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 ...  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.  When Sir Eustace’s condition, as he describes it, seems most hopeless, its alleviation arrives through a religious conversion.  There has been throughout present to him the conscience of “a soul defiled with every stain.”  And at the same moment, under circumstances unexplained, his spiritual ear is purged to hear a “Heavenly Teacher.”  The voice takes the form of the touching and effective hymn, which has doubtless found a place since in many an evangelical hymn-book, beginning

  “Pilgrim, burthen’d with thy sin,
  Come the way to Zion’s gate;
  There, till Mercy let thee in,
  Knock and weep, and watch and wait. 
    Knock!—­He knows the sinner’s cry. 
    Weep!—­He loves the mourner’s tears. 
    Watch!—­for saving grace is nigh
    Wait,—­till heavenly light appears.”

And the hymn is followed by the pathetic confession on the sufferer’s part that this blessed experience, though it has brought him the assurance of heavenly forgiveness, still leaves him, “though elect,” looking sadly back on his old prosperity, and bearing, but unresigned, the prospect of an old ago spent amid his present gloomy surroundings.  And yet Crabbe, with a touch of real imaginative insight, represents him in his final utterance as relapsing into a vague hope of some day being restored to his old prosperity: