I could see, furiously fast, the place all littered with the written
leaves--at three o'clock in the morning, when, as I knew, the cloud
overtook this end of Cornwall, and stopped him, and put his head to rest
on the desk; and the poor little wife must have got sleepy, waiting for
it to come, perhaps sleepless for many long nights before, and gone to
bed, he perhaps promising to follow in a minute to die with her, but
bent upon finishing that poem, and writing feverishly on, running a race
with the cloud, thinking, no doubt, 'just two couplets more,' till the
thing came, and put his head to rest on the desk, poor carle: and I do
not know that I ever encountered aught so complimentary to my race as
this dead poet Machen, and his race with the cloud: for it is clear now
that the better kind of those poet men did not write to please the vague
inferior tribes who might read them, but to deliver themselves of the
divine warmth that thronged in their bosom; and if all the readers were
dead, still they would have written; and for God to read they wrote. At
any rate, I was so pleased with these poor people, that I stayed with
them three weeks, sleeping under blankets on a couch in the
drawing-room, a place full of lovely pictures and faded flowers, like
all the house: for I would not touch the young mother to remove her. And
finding on Machen's desk a big note-book with soft covers, dappled red
and yellow, not yet written in, I took it, and a pencil, and in the
little turret-nook wrote day after day for hours this account of what
has happened, nearly as far as it has now gone. And I think that I may
continue to write it, for I find in it a strange consolation, and
companionship.

* * * * *

In the Severn Valley, somewhere in the plain between Gloucester and
Cheltenham, in a rather lonely spot, I at that time travelling on a