might
be made, in some way equally dim, the ransom for winning back her love.

* * * * *

Here pause, reader! Imagine yourself seated in some cloud-scaling swing,
oscillating under the impulse of lunatic hands; for the strength of lunacy
may belong to human dreams, the fearful caprice of lunacy, and the malice
of lunacy, whilst the _victim_ of those dreams may be all the more
certainly removed from lunacy; even as a bridge gathers cohesion and
strength from the increasing resistance into which it is forced by
increasing pressure. Seated in such a swing, fast as you reach the lowest
point of depression, may you rely on racing up to a starry altitude of
corresponding ascent. Ups and downs you will see, heights and depths, in
our fiery course together, such as will sometimes tempt you to look shyly
and suspiciously at me, your guide, and the ruler of the oscillations.
Here, at the point where I have called a halt, the reader has reached the
lowest depth in my nursery afflictions. From that point, according to the
principles of _art_ which govern the movement of these Confessions, I had
meant to launch him upwards through the whole arch of ascending visions
which seemed requisite to balance the sweep downwards, so recently
described in his course. But accidents of the press have made it
impossible to accomplish this purpose in the present month's journal.
There is reason to regret that the advantages of position, which were
essential to the full effect of passages planned for equipoise and mutual
resistance, have thus been lost. Meantime, upon the principle of the
mariner who rigs a _jury_-mast in default of his regular spars, I find my
resource in a sort of "jury" peroration--not sufficient in the way of a
balance by its _proportions_, but sufficient to indicate the _quality_ of
the balance which I had contemplated. He who has _really_ read the
preceding parts of these present Confessions, will be aware that a
stricter scrutiny of the past, such as was natural after the whole economy
of the dreaming faculty had been convulsed beyond all precedents on
record, led me to the conviction that not one agency, but two agencies,
had co-operated to the tremendous result. The nursery experience had been
the ally and the natural co-efficient of the opium. For that reason it was
that the nursery experience has been narrated. Logically, it bears the
very same relation to the convulsions of the dreaming f