The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, when o’er the sheep-track’s maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glistening haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head;
This shade he worships for its golden hues,
And makes (not knowing) that which he pursues.”
It is singular, and perhaps owing to the temperature and weather likely to prevail in that early part of summer, that more appearances of the spectre have been witnessed on Whitsunday than on any other day. ↩
“The sorcerer’s flower,” and “the sorcerer’s altar”—These are names still clinging to the anemone of the Brocken, and to an altar-shaped fragment of granite near one of the summits; and it is not doubted that they both connect themselves, through links of ancient tradition, with the gloomy realities of Paganism, when the whole Hartz and the Brocken formed for a very long time the last asylum to a ferocious but perishing idolatry. ↩
I need not tell any lover of Handel that his oratorio of “Israel in Egypt” contains a chorus familiarly known by this name. The words are: “And he gave them hail stones for rain; fire, mingled with hail, ran along upon the ground.” ↩
Mother of the World is the Arabic title of Damascus. That it was before Abraham—i.e. already an old establishment much more than a thousand years before the siege of Troy, and than two thousand years before our Christian era—may be inferred from Genesis 15:2; and, by the general consent of all eastern races, Damascus is accredited as taking precedency in age of all cities to the west of the Indus. ↩
Palmyra had not yet reached its meridian splendour of Grecian development, as afterwards near the age of Aurelian; but it was already a noble city. ↩
Though a Prophet was not therefore and in virtue of that character an Evangelist, yet every Evangelist was necessarily in the scriptural sense a Prophet. For let it be remembered that a Prophet did not mean a Predicter, or Foreshower of events, except derivatively and inferentially. What was a Prophet in the uniform scriptural sense? He was a man who drew aside the curtain from the secret counsels of Heaven. He declared, or made public, the previously hidden truths of God: and, because future events might chance to involve divine truth, therefore a revealer of future events might happen so far to be a Prophet. Yet still small was that part of a Prophet’s functions which concerned the foreshowing of events; and not necessarily any part. ↩
Colophon
Suspiria de Profundis
was published between 1845 and 1891 by
Thomas De Quincey.
This ebook was produced for
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and is based on transcriptions produced in 2016 by
Alex Cabal
for
Standard Ebooks,
a transcription produced in 2007 by
Robert Connal, Marcia Brooks, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg,
a second transcription produced in 2004 by
Anne Soulard, Charles Franks, David Widger, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg,
and on digital scans available at the
Internet Archive, the HathiTrust Digital Library, and Google Books.
The cover page is adapted from
Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On,
a painting completed in 1908 by
Edmund Dulac.
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