The poetic form, while most perfectly inclosing these divinations of childhood, and especially suited to the presentation of the faint and elusive elements, is less adapted to the philosophic and discursive examination of the subject of childhood. It is, then, an indication of the impression which the idea had made upon men that a prose writer of the period, of singular insight and subtlety, should have given some of his most characteristic thought to an examination of the essential elements of childhood. De Quincey was undoubtedly strongly affected by Wordsworth’s treatment of the subject; he has left evidence upon this point. Nevertheless, he appears to have sounded his own mind and appealed to his own memory for additional and corroborative testimony. In his Suspiria de Profundis, a sequel to the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he offers an account of his recollections of infancy, together with many reflections upon the experience which he then underwent. If it be said that the opium-eater was an untrustworthy witness, since his dreaming might well lead him to confuse the subtle workings of a mature mind with the vivid remembrance of one or two striking events of childhood, we may consider that De Quincey’s imagination was a powerful one, and capable of interpreting the incidents and emotions brought to it by memory, as a more prosaic mind could not. We are compelled, of course, in all such cases, to submit the testimony of such a man to the judgment of our own reason, but that reason ought, before pronouncing a final verdict, to be educated to perceive the possibilities of a wider range of observation than may have fallen to us individually, and to submit the results to a comparison with known operations of the human mind. Above all, it should be borne in mind that a distinction clearly exists between a child’s consciousness and its power of expression. De Quincey himself in a note says with acuteness and justice:— “The reader must not forget in reading this and other passages that though a child’s feelings are spoken of, it is not the child who speaks. I decipher what the child only felt in cipher. And so far is this distinction or this explanation from pointing to anything metaphysical or doubtful, that a man must be grossly unobservant who is not aware of what I am here noticing, not as a peculiarity of this child or that, but as a necessity of all children. Whatsoever in a man’s mind blossoms and expands to his own consciousness in mature life must have preëxisted in germ during his infancy. I, for instance, did not, as a child, consciously read in my own deep feelings these ideas. No, not at all; nor was it possible for a child to do so. I, the child, had the feelings; I, the man, decipher them. In the child lay the handwriting mysterious to him; in me, the interpretation and the comment.”