Ebook Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Landor utters a fine and true saying when in one of his Imaginary Conversations he makes Vittoria Colonna remark that the human heart is a world of poetry the imagina tion is only its atmosphere. It is because so much of De Quincey's 'finest work is so essentially human that he has taken and is likely to retain the high place in the realm of literature which is undeniably his. Universal human interest — herein lies the sole secret of literary immortality the revelation of the individual heart, its struggles and sorrows, its keen human sympathies in contact with a difficult world, finding an unrestful ease in that power of dreaming which is so familiar and yet SO mysterious, and whose visionary emanations have never ceased to interest Since waking and Sleeping first were. Given these things, and for their interpretation the magic of a style like De Quincey's at its best, and the result is one of the rarest in litera ture — a work whose appeal out of space, out of time, is perennial, unaffected by the changing fashions and periods of the literary world.