?
and again:--
"Few--_none_--find what they love or could have loved,
Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
Necessity of loving having removed
Antipathies"?
This, then, is the nearest approach to human love,--the removal of all
antipathies! But even these
"recur erelong,
Envenomed with irrevocable wrong:
And circumstance--that unspiritual god
And miscreator--makes and helps along
Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,
Whose touch turns hope to dust,--the dust which all have trod."
De Quincey, on the other hand, in whose heart there was laid no such
hollow basis for infidelity toward the master-passions of humanity,
repeated the pomps of joy or of sorrow, as evolved out of universal
human nature, and as, through sunshine and tempest, typified in the
outside world,--but never for one instant did he seek alliance, on the
one side, with the shallow enthusiasm of the raving Bacchante, or, on
the other, with the overshadowing despotism of gloom; nor can there be
found on a single page of all his writings the slightest hint indicating
even a latent sympathy with the power which builds only to crush, or
with the intellect that denies, and that against the dearest objects of
human faith fulminates its denials and shocking recantations solely for
the purposes of scorn.
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