This sort of mystery is always connected with dreams. They owe their
very existence to darkness, which withdraws them from the material
limitations of every-day life; they are shifted to an ideal
_proscenium_; their _dramatis personae_, however familiar nominally, and
however much derived from material suggestions, are yet in all their
motions obedient to an alien centre as opposite as is possible to the
ordinary centre about which the mere mechanism of life revolves. We
should therefore expect beforehand in De Quincey an overruling tendency
towards this remote architecture of dreams. The careful reader of his
"Autobiographic Sketches" will remember, that, at the early age of
seven, and before he knew of even the existence of opium, the least
material hint which bordered on the shadowy was sufficient to lift him
up into aerial structures, and to lead his infant footsteps amongst the
clouds. Such hints, after his little sister's death, were furnished by
certain expressions of the Litany, by pictures in the stained windows of
the church, and by the tumult of the organ.
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