brain-storm

Mr. Hammond, while engaged in some literary work connected with problems of dietetics, health and so on, in the British Museum Reading Room, was one day seized as he describes it with a sudden brain-storm, and though not having written a line of verse since boyhood suddenly found stanzas forming in his head quicker than he could record them.

Here had been tried all sorts of murder cases, with all sorts of defenses, from self-preservation with an ax to the irresponsibility of a brain-storm.