Mosses from an old manse
this object or of the design itself.
“I have thrown it all aside now,” he would say. “It was a dream such as
young men are always mystifying themselves with. Now that I have
acquired a little common sense, it makes me laugh to think of it.”
Poor, poor and fallen Owen Warland! These were the symptoms that he had
ceased to be an inhabitant of the better sphere that lies unseen around
us. He had lost his faith in the invisible, and now prided himself, as
such unfortunates invariably do, in the wisdom which rejected much that
even his eye could see, and trusted confidently in nothing but what his
hand could touch. This is the calamity of men whose spiritual part dies
out of them and leaves the grosser understanding to assimilate them
more and more to the things of which alone it can take cognizance; but
in Owen Warland the spirit was not dead nor passed away; it only slept.
How it awoke again is not recorded. Perhaps the torpid slumber was
broken by a convulsive pain. Perhaps, as in a former instance, the
butterfly came and hovered about his head and reinspired him,—as indeed
this creature of the sunshine had always a mysterious mission for the
artist,—reinspired him with the former purpose of his life. Whether it
were pain or happiness that thrilled through his veins, his first
impulse was to thank Heaven for rendering him again the being of
thought, imagination, and keenest sensibility that he had long ceased
to be.
“Now for my task,” said he. “Never did I feel such strength for it as
now.”
Yet, strong as he felt himself, he was incited to toil the more
diligently by an anxiety lest death should surprise him in the midst of
his labors. This anxiety, perhaps, is common to all men who set their
hearts upon anything so high, in their own view of it, that life
becomes of importance only as conditional to its accomplishment. So
long as we love life for itself, we seldom dread the losing it. When we
desire life for the attainment of an object, we recognize the frailty
of its texture. But, side by side with this sense of insecurity, there
is a vital faith in our invulnerability to the shaft of death while
engaged in any task that seems assigned by Providence as our proper
thing to do, and which the world would have cause to mourn for should
we leave it unaccomplished. Can the philosopher, big with the
inspiration of an idea that is to reform mankind, believe that he is to
be beckoned from this sensible existence at the very instant when he is
mustering his breath to speak the word of light? Should he perish so,
the weary ages may pass away—the world’s, whose life sand may fall,
drop by drop—before another intellect is prepared to develop the truth
that might have been uttered then. But history affords many an example
where the most precious spirit, at any particular epoch manifested in
human shape, has gone hence untimely, without space allowed him, so far
as mortal judgment could discern, to perform his mission on the earth.
The prophet dies, and the man of torpid heart and sluggish brain lives
on. The poet leaves his song half sung, or finishes it, beyond the
scope of mortal ears, in a celestial choir. The painter—as Allston
did—leaves half his conception on the canvas to sadden us with its
imperfect beauty, and goes to picture forth the whole, if it be no
irreverence to say so, in the hues of heaven. But rather such
incomplete designs of this life will be perfected nowhere. This so
frequent abortion of man’s dearest projects must be taken as a proof
that the deeds of earth, however etherealized by piety or genius, are
without value, except as exercises and manifestations of the spirit. In
heaven, all ordinary thought is higher and more melodious than Milton’s
song. Then, would he add another verse to any strain that he had left
unfinished here?
But to return to Owen Warland. It was his fortune, good or ill, to
achieve the purpose of his life. Pass we over a long space of intense
thought, yearning effort, minute toil, and wasting anxiety, succeeded
by an instant of solitary triumph: let all this be imagined; and then
behold the artist, on a winter evening, seeking admittance to Robert
Danforth’s fireside circle. There he found the man of iron, with his
massive substance thoroughly warmed and attempered by domestic
influences. And there was Annie, too, now transformed into a matron,
with much of her husband’s plain and sturdy nature, but imbued, as Owen
Warland still believed, with a finer grace, that might enable her to be
the interpreter between strength and beauty. It happened, likewise,
that old Peter Hovenden was a guest this evening at his daughter’s
fireside, and it was his well-remembered expression of keen, cold
criticism that first encountered the artist’s glance.
“My old friend Owen!” cried Robert Danforth, starting up, and
compressing the artist’s delicate fingers within a hand that was
accustomed to gripe bars of iron. “This is kind and neighborly to come
to us at last. I was afraid your perpetual motion had bewitched you out
of the remembrance of old times.”
“We are glad to see you,” said Annie, while a blush reddened her
matronly cheek. “It was not like a friend to stay from us so long.”
“Well, Owen,” inquired the old watchmaker, as his first greeting, “how
comes on the beautiful? Have you created it at last?”
The artist did not immediately reply, being startled by the apparition
of a young child of strength that was tumbling about on the carpet,—a
little personage who had come mysteriously out of the infinite, but
with something so sturdy and real in his composition that he seemed
moulded out of the densest substance which earth could supply. This
hopeful infant crawled towards the new-comer, and setting himself on
end, as Robert Danforth expressed the posture, stared at Owen with a
look of such sagacious observation that the mother could not help
exchanging a proud glance with her husband. But the artist was
disturbed by the child’s look, as imagining a resemblance between it
and Peter Hovenden’s habitual expression. He could have fancied that
the old watchmaker was compressed into this baby shape, and looking out
of those baby eyes, and repeating, as he now did, the malicious
question: “The beautiful, Owen! How comes on the beautiful? Have you
succeeded in creating the beautiful?”
