"Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Artist of the Beautiful" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawthorne Nathaniel)

the convulsion of intense rage and anguish that writhed across his
features. The next instant he let his head sink upon his hands.

"Go, Annie," murmured he, "I have deceived myself, and must
suffer for it. I yearned for sympathy- and thought- and fancied- and
dreamed- that you might give it me. But you lack the talisman,
Annie, that should admit you into my secrets. That touch has undone
the toil of months, and the thought of a lifetime! It was not your
fault, Annie- but you have ruined me!"

Poor Owen Warland! He had indeed erred, yet pardonably; for if
any human spirit could have sufficiently reverenced the processes so
sacred in his eyes, it must have been a woman's. Even Annie
Hovenden, possibly, might not have disappointed him, had she been
enlightened by the deep intelligence of love.

The artist spent the ensuing winter in a way that satisfied any
persons, who had hitherto retained a hopeful opinion of him, that he
was, in truth, irrevocably doomed to inutility as regarded the
world, and to an evil destiny on his own part. The decease of a
relative had put him in possession of a small inheritance. Thus
freed from the necessity of toil, and having lost the steadfast
influence of a great purpose- great, at least, to him- he abandoned
himself to habits from which, it might have been supposed, the mere
delicacy of his organization would have availed to secure him. But
when the ethereal portion of a man of genius is obscured, the
earthly part assumes an influence the more uncontrollable, because the
character is now thrown off the balance to which Providence had so
nicely adjusted it, and which, in coarser natures, is adjusted by some
other method. Owen Warland made proof of whatever show of bliss may be
found in riot. He looked at the world through the golden medium of
wine, and contemplated the visions that bubble up so gaily around
the brim of the glass, and that people the air with shapes of pleasant
madness, which so soon grow ghostly and forlorn. Even when this dismal
and inevitable change had taken place, the young man might still
have continued to quaff the cup of enchantments, though its vapor
did but shroud life in gloom, and fill the gloom with spectres that
mocked at him. There was a certain irksomeness of spirit, which, being
real, and the deepest sensation of which the artist was now conscious,
was more intolerable than any fantastic miseries and horrors that
the abuse of wine could summon up. In the latter case, he could
remember, even out of the midst of his trouble, that all was but a
delusion; in the former, the heavy anguish was his actual life.

From this perilous state, he was redeemed by an incident which more
than one person witnessed, but of which the shrewdest could not
explain nor conjecture the operation on Owen Warland's mind. It was
very simple. On a warm afternoon of Spring, as the artist sat among
his riotous companions, with a glass of wine before him, a splendid
butterfly flew in at the open window, and fluttered about his head.