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“Sometimes things would come in that wonderful raptus of inspiration — if that’s not too grandiose a phrase — and I’d get up and realize it had been hours and I was drenched in sweat.”

Even five years ago, most men who killed in a “raptus,” seized by a fit of jealous rage, were often forgiven in the eyes of the law and the women’s deaths treated as domestic “accidents.”

He would undoubtedly say,—"My dear Bettina, you, who have such a flow of words and ideas, must certainly have had a raptus when you wrote in that manner to G�the."

He will be restrained from that," said the butler, "by his father, who understands well the significance of raptus puellae.

It is, however, possible that the raptus was a more serious affair; and Professor Skeat has pointed out the coincidence that Chaucer’s “little son Lowis” was just ten years old in 1391.