Suspiria De Profundis

Conceived as a sequel to Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, this sequence of prose meditations by Thomas De Quincey descends into memory, grief, and the strange architecture of dreams. He writes of the death of his sister in early childhood, of the mind as a palimpsest where nothing is ever truly erased, and of the three Ladies of Sorrow who preside over human suffering. The prose is rhythmic and incantatory, closer to poetry than to ordinary essay, and it stands among the finest examples of Romantic dream-writing in English. Opium colors the whole, sharpening some passages into vision and blurring others into reverie. Free to download as a PDF and EPUB.