On humble graves, with wickers bound;
Some risen fresh, above the ground,
Some level with the native clay:
What sleeping millions wait the sound,
'Arise, ye dead, and come away!'

Alas! they stay not for that call;
Spare me this woe! ye demons, spare!--
They come! the shrouded shadows all,--
'Tis more than mortal brain can bear;
Rustling they rise, they sternly glare
At man upheld by vital breath;
Who, led by wicked fiends, should dare
To join the shadowy troops of death!"

For about fifteen stanzas this power of wild imaginings is sustained,
and, it must be admitted, at a high level as regards diction. The reader
will note first how the impetuous flow of those visionary recollections
generates a style in the main so lofty and so strong. The poetic diction
of the eighteenth century, against which Wordsworth made his famous
protest, is entirely absent. Then again, the eight-line stanza is
something quite different from a mere aggregate of quatrains arranged in
pairs. The lines are knit together; sonnet-fashion, by the device of
interlacing the rhymes, the second, fourth, fifth, and seventh lines
rhyming. And it is singularly effective for its purpose, that of
avoiding the suggestion of a mere ballad-measure, and carrying on the
descriptive action with as little interruption as might be.

The similarity of the illusions, here attributed to insanity, to those
described by De Quincey as the result of opium, is too marked to be