Repeats,--but with what
marvellous transformations! For hardly is its earliest section passed,
when, for all its future course, it is masked by a mighty trouble. No
longer does it flow along its natural path, and beneath the open sky,
but, like the sacred Alpheus, runs
"Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to the sunless sea."
Yet, amid the "briny tides" of that sea, amid turmoil and perplexity and
the saddest of mysteries, it preserves its earliest gentleness, and its
inward, noiseless peace, till once more it gushes up toward the sweet
heaven through the Arethusan font of death. Easily, then, is it to be
seen why De Quincey himself continually reverted, both in his conscious
reminiscences and through the subconscious relapses of dreams, from a
life clouded and disguised in its maturer years, to the unmasked purity
of its earliest heaven. And what from the vast desert, what from the
fatal wreck of life, was he to look back upon, for even an imaginary
solace, if not upon the rich argosies that spread their happier sails
above a calmer sea? We are forcibly reminded of the dream which
Milton[A] gives to his Christ in the desert, hungry and tired:--
"There he slept,
And dreamed, as appetite is wont to dream,
Of meats and drinks, Nature's refreshment sweet.
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