aculty as the
opium. The idealizing tendency existed in the dream-theatre of my
childhood; but the preternatural strength of its action and colouring was
first developed after the confluence of the _two_ causes. The reader must
suppose me at Oxford: twelve years and a half are gone by; I am in the
glory of youthful happiness; but I have now first tampered with opium; and
now first the agitations of my childhood reopened in strength, now first
they swept in upon the brain with power and the grandeur of recovered
life, under the separate and the concurring inspirations of opium.

Once again, after twelve years' interval, the nursery of my childhood
expanded before me--my sister was moaning in bed--I was beginning to be
restless with fears not intelligible to myself. Once again the nurse, but
now dilated to colossal proportions, stood as upon some Grecian stage with
her uplifted hand, and like the superb Medea standing alone with her
children in the nursery at Corinth,[19] smote me senseless to the ground.
Again, I was in the chamber with my sister's corpse--again the pomps of
life rose up in silence, the glory of summer, the frost of death. Dream
formed itself mysteriously within dream; within these Oxford dreams
remoulded itself continually the trance in my sister's chamber,--the blue
heavens, the everlasting vault, the soaring billows, the throne steeped in
the thought (but not the sight) of "Him that sate thereon;" the flight,
the pursuit, the irrecoverable steps of my return to earth. Once more the
funeral procession gathered; the priest in his white surplice stood
waiting with a book in his hand by the side of an open grave, the
sacristan with his shovel; the coffin sank; the _dust to dust_ descended.
Again I was in the church on a heavenly Sunday morning. The golden
sunlight of God slept amongst the heads of his apostles, his martyrs, his
saints; the fragment from the litany--the fragment from the clouds--awoke
again the lawny beds that went up to scale the heavens--awoke again the
shadowy arms that moved downwards to meet them. Once again, arose the
swell of the anthem--the burst of the Hallelujah chorus--the storm--the
trampling movement of the choral passion--the agitation of my own
trembling sympathy--the tumult of the choir--the wrath of the organ. Once
more I, that wallowed, became he that rose up to the clouds. And now in
Oxford, all was bound up into unity; the first state and the last were
melted into each o