daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "the golden, beaming sun looks
like a dull orange, or a red billiard ball."--_Introd. to Biog. Lit._,
p. clxii. And, upon this same analogy, psychological experiences of
deep suffering or joy first attain their entire fulness of expression
when they are reverberated from dreams. The reader must, therefore,
suppose me at Oxford; more than twelve years are gone by; I am in the
glory of youth: 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.]

Once again, after twelve years' interval, the nursery of my childhood
expanded before me: my sister was moaning in bed; and I was beginning
to be restless with fears not intelligible to myself. Once again the
elder nurse, but now dilated to colossal proportions, stood as upon
some Grecian stage with her uplifted hand, and, like the superb Medea
towering amongst her children in the nursery at Corinth, [13] smote me
senseless to the ground. Again I am in the chamber with my sister's
corpse, again the pomps of life rise up in silence, the glory of summer,
the Syrian sunlights, the frost of death. Dream forms itself mysteriously
within dream; within these Oxford dreams remoulds 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 "_Who_ might sit thereon;" the flight, the pursuit, the
irrecoverable steps of my return to earth. Once more the funeral
procession gathers; the priest, in his white surplus, stands waiting with
a book by the side of an open grave; the sacristan is waiting with his
shovel; the coffin has sunk; the _dust to dust_ has 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