thoughts it was in Lockhart himself--how the writer had lodged
in some rooms in Castle Street, Edinburgh, and how he had seen
all evening the silhouette of a man outlined on the blind of the
opposite house. All evening the man wrote, and the observer could
see the shadow hand conveying the sheets of paper from the desk to
the pile at the side. He went to a party and returned, but still
the hand was moving the sheets. Next morning he was told that the
rooms opposite were occupied by Walter Scott.

A curious glimpse into the psychology of the writer of fiction
is shown by the fact that he wrote two of his books--good ones,
too--at a time when his health was such that he could not afterwards
remember one word of them, and listened to them when they were read
to him as if he were hearing the work of another man. Apparently
the simplest processes of the brain, such as ordinary memory, were
in complete abeyance, and yet the very highest and most complex
faculty--imagination in its supreme form--was absolutely unimpaired.
It is an extraordinary fact, and one to be pondered over. It gives
some support to the feeling which every writer of imaginative work
must have, that his supreme work comes to him in some strange way
from without, and that he is only the medium for placing it upon
the paper. The creative thought--the germ thought from which a
larger growth is to come, flies through his brain like a bullet.
He is surprised at his own idea, with no conscious sense of having
originated it. And here we have a man, with all other brain
functions paralyzed, producing this magnificent work. Is it possible
that we are indeed but conduit pipes from the infinite reservoir of
the unknown? Certainly it is always our best work which leaves the
least sense of personal effort.