



Produced by Anne Soulard, Charles Franks and the Online
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NARRATIVE AND MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS.

By Thomas De Quincey.


Contents Of Volume I.

   The Household Wreck
   The Spanish Nun
   Flight Of A Tartar Tribe


Contents Of Volume II.

   System Of The Heavens As Revealed By Lord Rosse's Telescopes
   Modern Superstition
   Coleridge And Opium-Eating
   Temperance Movement
   On War
   The Last Days Of Immanuel Kant






VOLUME I.




THE HOUSEHOLD WRECK.


'To be weak,' we need not the great archangel's voice to tell us, '_is
to be miserable_.' All weakness is suffering and humiliation, no matter
for its mode or its subject. Beyond all other weakness, therefore, and
by a sad prerogative, as more miserable than what is most miserable
in all, that capital weakness of man which regards the _tenure_ of his
enjoyments and his power to protect, even for a moment, the crown of
flowers--flowers, at the best, how frail and few!--which sometimes
settles upon his haughty brow. There is no end, there never will be
an end, of the lamentations which ascend from earth and the rebellious
heart of her children, upon this huge opprobrium of human pride--the
everlasting mutabilities of all which man can grasp by his power or
by his aspirations, the fragility of all which he inherits, and the
hollowness visible amid the very raptures of enjoyment to every eye
which looks for a moment underneath the draperies of the shadowy
_present_, the hollowness, the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which
all the pomps and vanities of life ultimately repose. This trite but
unwearying theme, this impassioned common-place of humanity, is the
subject in every age of variation without end, from the poet,
the rhetorician, the fabulist, the moralist, the divine, and the
philosopher. All, amidst the sad vanity of their sighs and groans, labor
to put on record and to establish this monotonous complaint, which needs
not other record or evidence than those very sighs and groans. What is
life? Darkness and formless vacancy for a beginning, or something beyond
all beginning--then next a dim lotos of human consciousness, finding
itself afloat upon the bosom of waters without a shore--then a few sunny
smiles and many tears--a little love and infinite strife--whisperings
from paradise and fierce mockeries from the anarchy of chaos--dust and
ashes--and once more darkness circling round, as if from the beginning,
and in this way rounding or making an island of our fantastic
existence,--_that_ is human life; _that_ the inevitable amount of man's
laughter and his tears--of what he suffers and he does--of his motions
this way and that way--to the right or to the left--backwards
or forwards--of all his seeming realities and all his absolute
negations--his shadowy pomps and his pompous shadows--of whatsoever he
thinks, finds, makes or mars, creates or animates, loves, hates, or in
dread hope anticipates;--so it is, so it has been, so it will be, for
ever and ever.

Yet in the lowest deep there still yawns a lower deep; and in the vast
halls of man's frailty, there are separate and more gloomy chambers of
a frailty more exquisite and consummate. We account it frailty that
threescore years and ten make the upshot of man's pleasurable existence,
and that, far before that time is reached, his beauty and his power
have fallen among weeds and forgetfulness. But there is a frailty, by
comparison with which this ordinary flux of the human race seems to have
a vast duration. Cases there are, and those not rare, in which a
single week, a day, an hour sweeps away all vestiges and landmarks of
a memorable felicity; in which the ruin travels faster than the flying
showers upon the mountain-side, faster 'than a musician scatters
sounds;' in which 'it was' and 'it is not' are words of the self-same
tongue, in the self-same minute; in which the sun that at noon beheld
all sound and prosperous, long before its setting hour looks out upon
a total wreck, and sometimes upon the total abolition of any fugitive
memorial that there ever had been a vessel to be wrecked, or a wreck to
be obliterated.

These cases, though here spoken of rhetorically, are of daily
occurrence; and, though they may seem few by comparison with the
infinite millions of the species, they are many indeed, if they be
reckoned absolutely for themselves; and throughout the limits of a whole
nation, not a day passes over us but many families are robbed of their
heads, or even swallowed up in ruin themselves, or their course turned
out of the sunny beams into a dark wilderness. Shipwrecks and nightly
conflagrations are sometimes, and especially among some nations,
wholesale calamities; battles yet more so; earthquakes, the famine, the
pestilence, though rarer,