He was an athletic man of outdoor habits, an
enthusiastic sportsman, and a lover of natural scenery. His admiration
of Wordsworth was thought to have led him to imitation of the latter, in
his _Isle of Palms_, 1812, and his other poetry.
One of Wilson's companions, in his mountain walks, was Thomas De
Quincey, who had been led by his reverence for Wordsworth and Coleridge
to take up his residence, in 1808, at Grasmere, where he occupied for
many years the cottage from which Wordsworth had removed to Allan Bank.
De Quincey was a shy, bookish man, of erratic, nocturnal habits, who
impresses one, personally, as a child of genius, with a child's
helplessness and a child's sharp observation. He was, above all things,
a magazinist. All his writings, with one exception, appeared first in
the shape of contributions to periodicals; and his essays, literary
criticisms, and miscellaneous papers are exceedingly rich and varied.
The most famous of them was his _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_,
published as a serial in the _London Magazine_, in 1821. He had begun to
take opium, as a cure for the toothache, when a student at Oxford, where
he resided from 1803 to 1808. By 1816 he had risen to eight thousand
drops of laudanum a day. For several years after this he experienced the
acutest misery, and his will suffered an entire paralysis.
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