The Collected Writing of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II

It was in winter, and in the wintry weather of the year 1803, that I first entered Oxford with a view to its vast means of education, or rather with a view to its vast advantage...

Using a New Testament, of which (in the narrative parts at least) any one word being given will suggest most of what is immediately consecutive, you evade the most irksome of th...

It was in the year 1801, whilst yet at school, that I made my first literary acquaintance. This was with a gentleman now dead, and little, at any time, known in the literary wor...

[32] This chapter is composed of four articles contributed to _Tait's Magazine_ under the title of "Samuel Taylor Coleridge: By the English Opium-Eater." They appeared, respecti...

[88] Composed of articles in _Tait's Magazine_ for January, February, and April 1839, as revised and recast by De Quincey, published, with some additions, for the second volume...

That night--the first of my personal intercourse with Wordsworth--the first in which I saw him face to face--was (it is little, indeed, to say) memorable: it was marked by a cha...

A circumstance which, as much as anything, expounded to every eye the characteristic distinctions between Wordsworth and Southey, and would not suffer a stranger to forget it fo...

My first visit to the Wordsworths had been made in November, 1807; but, on that occasion, from the necessity of saving the Michaelmas Term at Oxford, for which I had barely left...

In February, as I have said, of 1809, I quitted Allan Bank; and, from that time until the depth of summer, Miss Wordsworth was employed in the task she had volunteered, of renew...

Immediately below the little village of Clappersgate, in which the Scottish ladies resided--Mrs. Millar and Mrs. Cullen--runs the wild mountain river called the _Brathay_, which...

Passing onwards from Brathay, a ride of about forty minutes carries you to the summit of a wild heathy tract, along which, even at noonday, few sounds are heard that indicate th...

It was at Mr. Wordsworth's house that I first became acquainted with Professor (then Mr.) Wilson, of Elleray. I have elsewhere described the impression which he made upon me at...

From the Lakes, as I have mentioned before, I went annually southwards--chiefly to Somersetshire or to London, and more rarely to Edinburgh. In my Somersetshire visits, I never...