ly. And at the
thought of the young poet whom he had seemed to have so greatly
wronged, at the touch of grief and pity and divine regret, his own
genius, defied and resisted, descended on him again out of heaven. It
was as if the spirit of young Paterson, appeased and reconciled, had
bequeathed to him its own immortal adolescence. He finished the poem
in four nights, sitting in his great coat, with his legs wrapped in
his blankets, and for the last two nights drinking gin and water to
keep the blood beating in his head. In the morning he felt as if it
were filled with some light and crackling and infinitely brittle
substance, the ashes of a brain that had kindled, flamed, and burned
itself away. It was the last onslaught of the god, the last mad
flaring of the divine fire.

For now he could write no longer. His whole being revolted against the
labour of capturing ideas, of setting words in their right order. The
least effort produced some horrible sensation. Now it was of a
plunging heart that suddenly reversed engines while his brain shivered
with the shock; now of a little white wave that swamped his brain with
one pulse of oblivion; now it was a sudden giving way of the floor of
consciousness, through which his thoughts dropped downwards headlong
into the abyss. He had great agony and distress in following their
flight. At night as he lay in bed, watching the feeble, automatic
procession of ideas, he noticed that they arrived in an order that was
not the order of sanity, that if he took note of the language they
clothed themselves in, he found he was listening as it were to the
gabble of idiocy or aphasia. At such moments he trembled for his
reason.

At first these horrors would vanish in the brief brilliance that
followed the act of eating; but before long, in the next stage of
exhaustion, food induced nothing but a drunken drowsiness. He had once
said as an excuse for refusing wine that he could get drunk on
anything else as well. In these days he got dead drunk on oatmeal
porridge, while he produced a perishing ecstasy on bread and milk. But
of genuine intoxication the pennyworth of gin and water that sustained
the immortal Elegy was his last excess.

He sent the poem to Hanson. Hanson made no sign. But about the middle
of January Rankin of all people broke the silence that had bound them
for a year and a half. Rankin did not know his address, even Hanson
had forgotten it. The letter had been forwarded by one