Some years later he drifts again to Grasmere, but only to pluck up root and branch that home with wife and children,--so wonted now to the pleasant sounds and sights of the Lake waters and the mountains--and to transport them to Edinboro’, where, through Professor Wilson, he has promise of work which had begun to fail him in London. There,--though he has the introduction which a place at the tavern table of Father Ambrose gives--he is a lonely man; pacing solitary, sometimes in the shadow of the Castle Rock, sometimes in the shadow of the old houses of the Canongate; always preoccupied, close-lipped, brooding, and never without that wretched opium-comforter at his home. It was in _Blackwood_ (1827) he first published the well known essay on “Murder as a Fine Art,”--perhaps the best known of all he wrote; there, too, he committed to paper, in the stress of his necessities, those sketchy _Reminiscences_ of his Lake life; loose, disjointed, ill-considered, often sent to press without any revision and full of strange coined words. I note at random, such as _novel-ish erector_ (for builder), _lambencies_, _apricating_, _aculeated_; using words not rarely, etymologically, and for some recondite sense attaching. Worse than this, there is dreary tittle-tattle and a pulling away of decent domestic drapery from the lives of those he had professed to love and honor; tedious expatiation, too, upon the scandal-mongering of servant-maids, with illustrations by page on page; and yet, for the matter of gossip, he is himself as fertile as a seamstress or a monthly nurse, and as overflowing and brazen as any newspaper you may name. But here and there, even amid his dreariest pages, you see, quivering--some gleams of his old strange power--a thrust of keen thought that bewilders you by its penetration--a glowing fancy that translates one to wondrous heights of poetic vision; and oftener yet, and over and over, shows that mastery of the finesse of language by which he commands the most attenuated reaches of his thought, and whips them into place with a snap and a sting. Yet, when all is said, I think we must count the best that he wrote only amongst the curiosities of literature, rather than with the manna that fell for fainting souls in the wilderness. De Quincey died in Edinburgh, in 1859, aged seventy-four. CHAPTER II.