For him, compensation is available through the agency of opium: saddened by the low wages of his acquaintances, he draws from ‘opium some means of consoling [himlself. Addicts and the poor share forms of consumption as the mode of reconciliation to their feelings of displeasure.

ruling principle of gothic architecture was that its structures should resemble those of an organic being.39 In which ever way we look at it, De Quincey's use of organic imagery to figure the revolutionaries imbues them with an inspirational power that obscures the political contempt he feels for them.

‘swarming with human life’ (C, 73), threaten his sanity. The overabundance of organic growth, such as that represented by a forest, was a familiar theme in gothic imagery, as the immense and unknowable power that produced it became an object of sublime terror.

Fact and fiction merge, and history and cultural difference are effaced.

the sense of repetition—the fact that 1793 is repeated in 1830, and will be repeated again and again throughout the century—in form presents a familiar scenario for De Quincey. His opium dreams recounted in Confessions and its sequel, Suspiria de  Profundis, are full of coincidences and repeated events, and De Quincey's most characteristic anxiety is that of a man caught up in events that are not only beyond his control, but beyond control itself.

the term sublime should be applied to objects that provoked terror in the spectator—for example, a tiger, a storm, or a tyrant; this terror, which ‘robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning’, was experienced as a kind of negative pleasure, such as the feeling which one would experience on the brink of death.

Kant shifted the referent of the term from the terrifying object to the perceiving subject's experience of that object. In this way, the sublime became a potentially empowering model in which the subject, at first overwhelmed by terror or incomprehension, as in Burke's account, then had recourse to the faculty of Reason, and became assured of its own independent powers of consciousness.

As the title promises, the structure of ‘Walking’ is meandering, almost desultory. …. The strategy of the essay is to unsettle expectations by providing, instead of a walk between specified locations, a directionless meditation on the activity in its abstract form. As a result, the essay is not an excursion that its readers can enjoy from the safe remove of time and space, but an aimless collection of philosophical remarks, a labyrinth in which Thoreau's readers lose themselves and, in losing themselves, are implicated in the ‘truth’ of the essay

whose mode of travel proclaimed their poverty and therefore the greater probability of their being wanderers with some illicit or economically disruptive motive.

purpose—was traditionally criminal, and English laws fostered the perception of travellers as potential wanderers whose character and motives should properly fall under suspicion.

hat unrestricted travel leads to unrestricted work, and that people's labour should be directed toward specific and known ends controlled by the authorities.

n 1572, for instance, an ‘Acte for the punishment of Vacabondes’ stated: