192

FIXING A FLITTING FANCY.

and hurry on the realization of his idea. So wholly did the topics on which William Blake thought, or dreamed, absorb his mind, that often, his biographer relates, in the middle of the night he would, after thinking deeply upon a particular subject, leap from his bed, and write for two hours or more. His wife, -his "beloved Kate" for well-nigh fifty years,would get up from bed when he was under those extra fierce inspirations which were as if they would tear him asunder, while he was yielding himself to the muse, or whatever else it would be called, sketching and writing; and so terrible a task did this seem to be, that she had to sit motionless and silent; "only to stay him mentally, without moving hand or foot: this for hours, and night after night." Beattie was noted, at houses where he was a visitor, for his habit of rising from bed in the witching time of night, in order to write down any poetical thought that had struck his fancy. Happy the little Miss Hannah More in having for bedfellow a yet smaller sister, whom she made, in childhood, the "repository of her nightly effusions," and who, in her solicitude, lest any of these precious compositions should be lost, used to steal downstairs for a light, and commit them to the first scrap of paper she found.

Of Washington Irving's narrative of the voyage of Peter Stuyvesant up the Hudson, and the enumeration of the army, we have this account; that coming home late one night, and finding himself locked out

JOTTING DOWN IMPRESSIONS IN THE DARK. 193

of his lodgings, he repaired to the quarters of a bachelor friend, and gained admittance, but found sleep less easy of acquisition. "It was then that the idea of that journey flashed through his mind; and so rapidly did the visages crowd upon him, that he rose from the bed to strike a light, and write them down, but he could not find the candle, and after stumbling about for a while, he managed to get hold of a piece of paper, and jot down some of his impressions in pencil in the dark.” This was in his twenty-sixth year. In his seventy-fifth, he being still a busy author, "sometimes the way in which a thing should be done flashed upon him as he was going to bed, and he could not recall it in the morning." Dr. Dove's Nocturnal Remembrancer was awanting. A year later we find him telling a friend, "When I have been engaged on a continuous work, I have often been obliged to rise in the middle of the night, light my lamp, and write an hour or two, to relieve my mind; and now that I write no more, I am sometimes compelled to get up in the same way to read."

Apropos of the difficulty of recovering a lost thought without breaking its wings in catching it, Walter Savage Landor tells Mr. Forster in a letter (Nov. 8, 1843), "I got up in the middle of last night to fix one on paper, and fixed a rheumatism instead. Night is not the time for pinning a butterfly on a blank leaf." His biographer tells us elsewhere of his

194 SCRAWLING A STROPHE IN THE DARK.

losing a whole night's rest after making, as he believed, a false quantity of the first syllable in flagrans, in one of his Latin Poemata, and sending it off to the press as short; how a letter of emendation was sent after it, to make the syllable long; and how the second night proved as sleepless as the first, as he tossed restlessly about under torture of a fresh misgiving that he might at first have been right after all; when suddenly, as the clock struck four on that winter morning, relief came in a joyously recollected line from Virgil, and Landor sprang out of bed repeating that verse of the first Georgic, the two words at the close of which, ille flagranti, decide the question. He then and there set down the verse in another letter to Mr. Forster, who remarks that he might as well have waited until daybreak, for he gained nothing by so sacrificing rest; but it was his old impetuous way. He was often and often out of bed in the middle of the night, to scrawl a strophe in pencil in the dark.

How Sir Charles Barry's sketch of the River Front of his great work was produced, his old friend, Mr. J. L. Wolfe, has borne personal witness. The two had been discussing the subject together till late one night, and Mr. Barry, as he then was, retired to bed without feeling satisfied, and in "that restless state well-known to doubting composers." But his visitor had not been long asleep, when the architect burst into his room exclaiming, “Eureka! I have got it at

WINDOW-PANE INSCRIPTION BY MOONLIGHT. 195

last!" and then and there, by the glimmer of a rushlight, he rapidly sketched out the grand idea that had just struck him. After a short sleep he was at his drawing-board, and when Mr. Wolfe rejoined him, there was the River Front.

It was during his stay at Mechlin in 1837 that M. Victor Hugo rose from his bed and inscribed on the window-pane, with a diamond ring, by moonlight, the lines beginning, "J'aime les carillons dans tes cités antiques, O vieux pays!"-for he was evidently charmed, not annoyed, by the almost incessant carillon chimes in the neighbouring tower of St. Rombaud, which indeed drove sleep from his eyelids, but withal excited the creative instinct in the poet—réveillant sans pitié les dormeurs ennuyeux, for whom, however, the poet too would be without pity if they grudged the vigil.

LIF

CONSOLATIONS OF LITERATURE.

IFE'S evening and night-time are solaced by the consolations of Literature. But, indeed, when do not those consolations abound?

Chateaubriand said that literature was to him more than a consolation; it was a hope and a refuge. Channing declared his grateful ability, with a book in his hand, to meet all the ills of life, and forget its carking cares. "I think we are not sufficiently grateful for the invention of printing. I know not that I ever mentioned it in my prayers, but it has done me more good than food and raiment. I depend on my book as on my daily bread." Lewis the Sixteenth, during the five months that preceded his death, consoled himself with the perusal of two hundred and fifty volumes. Valetudinarian Chesterfield describes himself as systematic in his pursuit of this lettered solace: "I read a great deal, and vary occasionally my dead company. I converse with great folios in the morning, while my head is clearest, and my attention strongest: I take up less severe quartos after dinner; and at night I choose the mixed company, and amusing chit-chat, of octavos and duodecimos. Je tire parti de tout ce que je puis: that is my philosophy." Dr. Primrose seeks to comfort his