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

"Ah!" exclaimed Owen, who had drunk freely, "are you alive again,
child of the sun, and playmate of the summer breeze, after your dismal
winter's nap! Then it is time for me to be at work!"

And leaving his unemptied glass upon the table, he departed, and
was never known to sip another drop of wine.

And now, again, he resumed his wanderings in the woods and
fields. It might be fancied that the bright butterfly, which had
come so spiritlike into the window, as Owen sat with the rude
revellers, was indeed a spirit, commissioned to recall him to the
pure, ideal life that had so etherealised him among men. It might be
fancied, that he went forth to seek this spirit, in its sunny
haunts; for still, as in the summer-time gone by, he was seen to steal
gently up, wherever a butterfly had alighted, and lose himself in
contemplation of it. When it took flight, his eyes followed the winged
vision, as if its airy track would show the path to heaven. But what
could be the purpose of the unseasonable toil, which was again
resumed, as the watchman knew by the lines of lamp-light through the
crevices of Owen Warland's shutters? The townspeople had one
comprehensive explanation of all these singularities. Owen Warland had
gone mad! How universally efficacious- how satisfactory, too, and
soothing to the injured sensibility of narrowness and dullness- is
this easy method of accounting for whatever lies beyond the world's
most ordinary scope! From Saint Paul's days, down to our poor little
Artist of the Beautiful, the same talisman had been applied to the
elucidation of all mysteries in the words or deeds of men, who spoke
or acted too wisely or too well. In Owen Warland's case, the
judgment of his townspeople may have been correct. Perhaps he was mad.
The lack of sympathy- that contrast between himself and his neighbors,
which took away the restraint of example- was enough to make him so.
Or, possibly, he had caught just so much of ethereal radiance as
served to bewilder him, in an earthly sense, by its intermixture
with the common day light.

One evening, when the artist had returned from a customary
ramble, and had just thrown the lustre of his lamp on the delicate
piece of work, so often interrupted, but still taken up again, as if
his fate were embodied in its mechanism, he was surprised by the
entrance of old Peter Hovenden. Owen never met this man without a
shrinking of the heart. Of all the world, he was most terrible, by
reason of a keen understanding, which saw so distinctly what it did
see, and disbelieved so uncompromisingly in what it could not see.
On this occasion, the old watchmaker had merely a gracious word or two
to say.

"Owen, my lad," said he, "we must see you at my house tomorrow
night."