"And now began the later and fiercer stage of my long sufferings;
without using a disproportionate expression, I might say of my
agony. For I now suffered for upwards of sixteen weeks the physical
anguish of hunger in various degrees of intensity, but as bitter,
perhaps, as ever any human being can have suffered who has survived
it. I would not needlessly harass my readers' feelings by a detail
of all that I endured; for extremities such as these, under any
circumstances of heaviest misconduct or guilt, cannot be
contemplated, even in description, without a rueful pity that is
painful to the natural goodness of the human heart. Let it suffice
to say that a few fragments of bread from the breakfast table of
one individual, and these at uncertain intervals, constituted my
whole support. . . . I was houseless, and seldom slept under a
roof."
After a time, however, he slept in an unoccupied house, or unoccupied
save by a child of ten years,--as forlorn as himself. She slept here,
and was much tormented by the fear of ghosts. She hailed his advent with
great pleasure as a protection from supernatural visitants; and when the
weather became cold, he used to hold her in his arms that she might
gain the additional comfort of a little warmth. He says they lay upon
the floor "with a bundle of cursed law papers for a pillow, and no
covering save an old cloak." He slept only from exhaustion, and could
hear himself moaning in his sleep; but his little companion, relieved of
fear, and perhaps a little better fed than he, slept soundly and well at
all times. He learned to love the poor child as his partner in
wretchedness. He made also one other friend, a girl of the streets,
named Ann, who was kind to him, and whom he remembered with gratitude to
the end of his life. He says of her:--
"This person was a young woman, and one of that unhappy class who
subsist upon the wages of prostitution. . . . Yet, no! let me not
class thee, O noble-minded Ann, with that order of women; let me
find, if it be possible, some gentler name to designate the
condition of her to whose bounty and compassion--ministering to my
necessities when all the world had forsaken me--I owe it that I am
at this time alive. . . . She was not as old as myself. . . . O
youthful benefactress! how often in succeeding years, standing in
solitary places and thinking of thee with grief of heart and
perfect love,--how often have I wished that, as in ancient times
the curse of a father was believed to have a supernatural power,
and to pursue its object with a fatal necessity of
self-fulfilment,--even so the benediction of a heart oppressed with
gratitude might have a like prerogative,--might have power given it
from above to chase, to haunt, to waylay, to overtake, to pursue
thee into the central darkness of a London brothel, or (if it were
possible) into the darkness of the grave, there to awaken thee with
an authentic message of peace and forgiveness and final
reconciliation!"
The youthful wanderer was finally discovered by his friends, and placed
by his wish at Oxford, where about a year after, in 1804, he began the
occasional use of opium. He did this merely as a means of pleasure at
first, like the drinking of wine, and took it only at stated intervals
for a period of eight years. He seemed to experience no harm from its
use in this way; but a very severe neuralgic affection of the stomach
(caused, it is supposed, by his privations in London primarily)
developed itself at the end of that time, and he resorted to the
habitual use of opium as a relief from pain.
He was married in 1816 to Miss Margaret Simpson, and lived with her in a
cottage at Grasmere. Of this wife, with whom he lived for twenty-one
years, he thus writes:--
"But watching by my pillow, or defrauding herself of sleep to bear
me company through the heavy watches of the night, sat my Electra;
for thou, beloved M., dear companion of my later years, thou wast
my Electra! and neither in nobility of mind nor in long-suffering
affection would'st permit that a Grecian sister should excel an
English wife. For thou thoughtest not much to stoop to humble
offices of kindness, and to servile ministrations of tenderest
affection; to wipe away for years the unwholesome dews upon the
forehead, or to refresh the lips when parched and baked with fever;
nor even when thy own peaceful slumbers had by long sympathy become
infected with the spectacle of my dread contest with phantoms and
shadowy enemies that oftentimes bade me 'sleep no more'--not even
then did'st thou utter a complaint or any murmur, nor withdraw thy
angelic smiles, nor shrink from thy service of love, more than did
Electra of old. For she too, though she was a Grecian woman, and
the daughter of the king of men, yet wept sometimes, and hid her
face in her robe!"
Hard indeed, no doubt, was the wife's lot through all those years; but
the world will never have more than this mere glimpse of her sorrow and
her devotion. Yet to a person gifted with imagination, it is enough. He
can reconstruct from it that long period of patient watchfulness and
unwearied devotion; he can share her hopes when her loved one makes a
battle with his enemy, her tears when he is defeated, her rapture when
he makes a seeming conquest, the bitterness of her anguish when he again
falls. For all this was gone through, not once, but three times, in the
course of De Quincey's life. It was not until he felt that death was
inevitable if he continued the use of opium (which he was then taking in
enormous quantities) that he ever resolved to give up its use. He knew
he must die if he kept on, he thought he should die if he gave it up,
but he determined to make the effort. His studies had long been
abandoned; he could not even read. For two years he had read but one
book; he shrank from study with a sense of infantine powerlessness that
gave him great anguish when he remembered what his mind had formerly
been. From misery and suffering, he might almost be described as being
in a dormant state. His wife managed all the affairs of the household,
and attended to necessary business. He did not lose his moral
sensibilities or aspirations, as so many opium eaters do, but his
intellect seemed dead. His brain had become a theatre, which presented
spectacles of more than earthly splendor, but as often painful as
pleasurable. He had no control now of the dreams which haunted him. He
learned now the awful tyranny of the human face.
"Upon the rocking waters of the ocean, the human face began to
appear: the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to
the heavens,--faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards
by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries; my
agitation was infinite, my mind tossed and surged with the ocean. .
. . I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with
mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal
pyramids. I was kissed with cancerous kisses by crocodiles; and
laid confounded with all unutterable slimy things, among reeds and
Nilotic mud. . . . The cursed crocodile became to me the object of
more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with
him for centuries."