The Works of Thomas De Quincey, "The English Opium Eater": Including All His Contributions to Periodical Literature, Volume 13A. and C. Black, 1863 |
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Popular passages
Page 197 - ... the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.
Page 197 - In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers and the murder must be insulated — cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs — locked up and sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested — laid asleep — tranced — racked into a dread armistice...
Page 198 - O mighty poet! - Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers, like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert - but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs...
Page 370 - Rent is that portion of the produce of the earth, which is paid to the landlord for the use of the original and indestructible powers of the soil.
Page 194 - In fact, my understanding said positively that it could not produce any effect. But I knew better; I felt that it did; and I waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable me to solve it. At length, in 1812, Mr. Williams made his...
Page 196 - This was to be expressed; and on its own account, as well as to make it a more proportionable antagonist to the unoffending nature of their victim, " the gracious Duncan," and adequately to expound *the deep damnation of his taking off," this was to be expressed with peculiar energy.
Page 55 - The true antithesis* to knowledge, in this case, is not pleasure, but power. All that is literature seeks to communicate power ; all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge.
Page 173 - ... usages in living society) of narrators or raconteurs. This is a shocking anomaly in the code of French good taste as applied to conversation. Of all the bores whom man in his folly hesitates to hang, and heaven in its mysterious wisdom suffers to propagate their species, the most insufferable is the teller of "good stories...
Page 56 - When, in King Lear, the height, and depth, and breadth, of human passion is revealed to us, and, for the purposes of a sublime antagonism, is revealed in the weakness of an old man's nature, and in one night two worlds of storm are brought face to face — the human world, and the world of physical nature — mirrors of each other, semichoral antiphonies, strophe and antistrophe heaving with rival convulsions, and with the double darkness of night and madness...
Page 142 - Thus the father spoke, and knew not that he spoke prefiguring words : for soon after the delicate child, with the morning brightness of his early wisdom, was exhaled, like a dew-drop, into heaven.