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It was the hour of sunset. All the souls that he had saved and all those he had not took dusky shapes in the mist that hung between the high banks, and seemed by their great number and density to block his way, and showed no signs of melting or changing back into mist, so that he feared his passage was to be difficult for ever.
In 1816, Percy Bysshe Shelley accompanied by Mary Godwin travelled from England to Switzerland where they met Lord Byron. One evening, at Byron's Villa Diodati, the poet read to Shelley and Mary some lines from Coleridge's poem “Christabel,” lines that relate how the witch Geraldine displayed her bosom to the young heroine of the poem:
Like one that shuddered, she unboundThe cincture from beneath her breast:Her silken robe and inner vest,Dropt to her feet, and full in view,Behold! her bosom and half her side—A sight to dream of, not to tell!
At the instant when Byron said “Behold! her bosom,” Shelley, who happened to be “looking at Mary's bosom, … jumped up and ran from the room. After a cold water treatment he explained that he had seen Mary like the Sussex woman of fable … with eyes in her breasts, and had rushed out to break the spell” (5). The phenomenon Shelley experienced here was the face-breast equation, a hypnagogic hallucination first discovered by R. J. Almansi. Since Shelley's experience of the eyes of the face fused with the nipples of the breast was