daring than it is important: "In strict philosophic truth, Christianity did not reach its mature period, even of infancy, until the days of the Protestant Reformation." This casts a light before and after. And it is a sublime idea to which it leads; the idea of the whole human race, through long millenniums, gazing upon the handwriting of God, and only in the slow course of centuries spelling it out. There is also, in the articles before us, an exactness of conception as to what Christianity really is, which sets De Quincey at a quite immeasurable distance from your general Christian litterateur. He does not confound it with "virtue," or any conceivable ethical theory; he does not, with a mouth homage which is but disguised atheism, lay artistic hands. on Christianity, and take it, like any old mythology, to play a part, or to act as a background, in an art novel; he recog-. nizes the perennial, supernatural element inextricably involved in its very idea, the continual action from age to age of the Spirit of God on the mind of man. In various parts of his works, indeed, De Quincey exhibits a profound insight into the spirit and nature of Christianity, — its essential distinction from Paganism, as a system of doctrines and morals, and not a mere ritual, and its absolute agreement with what is darkest and deepest in the human heart and history.

We have lingered perhaps too long on the subject of De Quincey's strictly intellectual powers; but we regret the less having done so, because it is here that our remarks may be of the greatest practical value. All men acknowledge De Quincey's genius; all men appreciate, more or less, the grandeur and the delicacy of his imagination; all own the supremacy of his command over the English tongue. But we think it is not so generally conceded, that he is a substantially valuable thinker; that there is not only treasure

of intellectual amusement, that there are not only masterpieces of style, within the compass of his works, but that there is much also of that intellectual stuff with which one might build up his system of opinion, or on which he might nourish his highest powers. Even this we have not so much proved, as indicated the means of proving. We might have enlarged on the vast stores of his learning, and still more on the perfect command he has over them all; how with the true poetic might he can fling a subject into the furnace of his genius, shapeless, rugged, and drossy as it may be, and show us it again flowing out in the purity and brightness of molten gold; how at eleven he was a brilliant Latin scholar, and at fifteen could talk Greek, with such fluency and correctness, that his master said he could address an Athenian mob better than his instructor an English; how he studied mathematics, and metaphysics, and theology, and scholastic logic, and all which could give exercise to his soul in the herculean youth of its powers. But we say, no We think we have said enough to make good our point. We differ from De Quincey in several respects: we fear that, in theology, we march nearer to the standard of Calvin than he would approve; we have already intimated our discontent with certain of his arguments on the identity of the early Christians and Essenes; we think he has under-. rated John Foster, and he has certainly outstripped our charity in the case of Judas: but yet we esteem him, and we think our readers will agree with us in esteeming him, a really powerful thinker, whose criticism upon human knowledge, and whose direct contributions to its stores, are worthy of being eagerly seized and earnestly scrutinized by thoughtful minds.

more.

We have spoken hitherto of what may be figured as the skeleton or bare framework of De Quincey's mind. We

have found him here comparable with Ricardo. But now we pass to a different delineation. We leave Ricardo and all dry algebraists, geometricians, metaphysicians, and scholastics behind. We come to look upon the glorious garment of sympathy in which De Quincey's mind is robed, and his grand imaginative eye, whose glance can clothe every algebraic formula in light as of the stars. He himself speaks of the "two hemispheres, as it were, that compose the total world of human power, - mathematics on the one hand, poetry on the other;" and we must think that he can expatiate in both. It is our belief, indeed, that every mind of a very high order can. It is of beneficent arrangement that men in general are furnished with distinct tendencies and powers: it is well that each man does his own work best, and even has a certain suppressed feeling that his special work is the most important in this world. But it is a positive and confounding error to apply the general rule to the few individual minds which rise far above the common level. Of these minds we think no assertion can be made with less of hesitancy or qualification, than that their powers and sympathies are diverse. We can trace the smothered gleams of a burning imagination through the works of Jonathan Edwards, like volcanic fires kept under by the solid ground, and towered cities, and stable mountains, of some Italy or Trinacria. Plato was the greatest prose poet that ever lived; the softening radiance of poetic light which played over the massive intellect of Luther gave it a beauty which will never fade; and we have no doubt that imaginative fire burned in the unwavering, far-searching eye of Calvin. To borrow a suggestion from those words of De Quincey regarding the hemispheres, we would say, that all great men have an intellectual night and an intellectual day: in the still, vast night, when no color rests on

the earth, and the stars in their courses are treading the fields of immensity, they look up calm and abstracted, to learn, by pure, unimpassioned thought, the laws of nature and of truth; in the blaze of day's sunlight, when the world is arrayed in its robe of many colors, and clouds, waves, and forests are rejoicing in beauty, they also share the joy, and take of the glories of nature to clothe the thoughts revealed to them in the silent night.

We are not prepared to say that what De Quincey has actually accomplished will prove sufficient to vindicate for him a place among the mighty ones of bygone ages, among the few who occupy the intellectual thrones of the world; but we do say, that there are unmistakeable traces that his natural endowment was of this royal order, that, in the two great forms of intellect the imaginative and the abstractive- he was magnificently gifted. The reader has seen how he was affected by Ricardo's political economy, it was a case of positive, rapturous delight. But now hear this: "A little before that time (1799), Wordsworth had published the first edition in a single volume) of the Lyrical Ballads;' and into this had been introduced Mr. Coleridge's poem of the Ancient Mariner,' as the contribution of an anonymous friend. It would be directing the reader's attention too much to myself, if I were to linger upon this, the greatest event in the unfolding of my own mind. Let me say, in one word, that, at a period when neither the one nor the other writer was valued by the public,—both having a long warfare to accomplish of contumely and ridicule, before they could rise into their present estimation, I found in their poems 'the ray of a new morning,' and an absolute revelation of untrodden worlds, teeming with power and beauty as yet unsuspected among men." These are the words of De Quincey. Now, we think it a very remarkable

fact, and one to which, in forming any estimate of the author of whom we treat, great importance is to be attached, that he was the first, or among the first, to hail the rising, in quarters of the literary heaven so widely apart, and with such an antithetic diversity of radiance of two such stars as Wordsworth and Ricardo. The light of Ricardo is perhaps, in every sense, good and bad, the driest in English literature; the general intellect even of practical England turns away from it. Wordsworth is, of all poets, the furthest removed from the practical world: he is the listener to the voice of woods, the watcher of the wreathing of the clouds; he can drink a tender and intense pleasure from the waving of the little flower, from the form of its star-shaped shadow; he can even enter, by inexpressible delicacy of poetic sympathy, into the feelings which his own creative power imparts, and wish that little flower

"Conscious of half the pleasure that it gives:"

from him, too, the general intellect of practical England, as proved in the case of Arnold, turns away dissatisfied. In the range of De Quincey's sympathies and the sympathies are the voices or the ministers of the powers, the leaves by which the plant drinks in the air of heaven-there was compass for both.

It is no fable of poetry or dream of a fevered brain, that the human mind is a macrocosm of nature; it is a fact to which even physiological science is now according her assent, and which a psychological comparison of the intellects of the great and the small in all ages would irresistibly demonstrate. Weakness of intellect and littleness of intellect are found, when well examined, to mean narrowness of intellect: trace men, through all their grades, from those humble forms of the "world school," where