It happens by and by to this impractical man, from whose disorderly and always open hand inherited moneys have slipped away; it happens--I say--that he must earn his bread by his own toil; so he projects great works of philosophy, of political economy, which are to revolutionize opinions; but they topple over into opium dreams before they are realized. He tries editing a county paper, but it is nought. At last he utilizes even his vices, and a chapter of the _Confessions of an Opium Eater_, in the _London Magazine_, draws swift attention to one whose language is as vivid as a flame; and he lays bare, without qualm, his own quivering sensibilities. This spurt of work, or some new craze, takes him to London, away from his family. And so on a sudden, that idyl of life among the Lakes becomes for many years a tattered and blurred page to him. He is once more a denizen of the great city, living a shy, hermit existence there; long time in a dim back-room of the publisher Bohn’s, in Bedford Street, near to Covent Garden. He sees Proctor and Hazlitt odd-whiles, and Hood, and still more of the Lambs; but he is peevish and distant, and finds largest company in the jug of laudanum which brings swift succeeding dreams and stupefaction. We will have a taste of some of his wild writing of those days. He is speaking of a dream. “The dream commenced with a music of preparation and of awakening suspense; a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march; of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day, a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and laboring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where--somehow, I knew not how--by some beings, I knew not whom--a battle, a strife, an agony was conducting, was evolving like a great drama or a piece of music.… I had the power, and yet had not the power to decide it … for the weight of twenty Atlantes was upon me as the oppression of inexpiable guilt. Deeper than ever plummet sounded, I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened; there came sudden alarms, hurrying to and fro, trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I know not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed--and clasped hands and heart-breaking partings, and then everlasting farewells! and with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated--everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated--everlasting farewells!”