text:  The relation in which the case stands to my latter opium experiences is this:--Those vast clouds of gloomy grandeur which overhung my dreams at all stages of opium but which grew into the darkest of miseries in the last and that haunting of the human face which latterly towered into a curse--were they not partly derived from this childish experience? It is certain that from the essential solitude in which my childhood was passed; from the depth of my sensibility; from the exaltation of this by the resistance of an intellect too prematurely developed it resulted that the terrific grief which I passed through drove a shaft for me into the worlds of death and darkness which never again closed and through which it might be said that I ascended and descended at will according to the temper of my spirits