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These included Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts , and in his later and more important period, Suspiria De Profundis , The Spanish Military Nun , The English Mail-Coach, and Vision of Sudden Death . In 1853 he began a coll. ed. of his works, which was the main occupation of his later years.
Of De Quincey's autobiographical sketches the best known is his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater . This is only partly a record of opium dreams, and its chief interest lies in glimpses it gives us of De Quincey's own life and wanderings. This should be followed by Suspiria de Profundis , which is chiefly a record of gloomy and terrible dreams produced by opiates.
Other pianoforte composers have given us more warm and vivid color, richer sensual effects of tone, more wild and bizarre combination, perhaps even greater sweetness in melody; but we look in vain elsewhere for the spiritual passion and poetry, the aspiration and longing, the lofty humanity, which make the Beethoven sonatas the suspiria de pro-fundis of the composer's inner life.
He seems to have been suckled from birth at the breast of that Mater Tenebrarum, our Lady of Darkness, whom De Quincey in one of his 'Suspiria de Profundis' describes among the Semnai Theai, the august goddesses, the mysterious foster-nurses of suffering humanity. He cannot say the simplest thing without giving it a ghastly or sinister turn.
The general interest which is manifested in De Quincey personally is also very much due to the fact that he was an opium-eater, and an opium-eater willing to breathe into the public ear the peculiarities of his situation and its hidden mysteries, or "suspiria de profundis."
Of Mauricus, see Plin. Ep. 4, 22: quo viro nihil firmius, nihil verius. Also Plin. Ep. 3, 11. Videre, sc. Domitianum. Aspici, sc. a Domitiano. For difference in the signification in these words, cf. 40: viso aspectoque, note. Suspiria subscriberentur. Rubor. Redness, referring to the complexion of Dom., which was such as to conceal a blush, cf. Suet. Dom. 18: vultu ruboris pleno.
Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow in Suspiria de Profundis and the Dream Fugue in the Mail Coach are among the most musical, the most poetic, and the most imaginative of the author's productions. General Characteristics. De Quincey's essays show versatility, scholarly exactness, and great imaginative power. His fame, however, rests in a large degree upon his style.
These are among the suspiria de profundis of a life which her husband compared to "a great joyless stoicism," writing to the brother, whom he had proposed as a third on their first home-coming: "Solitude, indeed, is sad as Golgotha, but it is not mad like Bedlam; absence of delirium is possible only for me in solitude"; a sentiment almost literally acted on.
An incident that had moved her strongly only a few weeks before, was a strange bit of reminiscence that could hardly be called a story. Ben had brought home a volume of De Quincey, and "Suspiria de Profundis" was among the papers.
The Confessions as a narrative is related to the Autobiography, while its poetical passages range it with the Suspiria and the Mail-Coach. De Quincey seems to have believed that he was creating in such writings a new literary type of prose poetry or prose phantasy; he had, with his splendid dreams as subject-matter, lifted prose to heights hitherto scaled only by the poet.
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