Machen, Arthur

Autograph Quotation, Signed, from The Hill of Dreams

[N.p., n.d., ca. mid 1920s] A fine autograph selection of one of the most memorable passages from chapter II of Machen's celebrated novel, The Hill of Dreams (1907), in his distinctive hand: “… But already about the town the darkness was forming: fast, fast the shadows crept upon it from the forest, and from sides banks & wreaths of curling mist were gathering, as if a ghostly leaguer were being built up against the city, and the strange race who lived in its streets. Suddenly there burst out from the stillness the clear and piercing music of the reveillé, calling, recalling, iterated, reiterated, & ending with one long high fierce shrill note with which the steep hills rang. Perhaps a boy in the school band was practising on his bugle, but for Lucian it was magic. For him it was the note of Roman trumpet, tibe mirum spargens sonum, filling all the hollow valley with its command, reverberated in dark places in the far forest, and resonant in the old graveyards without the walls. In his imagination he saw the earthen gates of the tombs broken open, and the serried legion swarming to the eagles. Century by century they passed up; they rose, dripping, from the river bed, they rose from the level, their armour shone in the quiet orchard, they gathered in ranks and companies from the cemetery, and as the trumpet sounded, the hill fort above the town gave up its dead. By hundreds and thousands the ghostly battle surged about the standard, behind the quaking mist, ready to march against the mouldering walls they had built so many years before. Arthur Machen The Hill of Dreams” 8vo. Pen and ink on ruled paper. 2 pp. Fine

• USD 1,750.00 > other currencies
• ordernr.: 42605

• bookseller: James Cummins Bookseller Inc. (USA)