He put his hands on her shoulders and looked more the man than the poet for the moment. “Anne,” he said solemnly. “Let well enough alone. I made up my mind to write no more the day you promised to marry me. I told you that the lover had buried the poet, and I believed it. But I find that the poet must come to life now and again—for a while at least. But although the process will be neither pleasant nor painless, I shall strangle him in time.”
“Can you?”
“Yes—I think so.”
“And be quite as happy as before?”
“Oh, I am not prophet enough for that. I can never be unhappy while I have you.”
“And I could never be happy if I let you kill a gift that is as living a part of yourself as your sense of vision or touch. Do you suppose I ever deluded myself with the dream that you would settle down into the domestic routine of years—write political pamphlets for Hunsdon? I knew this would come and I never have had a misgiving. I know you can write without stimulant. Nothing can be more fanciful than that the highest of all mental gifts must have artificial aid. That may be the need of the little man driving a pen for his daily bread, of the small talent trying to create, but never for you!”
“There is some strange congenital want. I am certain of it. And if I gave way, Anne, I should be a madman for days, perhaps weeks—a beast—oh, you have not the faintest suspicion; and all I am living for in the wretched present is that you never may.”
“I do not believe in permanent congenital weaknesses with a free rich faculty like yours. I know how that fatal idea has wedged itself in your brain—but if you try—if you persist—you will overcome it. Promise me that you will try.”
“You are so strong,” he said sadly. “You cannot conceive, with all your own imagination, the miserable weaknesses of the still half-developed human brain. The greatest scientific minds that have spent their lives in the study of the brain know next to nothing about it. How should you, dear child? I know the curse that is the other half of my gift to write, but of its cause, its meaning, I know nothing. You are strong by instinct, but you have not the least idea why or how you are strong. It is all a mysterious arrangement of particles.”