“I have succeeded,” replied the artist, with a momentary light of
triumph in his eyes and a smile of sunshine, yet steeped in such depth
of thought that it was almost sadness. “Yes, my friends, it is the
truth. I have succeeded.”
“Indeed!” cried Annie, a look of maiden mirthfulness peeping out of her
face again. “And is it lawful, now, to inquire what the secret is?”
“Surely; it is to disclose it that I have come,” answered Owen Warland.
“You shall know, and see, and touch, and possess the secret! For,
Annie,—if by that name I may still address the friend of my boyish
years,—Annie, it is for your bridal gift that I have wrought this
spiritualized mechanism, this harmony of motion, this mystery of
beauty. It comes late, indeed; but it is as we go onward in life, when
objects begin to lose their freshness of hue and our souls their
delicacy of perception, that the spirit of beauty is most needed.
If,—forgive me, Annie,—if you know how—to value this gift, it can never
come too late.”
He produced, as he spoke, what seemed a jewel box. It was carved richly
out of ebony by his own hand, and inlaid with a fanciful tracery of
pearl, representing a boy in pursuit of a butterfly, which, elsewhere,
had become a winged spirit, and was flying heavenward; while the boy,
or youth, had found such efficacy in his strong desire that he ascended
from earth to cloud, and from cloud to celestial atmosphere, to win the
beautiful. This case of ebony the artist opened, and bade Annie place
her fingers on its edge. She did so, but almost screamed as a butterfly
fluttered forth, and, alighting on her finger’s tip, sat waving the
ample magnificence of its purple and gold-speckled wings, as if in
prelude to a flight. It is impossible to express by words the glory,
the splendor, the delicate gorgeousness which were softened into the
beauty of this object. Nature’s ideal butterfly was here realized in
all its perfection; not in the pattern of such faded insects as flit
among earthly flowers, but of those which hover across the meads of
paradise for child-angels and the spirits of departed infants to
disport themselves with. The rich down was visible upon its wings; the
lustre of its eyes seemed instinct with spirit. The firelight glimmered
around this wonder—the candles gleamed upon it; but it glistened
apparently by its own radiance, and illuminated the finger and
outstretched hand on which it rested with a white gleam like that of
precious stones. In its perfect beauty, the consideration of size was
entirely lost. Had its wings overreached the firmament, the mind could
not have been more filled or satisfied.
“Beautiful! beautiful!” exclaimed Annie. “Is it alive? Is it alive?”
“Alive? To be sure it is,” answered her husband. “Do you suppose any
mortal has skill enough to make a butterfly, or would put himself to
the trouble of making one, when any child may catch a score of them in
a summer’s afternoon? Alive? Certainly! But this pretty box is
undoubtedly of our friend Owen’s manufacture; and really it does him
credit.”
At this moment the butterfly waved its wings anew, with a motion so
absolutely lifelike that Annie was startled, and even awestricken; for,
in spite of her husband’s opinion, she could not satisfy herself
whether it was indeed a living creature or a piece of wondrous
mechanism.
“Is it alive?” she repeated, more earnestly than before.
“Judge for yourself,” said Owen Warland, who stood gazing in her face
with fixed attention.
The butterfly now flung itself upon the air, fluttered round Annie’s
head, and soared into a distant region of the parlor, still making
itself perceptible to sight by the starry gleam in which the motion of
its wings enveloped it. The infant on the floor followed its course
with his sagacious little eyes. After flying about the room, it
returned in a spiral curve and settled again on Annie’s finger.
“But is it alive?” exclaimed she again; and the finger on which the
gorgeous mystery had alighted was so tremulous that the butterfly was
forced to balance himself with his wings. “Tell me if it be alive, or
whether you created it.”
“Wherefore ask who created it, so it be beautiful?” replied Owen
Warland. “Alive? Yes, Annie; it may well be said to possess life, for
it has absorbed my own being into itself; and in the secret of that
butterfly, and in its beauty,—which is not merely outward, but deep as
its whole system,—is represented the intellect, the imagination, the
sensibility, the soul of an Artist of the Beautiful! Yes; I created it.
But”—and here his countenance somewhat changed—“this butterfly is not
now to me what it was when I beheld it afar off in the daydreams of my
youth.”
“Be it what it may, it is a pretty plaything,” said the blacksmith,
grinning with childlike delight. “I wonder whether it would condescend
to alight on such a great clumsy finger as mine? Hold it hither,
Annie.”
By the artist’s direction, Annie touched her finger’s tip to that of
her husband; and, after a momentary delay, the butterfly fluttered from
one to the other. It preluded a second flight by a similar, yet not
precisely the same, waving of wings as in the first experiment; then,
ascending from the blacksmith’s stalwart finger, it rose in a gradually
enlarging curve to the ceiling, made one wide sweep around the room,
and returned with an undulating movement to the point whence it had
started.
“Well, that does beat all nature!” cried Robert Danforth, bestowing the