Excerpt from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: With "Levana," "the Rosicrucians and Freemasons," "Notes From the Pocket-Book of a Late Opium-Eater," Etc Landor utters a fine and true saying when in one of his Imaginary Conversations he makes Vittoria Colonna remark that the human heart is a world of poetry the imagina tion is only its atmosphere. It is because so much of De Quincey's 'finest work is so essentially human that he has taken and is likely to retain the high place in the realm of literature which is undeniably his. Universal human interest - herein lies the sole secret of literary immortality the revelation of the individual heart, its struggles and sorrows, its keen human sympathies in contact with a difficult world, finding an unrestful ease in that power of dreaming which is so familiar and yet SO mysterious, and whose visionary emanations have never ceased to interest Since waking and Sleeping first were. Given these things, and for their interpretation the magic of a style like De Quincey's at its best, and the result is one of the rarest in litera ture - a work whose appeal out of space, out of time, is perennial, unaffected by the changing fashions and periods of the literary world. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.