In relation to power, it is, like solitude, the open
heaven through which the grandeurs of eternity flow into the penetralian
recesses of the human heart, after that once the faculties of thought,
or the sensibilities, have been powerfully awakened. Sensibility _had_
been thus awakened in De Quincey, through grief occasioned by the loss
of a sister, his favorite and familiar playmate,--a grief so profound,
that he, somewhere, in speaking of it, anticipates the certainty of its
presence in the hour of death; and thought, also, had been prematurely
awakened, both under the influence of this overmastering pathos of
sorrow, and because of his strong predisposition to meditation. Both the
pathos and the meditative tendencies were increased by the halcyon peace
of his childhood. In a memorial of the poet Schiller, he speaks of that
childhood as the happiest, "of which the happiness has survived and
expressed itself, not in distinct records, but in deep affection, in
abiding love, and the hauntings of meditative power.
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