depths his friends traced him, and patched up a truce, which landed him in Oxford. Quiet and studious here at first--he is represented as a rare talker, a little given to wine--writing admiring letters to Wordsworth and others, who were his gods in those days; falling somehow into taste for that drug which for so many years held him in its grip, body and soul. The Oxford career being finished after a sort, there are saunterings through London streets again--evenings with the Lambs, with Godwin, and excursions to Somersetshire and the Lake country, where he encounters and gives nearer worship to the poetic gods of his idolatry. Always shy, but earnest; most interesting to strangers--with his pale face, high brow and lightning glances; talking too with a winning flow and an exuberance of epithet that somewhiles amounts to brilliancy: no wonder he was tenderly entreated by good Miss Wordsworth; no wonder the poet of the “Doe of Rylstone” enjoyed the titillation of such fresh, bright praises! So De Quincey at twenty-four became householder near to Grasmere--in the cottage I spoke of in the opening of the chapter--once occupied by Wordsworth, and later by Hartley Coleridge. There, on that pretty shelf of the hills--scarce lifted above Rydal-water, he gathers his books--studies the mountains--provokes the gossip of all the pretty Dalesmen’s daughters--lives there a bachelor, eight years or more--ranging round and round in bright autumnal days with the sturdy John Wilson (of the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_)--cultivating intimacy with poor crazy Lloyd (who lived nearby)--studying all anomalous characters with curious intensity, and finding anomalies where others found none. Meantime and through all, his sensibilities are kept wrought to fever heat by the opiate drinks--always flanking him at his table; and he, so dreadfully wonted to those devilish drafts, that--on some occasions--he actually consumes within the twenty-four hours the equivalent of seven full wine-glasses of laudanum! No wonder the quiet Dales-people looked dubiously at the light burning in those cottage windows far into the gray of morning, and counted the pale-faced, big-headed man for something uncanny. In these days comes about that strange episode of his mad attachment to the little elfin child--Catharine Wordsworth--of whom the poet-father wrote:-- “Solitude to her Was blithe society, who filled the air With gladness and involuntary songs. Light were her sallies, as the tripping fawn’s, Forth startled from the form where she lay couched; Unthought of, unexpected, as the stir Of the soft breeze ruffling the meadow flowers.”