotten his vice or forgiven the faults that marred his rare gifts. What genius had De Quincey! Marvelous the myriad-minded Coleridge! The opium-habit, however, was a vice that eclipsed their fame and robbed them of half their rightful influence. Voltaire's style was so faultlessly perfect that if the sentences lying across his page had been strings of pearls they could have been no more ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... 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 some of the noblest qualities of ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... 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 of ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... influence the next generation will still feel and acknowledge, while it reads not the writings of Mr. Gladstone but may be those of the author of "Henry Esmond" and the biographer of "Rab and his Friends." De Quincey divides literature into two sorts, the literature of power and the literature of knowledge. The latter is of necessity for to-day only, and must be revised to-morrow. The definition has scarcely De Quincey's usual verbal ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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, ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... odd to contrast 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 ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... deal and have been browsing for two or three hours at a time among those delightful books. I have arranged a course of reading upon Art, which I hope to have time to pursue, and then I have made selections from some such authors as Kingsley, Ruskin, De Quincey, Hawthorne,—and Mrs. Jameson, for which I hope to find time. Besides all this you can't imagine what domestic work has been given me. It is in the library where I am to spend 3/4 of an hour a day in arranging "studies" in Shakespeare. The work ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... Wordsworth for Mrs. James; and soon we came to a very famous place, Tibbie Shiels's Inn. I had never heard of it, but that doesn't take from its fame! Basil and Mrs. James could both tell me how Scott, and Christopher North, and De Quincey, and a long list of other great men, used to meet at the house kept by Mrs. Richardson, "Tibbie," who outlived all the noble company, and was buried at last in the same churchyard with the ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... 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 ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... own days we have quite a crowd of writers who have written with enthusiasm on the Maid of Domremy. It is sufficient to name the most prominent of these—Landor, Sir James Mackintosh, John Sterling, Lord Mahon, De Quincey, and ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... the table with the request to use it as an ash-tray, and taking down a volume of De Quincey from the hanging shelf, held it ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... De Quincey calls attention to one merit of Antoninus, which, he says, has been "utterly unnoticed hitherto by historians, but which will hereafter obtain a conspicuous place in any perfect record of the steps by which civilization has advanced and human nature been exalted. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... dinner party, and so seriously injured as very much to alarm his friends. He was not restored sufficiently to see visitors at the last dates. Rogers, Montgomery, Moore, Hunt, Wilson, Savage Landor, and De Quincey, are "listening to the praises of posterity." Not any of them can last ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... delight, as one observation more profound, or clothed in more forcible language, than another fell from his tongue.... As I retired homeward I thought a SECOND JOHNSON had visited the earth to make wise the sons of men." And De Quincey speaks of him as "the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive, in my judgment, that has yet existed amongst men." One is sometimes tempted to wish that the superlative could be abolished, or its use allowed only to old experts. What are men to ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... also wrote 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: "De Musset ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... strange cures (if any) of strange ailments of mind or body by its prudent use: how to wean men and nations from those deleterious chewings and smokings; with true and particular accounts of such splendid self-conquests as Coleridge and De Quincey, and—shall I add another, a living name?—have attained to. Then, again, what a field for poetical vagaries, and madnesses of imagination, would be afforded by the subject of opium-dreams! Now, strictly ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... 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
... I thought, as I looked into their poor painted faces,—faces but half human, vampirish faces, faces already waxen with the look of the grave,—I thought, as I often did, of the poor little girl whom De Quincey loved, the good-hearted little 'peripatetic' as he called her, who had succoured him during those nights, when, as a young man, he wandered homeless about these very streets,—that good, kind little Ann whom De Quincey had loved, then so strangely lost, and for whose face ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... [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 ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Mrs. Dwight and Miss Lawton, is Alma De Quincey Smith, with whose work you are of course familiar. She had her reception last week but was only too glad to come to-night and extend the welcoming hand of the east to our ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... with no opposition until he was about to return with the spoils; then, as he passed through a defile, the chieftain set upon him in the rear, and slew several of his knights, carrying off the Norman standard. Robert de Quincey, who had just married a daughter of Strongbow's by a former marriage, was amongst the slain. The Earl had bestowed a large territory in Wexford ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... 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
... words to your vocabulary. Do not use foreign words when English will do as well. There are times when it will not, though it is a very copious language. Never think English inferior. Hear its music in Tennyson and Longfellow, De Quincey and Ruskin. See its beauty in the pages of Hawthorne and Irving. Do not use technical terms with those unacquainted with science or art. It shows ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... through ruddy wine at the small hours chasing each other over the dial. For hours, almost whole days, he would sit silent at the helm of his boat on the Isis, his rapt eye peopling the vacant air with unutterable visions. He swam like a dolphin, rode like a Centaur, and De Quincey called him the best unprofessional male dancer he had ever seen. Three times he was vanquished by a huge shoemaker,—so the story goes,—champion of the "Town": at the fourth meeting, the Gentleman Commoner proved himself the better man, knocked his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... later find. I don't think it lived long 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 ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... 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 ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... attach 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 ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... 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
... of a murder hole—an inn of assassins in a lonely district of the United States, which Mr. Louis Stevenson heard in his travels there, and told to me some years ago. The details have escaped my memory, but, as Mr. Stevenson narrated them, they rivalled De Quincey's awful story of Williams's murders in the ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... 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 few weeks ago. It was disapproved ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... well-known passage in one of his essays De Quincey enumerates the multiform attainments and powers of Coleridge, and the corresponding varieties of demand made by them on any one who should aspire to become this many-sided man's biographer. The description is slightly touched with the humorous hyperbole characteristic ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... [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 Price, "Essays on the Picturesque as Compared ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... it, so characteristic of the excellent but bigoted Omar, is enough to cast suspicion upon it. De Quincey tells us that "if a saying has a proverbial fame, the probability is that it was never said." How many amusing stories stand a chance of going down to posterity as the inventions of President Lincoln, of which, nevertheless, he is doubtless ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... hanged and scorn ye," is the airy answer. "I had a pleasant hour the other evening," said a friend to us, "over my cigar and a book." "What book was that?" "A treatise conclusively proving the awful consequences of smoking." De Quincey came up to London and declared war upon opium; but during a little amnesty, in which he lapsed into his old elysium, he wrote his best book ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... Francis rejoined, with almost passionate seriousness, "a spook who lifted an invisible curtain with invisible fingers, and pointed to such a drama of horrors as De Quincey, Poe and Sue combined could never have imagined. Oliver Hilditch was guilty, Andrew. He murdered the man Jordan—murdered him ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that years before he had wanted to see what taking drugs was like, and he had been taking them ever since. He was mad keen on the subject and had read De Quincey and those people from beginning to end. I've tried them with him.... There are not many things ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... with his tempestuous temper, throwing plates on the floor; Hazlitt with his bitterness and his low love affair; even that healthier and happier Bohemian, Peacock. With these, in one sense at least, goes De Quincey. He was, unlike most of these embers of the revolutionary age in letters, a Tory; and was attached to the political army which is best represented in letters by the virile laughter and leisure of Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae. But he had nothing in common with that environment. It remained for ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... to Oxford, De Quincey says of caution money: "This is a small sum, properly enough demanded of every student, when matriculated, as a pledge for meeting any loss from unsettled arrears, such as his sudden death or ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... compare the effects of hypnotization with those of opium or other narcotic. Dr. Cocke asserts that there is a difference. His descriptions of dreams bear a wonderful likeness to De Quincey's dreams, such as those described in "The English Mail-Coach," "De Profundis," and "The Confessions of an English Opium Eater," all of which were presumably ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus |
