Therein lay one secret of his great genius. He often said that he
was an idler, but we know that he was a patient and industrious worker.
His idleness was his way of describing his long musings, waiting the
bidding of her whom God inspires--Truth, who often hides her face from
the clouded eyes of man. For hours, days, weeks, he was disinclined to
work. He felt no constraining impulse, his attention was relaxed or
engaged upon a novel, or his seeds, or the plan of a new house, which
always excited his interest. Then, apparently suddenly, whilst in one of
his day-dreams, or in a fever (as at Ternate, to recall the historical
episode when the theory of Natural Selection struck him), an
explanation, a theory, a discovery,[68] the plan of a new book, came to
him like a flash of light, and with the plan the material, the
arguments, the illustrations; the words came tumbling one over the
other in his brain, and as suddenly his idleness vanished, and work,
eager, prolonged, unwearying, filled his days and months and years until
the message was written down and the task fully accomplished. Whilst
writing he referred to few books, but wrote straight on, adding
paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter, without recasting or
revision.[69] And the result was fresh, striking, original. It was a
creation. The work being done, he relapsed into his busy idleness. The
truth, as he saw it, seemed to come to him.
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