ABSTRACT
A year later Horne would feel exhausted and written out; for the present that unusual poetic facility which had produced his religious epic continued undimmed. If anything, it glowed more brightly. He had finished Ancient Idols on the twentieth day of July 1842, a day he felt sufficiently important to record exactly for posterity; and for four months thereafter he picked at desultory literary tasks – petty journalism, the reconstruction of some Jacobean plays, the revision of educational tales Mary was writing for children. In November, however, his aimless scribblings began to form themselves into order, and produce the plan of another poem; an epic like the last and concerned with a struggle hardly less important and personal.
