tottered into the civic2 fire. It-like some hun- | haply their old fathers and mothers, were draggry and strangest beast on the innermost wild ging the abandoned wain homeward. Although of Africa, pierced, broken, prostrate, motion- we were accompanied by many brave spearmen less, gazed at by its hunter in the impatience and skilful archers, it was perilous to pass the of glory, in the delight of awe-panted once creatures which the farm-yard dogs, driven more, and seized him. from the hearth by the poverty of their mas ters, were tearing and devouring; while others. bitten and lamed, filled the air either with long and deep howls or sharp and quick barkings, as they struggled with hunger and feebleness, or were exasperated by heat and pain. Nor could the thyme from the heath, nor the bruised branches of the fir-tree, extinguish or abate the foul odour. I have seen within this hour, O Metellus, what Rome in the cycle of her triumphs will never see, what the Sun in his eternal course can never show her, what the Earth has borne but now, and must never rear again for her, what Victory herself has envied her, a Numantian. Metellus. We shall feast to-morrow. Hope, Caius Marius, to become a tribune: trust in fortune. Leofric. And now, Godiva, my darling, thou art afraid we should be eaten up before we Marius. Auguries are surer: surest of all is enter the gates of Coventry; or perchance that perseverance. Metellus. I hope the wine has not grown vapid in my tent: I have kept it waiting, and must now report to Scipio the intelligence of our discovery. Come after me, Caius. Marius (alone). The tribune is the discoverer! the centurion is the scout! Caius Marius must enter more Numantias. Lighthearted Cæcilius, thou mayest perhaps here after, and not with humbled but with exulting pride, take orders from this hand. If Scipio's words are fate, and to me they sound so, the portals of the Capitol may shake before my chariot, as my horses plunge back at the applauses of the people, and Jove in his high domicile may welcome the citizen of Arpinum. LEOFRIC AND GODIVA* Godiva. There is a dearth in the land, my sweet Leofrie! Remember how many weeks of drought we have had, even in the deep pastures of Leicestershire; and how many Sundays we have heard the same prayers for rain, and supplications that it would please the Lord in his mercy to turn aside his anger from the poor, pining cattle. You, my dear husband, have imprisoned more than one malefactor for leaving his dead ox in the public way; and other hinds4 have fled before you out of the traces, in which they, and their sons and their daughters, and 2 citizens (perhaps after the analogy of the 4 peasants. in the gardens there are no roses to greet thee, no sweet herbs for thy mat and pillow. Godiva. Leofric, I have no such fears. This is the month of roses: I find them everywhere since my blessed marriage. They, and all other sweet herbs, I know not why, seem to greet me wherever I look at them, as though they knew and expected me. Surely they cannot feel that I am fond of them. Leofric. O light, laughing simpleton! But what wouldst thou? I came not hither to pray; and yet if praying would satisfy thee, or remove the drought, I would ride up straightway to Saint Michael's and pray until morning. Godiva. I would do the same, O Leofrie! but God hath turned away his ear from holier lips than mine. Would my own dear husband hear me, if I implored him for what is easier to accomplish,-what he can do like God? Leofric. How! what is it? Godiva. I would not, in the first hurry of your wrath, appeal to you, my loving Lord, in behalf of these unhappy men who have offended you. Leofric. Unhappy! is that all? Godiva. Unhappy they must surely be, to have offended you so grievously. What a soft air breathes over us! how quiet and serene and still an evening! how calm are the heavens and the earth!-Shall none enjoy them; not even we, my Leofric? The sun is ready to set: let it never set, O Leofric, on your anger. These are not my words: they are better than mine.> Should they lose their virtue from my unworthiness in uttering them? According to legend, Leofric, Earl of Mercia in Leofric. Godiva, wouldst thou plead to me for rebels? Godiva. They have, then, drawn the sword 5 Ephesians, iv. 26. Leofric. They have omitted to send me my my husband, we must obey it. Look upon me! dues, established by my ancestors, well knowing look upon me! lift your sweet eyes from the of our nuptials, and of the charges and festivi-¦ ground! I will not cease to supplicate; I dare ties they require, and that in a season of such not. scarcity my own lands are insufficient. Godiva. If they were starving, as they said they were Leofric. We may think upon it. Godiva. Never say that! What! think upon goodness when you can be good? Let not Leofric. Must I starve too? Is it not enough the infants cry for sustenance! The mother of to lose my vassals? our blessed Lord will hear them; us never, never afterward. Godiva. Enough! O God! too much! too much! May you never lose them! Give them life, peace, comfort, contentment. There are those among them who kissed me in my infancy, and who blessed me at the baptismal font. Leofric, Leofric! the first old man I meet I shall think is one of those; and I shall think on the blessing he gave me, and (ah me!) on the blessing I bring back to him. My heart will bleed, will burst; and he will weep at it! he will weep, poor soul, for the wife of a cruel lord who denounces vengeance on him, who carries death into his family! Leofric. We must hold solemn festivals. Leofric. Well, then? Leofric. Here comes the Bishop: we are but one mile from the walls. Why dismountest thou? no bishop can expect it. Godiva! my honour and rank among men are humbled