GERMINAL IDEA. “What started ‘The Father’s Hand’ was the quotation from
the fifth, no, the sixth, book of the Æneid,
_Bis conatus erat casus effingere in auro
Bis patriæ cecidere manus._
I happened to have been reading it the day before. Then I could not
go to sleep the next night, and it occurred to me that the lines were
perhaps the most touching I knew, and that they were an example of
the modernity or rather the timelessness of all art. Then I tried to
imagine a situation today that they would fit, and the whole story was
worked out before morning. My own reaction about it is that I have
stolen Vergil’s thunder.”--_George Humphrey._