"I don't know, at present, quite how things are with me. I labour under a great oppression of spirit. I have a strange thirsty longing to see her face and hear her speech. If I could only hear from herself that she had done what her best self—of which we have often spoken—ratifies, I should feel more content. But she trusts her impulses too much; and the habit of loving all she loves with passion, blinds her a little. A woman who loves her sister, her pets, the very sunshine and air with passion, hardly knows what a lover is. I can not help feeling that I might have shown her a little better than J——. Still one must accept facts and interpret them, especially in cases where one has not even been allowed to try and fail; for I never spoke to her a word of love. Ah, well! perhaps I shall be stronger soon."
CHAPTER VIII
Arthur Hamilton as an author
I must give a chapter to this subject, because it entered very largely into Arthur's life, although he was singularly unsuccessful as an author, considering the high level of his mental powers.
He lacked somehow, not exactly the gift of expression—his letters testify to that—but the gift of proportion and combination.
His essays are disjointed—discursive and eloquent in parts, and bare and meagre in others. Connections are omitted, passages of real and rare beauty jostling with long passages of the most common-place rhetoric. His platitudes, however, to myself who knew him, have a genuine ring about them; he never admitted a truism into his writing till it had become his own by vivid realization. As he himself says:
"I always find a peculiar interest in the solemn enunciation of a platitude by a dull person who does not naturally aim at effect. You feel sure it is the condensation of life and experience. Such an utterance often brings a platitude home to me as no amount of rhetorical writing can."
Still, the reading public will not stand this, and Arthur never found a market.
He wrote voluminously.
I have in my bureau several pigeon-holes crammed with manuscripts in his curious sprawling hand. He wrote, when he was in the mood, very quickly, with hardly an erasure. Among them is: