Page:Devonshire Characters and Strange Events.djvu/399

 seated at one end of a long deal table, while the cottager's wife and daughters are plying their needles, and doing all their family work at the other, he pens down the thoughts that have passed through the flitting visions of his imagination while alone on the road. Here he wrote most of his first book of ballads, and here he is working up his glowing rollicking songs for a new volume. Sometimes the poetic inspiration comes in upon him like a flood on his way. He told me that he once brought home with him six sonnets on six different subjects, which he had thought out and penned in one of his daily beats. When the news of the taking of the Redan reached England, the very inner soul of his patriotism was stirred within him to the proudest emotion. As he walked up and down the long hills with his letter-bags strapped to his side, the thoughts of the glory his country had won came into his mind with a half-suffocating rush, and he struggled, nearly drowned by them, to give them forms of speech. The days were short, the road was long, and hard to foot, and the rules of the postal service were rigid. He could not hold fast the thoughts the event stirred within him until he reached the cottage. Some of the best of them would flit out of his memory, if he delayed to pen them as they arose. So he ran with all his might and main for a third of a mile, all panting with the race for time, found he had caught enough of it for pencilling on his knee a whole verse of the song. Thus he ran and wrote, each stanza costing him a race that made the hot perspiration fall upon the soiled and crumpled paper, on which he brought home to a wife prouder than himself of the song,—'The Lion Flag of England.'"