Word: alethea
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Behind their faith that dreams produced superior art, some Romantics pursued a corollary faith: that opium produced superior dreams. In a gracefully written, witty survey, British Scholar Alethea Hayter skeptically checks out a few case histories...
...born in Australia, never saw his native country till the death of his uncle left him the family estate. He fell in love with the place at sight, though it had fallen into wrack & ruin. Its restoration became his career. When he and his neighbor's daughter Alethea fell in love everybody except one disappointed suitor thought it was splendid. For a time everything went swimmingly. Alethea bore Nicholas a bouncing daughter, later a boy. When the boy turned out to be perfectly formed but a dwarf Nicholas refused to see him, hated to have him around...
...Alethea could never understand the violence of Nicholas's feeling until one day his mother arrived from Australia. She was a hideous dwarf. Nicholas hated her, hated the thought that he had dwarf's blood in his veins, was morbidly afraid he himself had a dwarf's soul in a man's body. After a terrible scene Alethea took the little boy and ran away to her aunt in Germany. Though eventually she went back to her husband, for years she did not dare have her son in the same house with him. The boy grew up with a talent...