by this. Earl Godwin will hear of it. Up! up! the Bishop hath seen it: he urgeth his horse onward. Dost thou not hear him now upon the solid turf behind thee? Godiva. Never, no, never will I rise, O Leofric, until you remit this most impious tax this tax on hard labour, on hard life. Leofric. Turn round: look how the fat nag canters, as to the tune of a sinner's psalm, slow and hard-breathing. What reason or right can the people have to complain, while their and well caparisoned? Godiva. My husband, my husband! will you pardon the city? Leofric. Sir Bishop! I could not think you would have seen her in this plight. Will I pardon? Yea, Godiva, by the holy rood, will I pardon the city, when thou ridest naked at noontide through the streets! Godiva. O my dear, cruel Leofric, where is the heart you gave me? It was not so: can mine have hardened it? Godiva. Is the clamorousness that succeeds bishop's steed is so sleek the death of God's dumb creatures, are crowded | Inclination to change, desire to abolish old halls, are slaughtered cattle, festivals?-are usages.-Up! up! for shame! They shall maddening songs, and giddy dances, and hire-smart for it, idlers! Sir Bishop, I must blush ling praises from parti-coloured coats? Can the for my young bride. voice of a minstrel tell us better things of ourselves than our own internal one might tell us; or can his breath make our breath softer in sleep? O my beloved! let everything be a joyance to us: it will, if we will. Sad is the day, and worse must follow, when we hear the blackbird in the garden, and do not throb with joy. But, Leofric, the high festival is strown by the servant of God upon the heart of man. It is gladness, it is thanksgiving; it is the orphan, the starveling, pressed to the bosom, Bishop. Earl, thou abashest thy spouse; she and bidden as its first commandment to remem-turneth pale, and weepeth. Lady Godiva, peace ber its benefactor. We will hold this festival; be with thee. the guests are ready; we may keep it up for weeks, and months, and years together, and always be the happier and the richer for it. The beverage of this feast, O Leofrie, is sweeter than bee or flower or vine can give us:6 it flows from heaven; and in heaven will it abun dantly be poured out again to him who pours it out here unsparingly. Leofric. Thou art wild. | Godiva. Thanks, holy man! peace will be with me when peace is with your city. Did you hear my Lord's eruel word? Bishop. I did, lady. against it? Bishop. Will you remember it, and pray Wilt thou forget it, daughter? Godiva. I am not offended. Bishop. Angel of peace and purity! Godira. But treasure it up in your heart: Godiva. I have, indeed, lost myself. Some Power, some good kind Power, melts me (body deem it an incense, good only when it is conand soul and voice) into tenderness and love. Osumed and spent, ascending with prayer and sacrifice. And, now, what was it? 6 Honey, nectar, and wine are the constituents of mead. Bishop. Christ save us! that he will pardon the city when thou ridest naked through the large a family! Shall my youth harm me? streets at noon. Godiva. No judgments, then, to-morrow, Leofric? Leofric. None: we will carouse. Godiva. The saints of heaven have given me strength and confidence; my prayers are heard; the heart of my beloved is now softened. Leofric (aside). Ay, ay-they shall smart, though. Godiva. Say, dearest Leofric, is there indeed no other hope, no other mediation? Leofric. I have sworn. Beside, thou hast made me redden and turn my face away from thee, and all the knaves have seen it: this adds to the city's crime. Under God's hand it gives me courage. Ah! when will the morning come? Ah! when will the noon be over? I now pass to what is the main subject of these latter confessions, to the history and journal of what took place in my dreams; for these were the immediate and proximate cause of my acutest suffering. The first notice I had of any important change going on in this part of my physical economy, was from the re-awakening of a state of eye generally incident to childhood, or exalted states of irritability. I know not whether my reader is aware that many children, perhaps Godiva. I have blushed too, Leofric, and most, have a power of painting, as it were, was not rash nor obdurate. upon the darkness, all sorts of phantoms; in some, that power is simply a mechanic affection of the eye; others have a voluntary, or semivoluntary power to dismiss or to summon them; or, as a child once said to me when I questioned him on this matter, "I can tell them to go, and they go; but sometimes they come, when I don't tell them to come." Whereupon I told him that he had almost as unlimited a command over Leofric. But thou, my sweetest, art given to blushing: there is no conquering it in thee. I wish thou hadst not alighted so hastily and roughly it hath shaken down a sheaf of thy hair. Take heed thou sit not upon it, lest it anguish thee. Well done! it mingleth now sweetly with the cloth of gold upon the saddle, running here and there, as if it had life and faculties and business, and were working there-apparitions as a Roman centurion over his solupon some newer and cunninger device. O my beauteous Eve! there is a Paradise about thee! the world is refreshed as thou movest and breathest on it. I cannot see or think of evil where thou art. I could throw my arms even here about thee. No signs for me! no shaking of sunbeams! no reproof or frown or wonderment -I will say it-now, then, for worse-I could close with my kisses thy half-open lips, ay, and those lovely and loving eyes, before the people. Godiva. To-morrow you shall kiss me, and they shall bless you for it. I shall be very pale, for to-night I must fast and pray. Leofric. I do not hear thee; the voices of