DE QUINCEY, Thomas

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Flowers that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their coloring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children - honored as the jewelry of God.

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Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.
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Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.

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Cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate...

Cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate tenderness to their young when deprived of them; and, in short, I am not ashamed to profess a deep love for these quiet creatures.

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Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

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For if once a man, whose talk is of oxen, should become conscious of himself as a being through whom the glory of God is revealed, and should look steadily at his own nature and destiny, he would tremble at the responsibilities laid upon him. For man is the servant and interpreter of a great mystery. Vast chains of relation connect him with all things. The heavens are not too high for him, nor the depths too profound. Through sorrow, through suffering, through mighty hopes and fears, the human spirit is trained for its unknown inheritance; and, in the silence of the grave itself, there remain the echoes of that which is immortal.

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But I took it- and in an hour- oh, heavens! What a revulsion! What an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of inner spirit! What an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes: this negative effect wss swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me- in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea …for all human woes; here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages.

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