e 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 downward 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 in
the dust, became he that rose up to the clouds. And now all was
bound up into unity; the first state and the last were melted into
each other as in some sunny, glorifying haze. For high in heaven
hovered a gleaming host of faces, veiled with wings, around the
pillows of the dying children. And such beings sympathize equally
with sorrow that grovels and with sorrow that soars. Such beings
pity alike the children that are languishing in death, and the
children that live only to languish in tears."

This extract is important as showing that when a mere child, knowing
nothing of the fatal drug, he had visions similar to those which filled
his after years. At Oxford he had begun the use of opium--but his first
vision was a repetition of one of his childish years, and it leads us to
infer that his own vivid imagination bore an important part in the
brilliant dreams which followed his taking of opium. No person of
ordinary mind could induce those gorgeous and bewildering dreams by its
use. In his case the drug acted upon a mind fitted to see visions and
dream dreams even without its use; and the result was that gorgeous and
bewildering phantasmagoria which he so eloquently describes.

The causes of his first indulging in opium may be briefly glanced at
here. At seventeen, he ran away from the school at which he had been
placed by his guardians, his father now being dead. He wished to enter
college at once, and it appears was well prepared to do so, and had made
earnest representations to his guardians upon the subject, as he was
unhappy where he was, and under a very unsuitable master. But they would
not consent, and, like one of his brothers who ran away from school and
went to sea, he borrowed a little money and stole quietly away to
Wales.

The brother had left school, it appears, with good reason, being
brutally trea