the folk are so loud under this archway. Godiva (to herself). God help them! good kind souls! I hope they will not crowd about me so to-morrow. O Leofric! could my name be forgotten, and yours alone remembered! But perhaps my innocence may save me from reproach; and how many as innocent are in fear and famine! No eye will open on me but fresh from tears. What a young mother for so diers. In the middle of 1817, I think it was, that this faculty became positively distressing to me: at night, when I lay awake in bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp; * De Quincey says: "The Opium Confessions were written with some slight secondary purpose of exposing the specific power of opium upon the faculty of dreaming, but much more with the purpose of displaying the faculty itself." And again: "The machinery for dreaming planted in the human brain was not planted for nothing. That faculty, in alliance with the mystery of darkness, is the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy. And the dreaming organ, in connection with the heart, the eye, and the ear. compose the magnificent apparatus which forces the infinite into the chambers of the human brain, and throws dark reflections from eternities below all life upon the mirrors of that mysterious camera obscura-the sleening mind." Such, in substance. is De Quincey's account of what may very well be regarded as an almost unique contribution to the literature of the world. To English literature he has made, moreover, the important contribution of a style of "impassioned prose" which has no counterpart. See Eng. Lit., p. 275. Late in life, he revised his Confessions, but the early text of 1821-1822 is from a rhetorical point of view generally the superior and is here retained. friezes of never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as if they were stories drawn from times before Edipus or Priam-before Tyre-before Memphis. And, at the same time, a corresponding change took place in my dreams; a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour. And the four following facts may be mentioned, as noticeable at this time: 1. That as the creative state of the eye increased, a sympathy seemed to arise between the waking and the dreaming states of the brain in one point-that whatsoever I happened to call up and to trace by a voluntary act upon the darkness was very apt to transfer itself to my dreams; so that I feared to exercise this faculty; for, as Midas turned all things to gold. that yet baffled his hopes and defrauded his human desires, so whatsoever things capable of being visually represented I did but think of in the darkness, immediately shaped themselves into phantoms of the eye; and, by a process apparently no less inevitable, when thus once traced in faint and visionary colours, like writings in sympathetic ink, they were drawn out by the fierce chemistry of my dreams, into insufferable splendour that fretted my heart. forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived; I could not be said to recollect them; for if I had been told of them when waking, I should not have been able to acknowledge them as parts of my past experience. But placed as they were before me, in dreams like intuitions. and clothed in all their evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I recognised them instantaneously. I was once told by a near relative of mine, that having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of death but for the critical assistance which reached her, she saw in a moment her whole life, in its minutest incidents, arrayed before her simultaneously as in a mirror; and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part. This, from some opium experiences of mine, I can believe; I have, indeed, seen the same thing asserted twice in modern books, and accompanied by a remark which I am convinced is true-viz., that the dread book of account, which the Scriptures speak of,3 is, in fact, the mind itself of each individual. Of this, at least, I feel assured, that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the 2. For this, and all other changes in my mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend dreams, were accompanied by deep-seated anxi- away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or ety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly unveiled, the inscription remains for ever; just incommunicable by words. I seemed every as the stars seem to withdraw before the comnight to descend, not metaphorically, but liter-mon light of day, whereas, in fact, we all know ally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses, that it is the light which is drawn over them depths below depths, from which it seemed as a veil, and that they are waiting to be hopeless that I could ever re-ascend. Nor did revealed when the obscuring daylight shall have I, by waking, feel that I had re-ascended. This withdrawn. I do not dwell upon; because the state of gloom which attended these gorgeous spectacles, amounting at last to utter darkness, as of some suicidal despondency, cannot be approached by words. 3. The sense of space, and, in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, etc., were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fit ted to receive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or a hundred years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representa tive of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience. 