The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen (best books for students to read .txt) 📕
Description
An ancient Roman hilltop fort proves an irresistible draw to Lucian Taylor, but what awaits at the top isn’t just a view of the surrounding Welsh landscape but a bacchal experience his young soul isn’t ready for. This experience sets his path as he attempts to transcribe his increasingly elaborate visions into the perfect book; the book that will actually mean something more than the banal novels he sees the publishing houses push out.
The Hill of Dreams is a semi-autobiographical work, with Arthur Machen following a similar physical journey to the novel: a childhood in rural Wales followed by attempts to become an author in London. Machen was inspired by a review of Tristram Shandy that described it as “a picaresque of the mind,” and determined to write “a Robinson Crusoe of the soul.” The protagonist’s isolation from the rest of society certainly resonates with that description.
Machen wrote this ten years earlier than its original 1907 publication, it having been turned down by the publishers of the time. While it was mostly ignored on its initial release, it has picked up admirers over the years and is now viewed as one of Machen’s most important works.
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- Author: Arthur Machen
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She spread the neat pile of manuscript broadcast over the desk, and took a sheet at haphazard. It was all covered with illegible hopeless scribblings; only here and there it was possible to recognize a word.
“Why, nobody could read it, if they wanted to.”
“It’s all like that. He thought it was beautiful. I used to ’ear him jabbering to himself about it, dreadful nonsense it was he used to talk. I did my best to tongue him out of it, but it wasn’t any good.”
“He must have been a bit dotty. He’s left you everything.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll have to see about the funeral.”
“There’ll be the inquest and all that first.”
“You’ve got evidence to show he took the stuff.”
“Yes, to be sure I have. The doctor told him he would be certain to do for himself, and he was found two or three times quite silly in the streets. They had to drag him away from a house in Halden Road. He was carrying on dreadful, shaking at the gaite, and calling out it was ’is ’ome and they wouldn’t let him in. I heard Dr. Manning myself tell ’im in this very room that he’d kill ’imself one of these days. Joe! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself. I declare you’re quite rude, and it’s almost Sunday too. Bring the light over here, can’t you?”
The man took up the blazing paraffin lamp, and set it on the desk, beside the scattered heap of that terrible manuscript. The flaring light shone through the dead eyes into the dying brain, and there was a glow within, as if great furnace doors were opened.
ColophonThe Hill of Dreams
was published in 1907 by
Arthur Machen.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Robin Whittleton,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2004 by
Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
The Master Therion,
a painting completed in 1917 by
Leon Engers Kennedy.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
October 30, 2019, 9:30 p.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
standardebooks.org/ebooks/arthur-machen/the-hill-of-dreams.
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