Still, taking no delight
in obstinacy, and feeling the necessity of some fresh attempt grow daily
more pressing, he turned his brains about, and sending them foraging, at
length bethought him of a certain old Highland legend with which at one
time he had been a good deal taken, from the discovery in it of certain
symbolical possibilities. This legend he proceeded to rewrite and
remodel, doing his best endeavor to preserve in it the old Celtic aroma
and aerial suggestion, while taking care neither to lose nor reproduce
too manifestly its half-apparent, still evanishing symbolism. Urged by
fear and enfeebled by doubt, he wrote feverously, and, after three days
of laborious and unnatural toil, submitted the result to Annie, who was
now his only representative of the outer world, and the only person for
whose criticism he seemed now to care. She, greatly in doubt of her own
judgment, submitted it to his friend; and together they agreed on this
verdict: That, while it certainly proved he could write as well in prose
as in verse, people would not be attracted by it, and that it would be
found lacking in human interest. His friend saw in it also too much of
the Celtic tendency to the mystical and allegorical, as distinguished
from the factual and storial.
Upon learning this their decision, poor Hector fell once more into a
state of great discouragement, not feeling in him the least power of
adopting another way; there seemed to him but one mode, the way things
came to him.
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