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 accidental.

In the concluding pages of his _Confessions_, De Quincey writes: "The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both powerfully affected.

Buildings, landscapes, etc., were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive ...