82 MEMOIK OF JOHN WILSON. 



De Quincey. Strange to say, they had, when at Oxford, remained 

 unknown to each other ; but here, attracted by the same influence, 

 a mutual friendship was not long in being formed, which endured — 

 independent of years of separation and many caprices of fortune — 

 till death divided them. The graces of nature with which De 

 Quincey was endowed fascinated my father, as they did every mind 

 that came within the sphere of his extraordinary power in the days 

 of his mental vigor, ere that sad destiny — for so it may be called — 

 overtook him, which the brightness and strength of his intellect had 

 no power to avert. The first impressions of the " Opium Eater" 

 must be given in his own graphic words :* — " I remember the whole 

 scene as circumstantially as if it belonged to but yesterday. In the 

 vale of Grasmere — that peerless little vale, which you and Gray the 

 poet and so many others have joined in admiring as the very Eden 

 of English beauty, peace, and pastoral solitude — you may possibly 

 recall, even from that flying glimpse you had of it, a modern house 

 called Allaubank, standing under a low screen of woody rocks which 

 descend from the hill of Silver How, on the western side of the 

 lake. This house had been then recently built by a worthy merchant 

 of Liverpool ; but for some reason of no importance to you and me, 

 not being immediately wanted for the family of the owner, had been 

 let for a term of three years to Mr. Wordsworth. At the time I 

 speak of, both Mr. Coleridge and myself were on a visit to Mr. 

 Wordsworth ; and one room on the ground floor, designed for a 

 breakfasting-room, which commands a sublime view of the three 

 mountains — Fairfield, Arthur's Chair, and Seat Sandal (the first of 

 them within about 400 feet of the highest mountains in Great 

 Britain) — was then occupied by Mr. Coleridge as a study. On this 

 particular day, the sun having only just set, it naturally happened 

 that Mr. Coleridge — whose nightly vigils were long — had not yet 

 come down to breakfast ; meantime, and until the epoch of the Cole- 

 ridgian breakfast should arrive, his study was lawfully disposable to 

 profaner uses. Here, therefore, it was, that, opening the door hastily 

 in quest of a book, I found seated, and in earnest conversation, two 

 gentlemen : one of them my host, Mr. Wordsworth, at that time about 

 thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old; the other was a younger man 

 by good sixteen or seventeen years, in a sailor's dress, manifestly in 

 robust health, fervidus juventa, and wearing upon his countenance 



* Disinterred from th columns of the Edinburgh Literary Gazette. 



