I looked to the weather side, and the summer had departed. The sea was rocking, and shaking with gathering wrath. Upon its surface sat mighty mists, which grouped themselves into arches and long cathedral aisles. Down one of these, with the fiery pace of a quarrel from a crossbow, ran a frigate right athwart our course. “Are they mad?” some voice exclaimed from our deck. “Do they woo their ruin?” But in a moment, as she was close upon us, some impulse of a heady current or local vortex gave a wheeling bias to her course, and off she forged without a shock. As she ran past us, high aloft amongst the shrouds stood the lady of the pinnace. The deeps in malice opened ahead to receive her, the billows were fierce to catch her. But far away she was borne upon the desert spaces of the sea: whilst still by sight I followed her, she ran before the howling gale, chased by angry sea-birds and by maddening billows: still I saw her, as at the moment when she ran past us, standing amongst the shrouds, with her white draperies streaming before the wind. There she stood, with hair dishevelled, one hand clutched amongst the tackling―rising, sinking, fluttering, trembling, praying―there for leagues I saw her as she stood, raising at intervals one hand to heaven, amidst the fiery crests of the pursuing waves and the raving of the storm; until at last, upon a sound from afar of malicious laughter and mockery, all was hidden forever in driving showers; and afterwards, but when I know not, nor how.
De Quincey's “Dream-Fugue” is as luxuriant and extravagant a use of metaphor as Macaulay's “Puritans” is of the use of antithesis and the balanced structure. The whole thing is a metaphor, and every part is a metaphor within a metaphor.
This is much more than mere fine writing. It is a metaphorical representation of the incident he has previously described. In that incident he was particular struck by the actions of the lady. The young man turned his horse out of the path of the coach, but some part of the coach struck one of the wheels of the gig, and as it did so, the lady involuntarily started up, throwing up her arms, and at once sank back as in a faint. De Quincey did not see her face, and hence he speaks in this description of “averted signs?” The “woman bursting her sepulchral bonds” probably refers to a tomb in Westminster Abbey which represents a woman escaping from the door of the tomb, and Death, a skeleton, is just behind her, but too late to catch her “arching foot” as she flies upward―presumably as a spirit.