4. The minutest incidents of childhood, or 1 Greece. Phoenicia, Egypt, form a climax of an- Having noticed these four facts as memorably distinguishing my dreams from those of health, I shall now cite a case illustrative of the first fact; and shall then cite any others that I remember, either in their chronological order, or any other that may give them more effect as pictures to the reader. I had been in youth, and even since, for occasional amusement, a great reader of Livy, whom, I confess, that I prefer, both for style and matter, to any other of the Roman historians; and I had often felt as most solemn and appalling sounds, and most emphatically representative of the majesty of the Roman people, the two words so often occurring in Livy-Consul Romanus ; especially when the consul is introduced in his military character. I mean to say that the words king-sultan-regent, etc., or any other titles of those who embody in their own persons the collective majesty of a great people, had 3 Revelation, xx, 12. May, 1818. The less power over my reverential feelings. I had | paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the also, though no great reader of history, made heavens; faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, myself minutely and critically familiar with surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by one period of English history-viz., the period generations, by centuries:-my agitation was of the Parliamentary War-having been at- infinite,-my mind tossed-and surged with the tracted by the moral grandeur of some who ocean. figured in that day, and by the many interesting memoirs which survive those unquiet times. Both these parts of my lighter reading, having The Malay has been a fearful enemy for months. furnished me often with matter of reflection, I have been every night, through his I know now furnished me with matter for my dreams. means, transported into Asiatic scenes. Often I used to see, after painting upon the not whether others share in my feelings on this blank darkness a sort of rehearsal whilst wak- point; but I have often thought that if I were ing, a crowd of ladies, and perhaps a festival, compelled to forego England, and to live in and dances. And I heard it said, or I said to China, and among Chinese manners and modes myself, "These are English ladies from the unof life and scenery, I should go mad. happy times of Charles I. These are the wives causes of my horror lie deep; and some of them and the daughters of those who met in peace, must be common to others. Southern Asia, in and sat at the same tables, and were allied by general, is the seat of awful images and assomarriage or by blood; and yet, after a certain ciations. As the cradle of the human race, it day in August, 1642, never smiled upon each would alone have a dim and reverential feeling other again, nor met but in the field of battle; connected with it. But there are other reasons. and at Marston Moor, at Newbury, or at Nase- No man can pretend that the wild, barbarous, by, cut asunder all ties of love by the cruel and capricious superstitions of Africa, or of sabre, and washed away in blood the memory of savage tribes elsewhere, affect him in the way ancient friendship." The ladies danced, and that he is affected by the ancient, monumental, looked as lovely as the court of George IV. Yet cruel, and elaborate religions of Indostan, etc. I knew, even in my dreams, that they had been The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their in the grave for nearly two centuries. This institutions, histories, modes of faith, etc., is pageant would suddenly dissolve; and, at a so impressive, that to me the vast age of the clapping of hands, would be heard the heart- race and name overpowers the sense of youth quaking sound of Consul Romanus; and imme- in the individual. A young Chinese seems to diately came "sweeping by," in gorgeous palu-me an antediluvian man renewed. Even Engdaments, Paulus or Marius, girt round by a company of centurions, with the crimson tunic hoisted on a spear, and followed by the alalagmoss of the Roman legions. And now came a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll, through many months, promised an abiding torment; and, in fact, it never left me until the winding up of my case. Hitherto the human face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically, nor with any special power of tormenting. But now that which I have called the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself. Perhaps some part of my London life might be answer able for this. Be that as it may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to appear: the sea appeared 4 Charles's standard was raised, giving the signal for civil war, August 22, 1642. 5 military cloaks lishmen, though not bred in any knowledge of such institutions, cannot but shudder at the mystic sublimity of castes that have flowed apart, and refused to mix, through such immemorial tracts of time; nor can any man fail to be awed by the names of the Ganges, or the Euphrates. It contributes much to these feelings, that Southern Asia is, and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life; the great officina gentium.10 Man is a weed in those regions. The vast empires also, in which the enormous population of Asia has always been cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings associated with all oriental names or images. In China, over and above what it has in common with the rest of Southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence, and want of sympathy, placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyse. I could sooner live with lunatics, 6 For this latter Consul, see note to Landor's or brute animals. All this, and much more than Metellus and Marius, p. 512. 7 A signal of battle. 8 "A word expressing collectively the gathering of the Roman war-cries- Álála, Alála."-De Quincey. 9 A Malay, as related in an earlier part of the Confessions, once knocked at De Quincey's door. 10 laboratory of nations |