In his autobiography from 1785-1803, De Quincey[30] remembered feeling that life was finished and blighted for him at the age of six, up to which time the influence of his sister three years older had brooded over him.
His first remembrance, however, is of a dream of terrific grandeur before he was two, which seemed to indicate that his dream tendencies were constitutional and not due to morphine, but the chill was upon the first glimpse that this was a world of evil. He had been brought up in great seclusion from all knowledge of poverty and oppression in a silent garden with three sisters, but the rumor that a female servant had treated one of them rudely just before her death plunged him into early pessimism. He felt that little Jane would come back certainly in the spring with the roses, and he was glad that his utter misery with the blank anarchy confusion which her death brought could not be completely remembered. He stole into the chamber where her corpse lay, and as he stood, a solemn wind, the saddest he ever heard, that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand centuries, blew, and that same hollow Memnonian wind he often had heard since, and it brought back the open summer window and the corpse. A vault above opened into the sky, and he slept and dreamed there, standing by her, he knew not how long; a worm that could not die was at his heart, for this was the holy love between children that could not perish. The funeral was full of darkness and despair for him, and after it he sought solitude, gazed into the heavens to see his sister till he was tired, and realized that he was alone. Thus, before the end of his sixth year, with a mind already adolescent, although with a retarded body, the minor tone of life became dominant and his awakening to it was hard.
As a penniless schoolboy wandering the streets of London at night, he was on familiar and friendly terms of innocent relationship with a number of outcast women. In his misery they were to him simply sisters in calamity, but he found in them humanity, disinterested generosity, courage, and fidelity. One night, after he had walked the streets for weeks with one of these friendless girls who had not completed her sixteenth year, as they sat on the steps of a house, he grew very ill, and had she not rushed to buy from her slender purse cordials and tenderly ministered to and revived him, he would have died. Many years later he used to wander past this house, and he recalled with real tenderness this youthful friendship; he longed again to meet the "noble-minded Ann ----" with whom he had so often conversed familiarly "_more Socratico_," whose betrayer he had vainly sought to punish, and yearned to hear from her in order to convey to her some authentic message of gratitude, peace, and forgiveness.