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

But the innate tendency of his soul had only been accumulating
fresh vigor, during its apparent sluggishness. As the summer advanced,
he almost totally relinquished his business, and permitted Father
Time, so far as the old gentleman was represented by the clocks and
watches under his control, to stray at random through human life,
making infinite confusion among the train of bewildered hours. He
wasted the sunshine, as people said, in wandering through the woods
and fields, and along the banks of streams. There, like a child, he
found amusement in chasing butterflies, or watching the motions of
water-insects. There was something truly mysterious in the
intentness with which he contemplated these living playthings, as they
sported on the breeze; or examined the structure of an imperial insect
whom he had imprisoned. The chase of butterflies was an apt emblem
of the ideal pursuit in which he had spent so many golden hours.
But, would the Beautiful Idea ever be yielded to his hand, like the
butterfly that symbolized it? Sweet, doubtless, were these days, and
congenial to the artist's soul. They were full of bright
conceptions, which gleamed through his intellectual world, as the
butterflies gleamed through the outward atmosphere, and were real to
him for the instant, without the toil and perplexity, and many
disappointments, of attempting to make them visible to the sensual
eye. Alas, that the artist, whether in poetry or whatever other
material, may not content himself with the inward enjoyment of the
Beautiful, but must chase the flitting mystery beyond the verge of his
ethereal domain, and crush its frail being in seizing it with a
material grasp! Owen Warland felt the impulse to give external reality
to his ideas, as irresistibly as any of the poets or painters, who
have arrayed the world in a dimmer and fainter beauty, imperfectly
copied from the richness of their visions.

The night was now his time for the slow progress of recreating
the one Idea, to which all his intellectual activity referred
itself. Always at the approach of dusk, he stole into the town, locked
himself within his shop, and wrought with patient delicacy of touch,
for many hours. Sometimes he was startled by the rap of the
watchman, who, when all the world should be asleep, had caught the
gleam of lamplight through the crevices of Owen Warland's shutters.
Daylight, to the morbid sensibility of his mind, seemed to have an
intrusiveness that interfered with his pursuits. On cloudy and
inclement days, therefore, he sat with his head upon his hands,
muffling, as it were, his sensitive brain in a mist of indefinite
musings; for it was a relief to escape from the sharp distinctness
with which he was compelled to shape out his thoughts, during his
nightly toil.

From one of these fits of torpor, he was aroused by the entrance of
Annie Hovenden, who came into the shop with the freedom of a customer,
and also with something of the familiarity of a childish friend. She
had worn a hole through her silver thimble, and wanted Owen to
repair it.