There is a certain passage in his Autobiography which affords a key to this characteristic of his work. When quite a boy he had constituted himself imaginary king of an imaginary kingdom of Gombrom. Speaking of this fancy he writes: “O reader! do not laugh! I lived for ever under the terror of two separate wars and two separate worlds; one against the factory boys in a real world of flesh and blood, of stones and brickbats, of flight and pursuit, that were anything but figurative; the other in a world purely aerial, where all the combats and the sufferings were absolute moonshine. And yet the simple truth is that for anxiety and distress of mind the reality (which almost every morning’s light brought round) was as nothing in comparison of that Dream Kingdom which rose like a vapour from my own brain, and which apparently by the fiat of my will could be for ever dissolved. Ah, but no! I had contracted obligations to Gombrom; I had submitted my conscience to a yoke; and in secret truth my will had no autocratic power. Long contemplation of a shadow, earnest study for the welfare of that shadow, sympathy with the wounded sensibilities of that shadow under accumulated wrongs; these bitter experiences, nursed by brooding thought, had gradually frozen that shadow into a region of reality far denser than the material realities of brass or granite.” This confession is a remarkable testimony to the reality of De Quincey’s imaginative life. “I had contracted obligations to Gombrom.” Yes, despite his practical experiences with the world, it was Gombrom, “the moonlight” side of things, that appealed to him. The boys might fling stones and brickbats, just as the world did later—but though he felt the onslaught, it moved him far less than did the phantasies of his imagination. There is no necessity to weigh Wilde’s experiences of “Our Ladies of Sorrow” beside those of De Quincey. All we need ask is which impresses us the more keenly with the actuality of sorrow. And I think there can be no doubt that it is not De Quincey.