Gents Mag 1857 part 2 p.111
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Gentleman's Magazine 1857 part 2 p.111
And he, we may be sure, who could draw 'Even from the meanest flower that blows, Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears;' to whom the mere daisy, the pansy, the primrose, could furnish pleasures - not the puerile ones which his most puerile and worldly insulters imagined, but pleasures drawn from depths of reverie and meditative tenderness, far beyond all powers of their hearts to conceive; that man would hardly need any large variety of books."Besides his rare scholarship, his very extensive reading, and his singular familiarity with that German literature with which - in an article on Jean Paul, in the "London Magazine," in 1821 - he was the first to make the English public acquainted, Mr. De Quincey's genius appears to be distinguished chiefly by his rich and strange humour; his great analytic power, and subtlety of understanding; his extraordinary, almost unequalled, imaginative eloquence; and a mastery over language, both in regard to precision and magnificence, which has no parallel at all amogst his contemporaries. In some of his best papers these various phases of his genius are made to succeed and relieve each other with brilliant effect; others, again, are cast in one mood, and characterised throughout their whole extent by the predominance of one power. In the "Confessions" - although the greater part of the narrative has an atmosphere of sadness shed around it from the depths of agony which it discloses - the reader will have no difficulty in recognising the acute logic and the genial humour which shew themselves, from time to time, struggling upwards, as it were, out of the grief and grandeur of the author's eloquent revelations. His compositions in a single key are numerous enough. In one of the volumes now before us there are three or four productions, severally manifesting genius of a separate, special kind, such would be sufficient of itself for the foundation of an ordinary writer's fame. There is the lecture on "Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts," which runs over, in a manner, with a ripe and laughter-moving humour from the first page to the last; there is a history of the "Revolt of the Tartars," as splendid and sustained as one of Gibbon's chapters, and as good an imitation of a narrative of true events as any of Defoe's, yet which has, nevertheless, not a word of truth in it from one end to the other; there is the "Dialogues of Three Templars, on Political Economy," which is terse, and logical, and subtle, and at the same time so simple as to make some of the abstrusest principles of that important science easily understood by any attentive reader, however absolute his previous ignorance may have been; and there is, lastly, a "Dream-Fugue" on sudden death, so full of the sweetest and the choicest inspiration of imagination, so rich in trembling tenderness, with inserted symphonies of grandeur, as to require only the accident of metre, if indeed it requires even that, to deserve a place among the choicest and most charming specimens of genuine poetry. These, let it be remembered, are only a portion of the contents of one of the collected volumes, and that one not by any means undoubtedly the best. Among the articles not yet hived in the collection, we are sure that we could point to several which are at least equal, and to one or two which are superior, to the most admirable of those which are contained in these volumes. Mr. De Quincey's mastery of language, which we have already mentioned, is worthy of a somewhat further notice, since it is, in fact, from its very perfection, one of his most wonderful accomplishments. Both his choice of words, and his mode of arranging them into sentences, is, as nearly as can be, faultless. Professor Wilson, as we are told by Mr. Gil- |
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