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The Daily Dispatch: March 10, 1865., [Electronic resource] 1 1 Browse Search
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The writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume 5. (ed. John Greenleaf Whittier), Tales and Sketches (search)
world within me! Here was a panacea, a pharmakon nepenthes for all human woes; here was the secret of happiness about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages: happiness might be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket.—de Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater. he was a tall, thin personage, with a marked brow and a sunken eye. He stepped towards a closet of his apartment, and poured out a few drops of a dark liquid. His hand shook, as he raised the glass which me incessantly. I can only think of it as a total disarrangement of the whole nervous system, the jarring of all the thousand chords of sensitiveness, each nerve having its own particular pain. Essay on the Effects of Opium, London, 1763. De Quincey, in his wild, metaphysical, and eloquent, yet, in many respects, fancy sketch, considers the great evil resulting from the use of opium to be the effect produced upon the mind during the hours of sleep, the fearful inquietude of unnatural dream
The Daily Dispatch: April 16, 1861., [Electronic resource], article 2 (search)
y who has equalled Abraham Lincoln in the combined secretiveness, hypocrisy, and diabolism of his character.--The name of this man was Williams, and he flourished in London about the year 1808. --Whoever will read "Three Remarkable Murders," by De Quincey, will find the most mysterious and remorseless murderer of the nineteenth century the exact counterpart of Abraham Lincoln. This man was so civil in his demeanor that if, by chance, in passing through the street, the professional instrument whit knowing who he was or what he wanted, felt she was doomed, and, dropping down upon her knees, the involuntary exclamation was wrung from her lips, "Lord God, have mercy on me." But it is doing great injustice to this eminent "artist," as De Quincey calls him, to liken the murderer of a few families to Abraham Lincoln, or any of his Cabinet. Williams may have had the genius of Lincoln, and possibly the thirst for blood; but he never had the opportunity. Here is this man, professing for m
The Daily Dispatch: March 10, 1865., [Electronic resource], article 3 (search)
De Quincey once wrote a neat little esthetic essay on "Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts." Murders, he maintained, have their little differences and shades of merit, as well as statues, pictures, cameos and the like. The performance of Cain was the first infancy of the art, and a good many modern murders are quite as deficient in taste, finish and scenical grouping. This connoisseur of homicide admits that murder is a dangerous, as well as difficult branch, and that "if a man once indulges in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder that perhaps he thought little of at the time." He tells of a brother connoisseur who had become gloomy and misanthropically over the cleaver and paving stone character of modern murders, and looked upon the French Revolution as the great cause of degeneration in the
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