Explore "Confessions of a Book-Lover" by E. Walter Walters on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
HOW ruthlessly Webster strips the word ‘confession' of the tender associations woven around it by the hand of the gentle essayist! A confession, he informs us, is the acknowledgement of a crime or fault, open declaration of guilt, &c. True, a brighter note is struck in further definitions; but I cannot find in any book at my command a definition of the word as used, for example, by Thomas De Quincey. The fact that De Quincey took opium was, I believe, known long before he wrote his _Confessions_. He personally avers that his object was to emblazon the power of opium, not over bodily disease and pain, but over the grander and more shadowy world of dreams. He desired
Humbly to confess / A penitential loneliness.