Suspiria de Profundis by Thomas De Quincey (urban books to read .TXT) 📕

Many readers will recall, though, at the moment of writing, my own thoughts did not recall, the well-known passage in the Prometheus⁠—

—πουτιωυ τε κυματωυ
Αυηριθμου γελασμα.

“O multitudinous laughter of the ocean billows!” It is not clear whether Aeschylus contemplated the laughter as addressing the ear or the eye. ↩

This, it may be said, requires a corresponding duration of experience; but, as an argument for this mysterious power lurking in our nature, I may remind the reader of one phenomenon open to the notice of everybody⁠—namely, the tendency of very aged persons to throw back and concentrate the light of their memory upon scenes of early childhood, as to which they recall many traces that had faded even to themselves in middle life, whilst they often forget altogether the whole intermediate stages of their experience. This shows that naturally, and without violent agencies, the human brain is by tendency a palimpsest. ↩

As I have never allowed myself to covet any man’s ox nor his ass, nor anything that is his, still less would it become a philosopher to covet other people’s images or metaphors. Here, therefore, I restore to Mr. Wordsworth this fine image of the revolving wheel and the glimmering spokes, as applied by him to the flying successions of day and night. I borrowed it for one moment in order to point my own sentence; which being done, the reader is witness that I now pay it back instantly by a note made for that sole purpose. On the same principle I often borrow their seals from young ladies, when closing my letters, because there is sure to be some tender sentiment upon them about “memory,” or “hope,” or “roses,” or “reunion,” and my correspondent must be a sad brute who is not touched by the eloquence of the seal, even if his taste is so had that he remains deaf to mine. ↩

This, the reader will be aware, applies chiefly to the cotton and tobacco States of North America; but not to them only: on which account I have not scrupled to figure the sun which looks down upon slavery as tropical⁠—no matter if strictly within the tropics, or simply so near to them as to produce a similar climate. ↩

The word σεμυος is usually rendered “venerable” in dictionaries⁠—not a very flattering epithet for females. But I am disposed to think that it comes nearest to our idea of the sublime, as near as a Greek word could come. ↩

The story and the verses are, or used to be, well known. A schoolboy, forbidden to return home at the holidays, is suspected to have written the lyrical Latin verses upon the rapture of returning home, and to have breathed out his life in the anguish of thus reviving the images which for him were never to be realized.⁠ ⁠… The reader must not fancy any flaw in the Latin title. It is elliptic; revisere being understood, or some similar word. ↩

See the story of the young soldier who told his officer, on having been struck by him, that “he would make him repent it.” (Close of autobiographic sketch, “Infant Literature.”) ↩

Three thousand children are annually burnt to death in the nations of England and Scotland, chiefly through the carelessness of parents. I shudder to add another and darker cause, which is a deep disgrace to the present age. ↩

Count Massigli (an Austrian officer in the imperial service) about sixty years ago fathomed and attempted to fathom many parts of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. If I remember rightly, he found the bottom within less than an English mile. ↩

This very striking phenomenon hat been continually described by writers, both German and English for the last fifty years. Many readers, however, will not have met with these descriptions; and on their account I add a few words in explanation, referring them for the best scientific comment on the case to Sir David Brewster’s Natural Magic. The spectre takes the shape of a human figure, or, if the visiters are more than one, then the spectres multiply; they arrange themselves on the blue ground of the sky, or the dark ground of any clouds that maybe in the right quarter, or perhaps they are strongly relieved against a curtain of rock, at a distance of some miles, and always exhibiting gigantic proportions. At first, from the distance and the colossal size, every spectator supposes the appearance to be quite independent of himself. But very soon he is surprised to observe his own motions and gestures mimicked; and wakens to the conviction that the phantom is but a dilated reflection of himself. This Titan amongst the apparitions of Earth is exceedingly capricious, vanishing abruptly for reasons best known to himself, and more coy in coming forward than the Lady Echo of Ovid. One reason why he is seen so seldom must be ascribed to the concurrence of conditions under which only the phenomenon can be manifested; the sun must be near to the horizon (which of itself implies a time of day inconvenient to a person starting from a station as distant as Elbingerode); the spectator must have his back to the sun; and the air must contain some vapor, but partially distributed. Coleridge ascended the Brocken on the Whitsunday of 1799, with a party of English students from Goettingen, but failed to see the phantom; afterwards in England (and under the three same conditions) he saw a much rarer phenomenon, which he described in the following eight lines. I give them from a correct copy (the apostrophe in the beginning must be understood as addressed to an ideal conception):

“And art thou nothing? Such