This disturbed me very much less than the vast expansion of time.

Sometimes I seemed to have lived for seventy or a hundred years in one night." Compare Crabbe's sufferer:-- "There was I fix'd, I know not how, Condemn'd for untold years to stay Yet years were not;--one dreadful _Now_ Endured no change of night or day." Again, the rapid transition from one distant land to another, from the Pole to the Tropics, is common to both experiences.

The "ill-favoured ones" who are charged with Sir Eustace's expiation fix him at one moment "-- on the trembling ball That crowns the steeple's quiv'ring spire" just as the Opium-Fiend fixes De Quincey for centuries at the summit of Pagodas.

Sir Eustace is accused of sins he had never committed:-- "Harmless I was: yet hunted down For treasons to my soul unfit; I've been pursued through many a town For crimes that petty knaves commit." Even so the opium-eater imagines himself flying from the wrath of Oriental Deities.

"I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the Ibis and the Crocodile trembled at." The morbid inspiration is clearly the same in both cases, and there can be little doubt that Crabbe's poem owes its inception to opium, and that the frame work was devised by him for the utilisation of his dreams.
But a curious and unexpected _denouement_ awaits the reader.