But he had never voluntarily taken a pen in his hand
to make verse, nor had he even felt the desire to possess the gift,
except as a part of general ambition. He may have acknowledged the
regret that he could not immortalize himself by writing a great poem,
but the regret was the offspring of personal ambition, not of yearning
poetical instinct. But the most extraordinary phase of the matter was
that such a tempest could take place in a brain as well regulated
as his own. He was eminently a practical man, and a good deal of a
thinker. He had never been given to flights of imagination, and even
in his attacks of melancholy, although his will might be somewhat
enfeebled, his brain could always work clearly and cleverly. The
lethargy which had occasionally got the best of him had invariably
been due to violent nervous shock or strain, and was as natural as
excessive bodily languor after violent physical effort. Why, then,
should his brain twice have acted as if he had sown it with eccentric
weeds all his life, instead of planting it with the choicest seeds he
could obtain, and watering and cultivating them with a patience and an
interest which had been untiring?
But the explanation of his attempt to put his unborn poem into words
gave him less thought to-day than it had after its first occurrence;
there were other phases of last night's experience weirder and
more unexplainable still.
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