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

"Well, but, Owen, what are you about?" asked his old school-fellow,
still in such a hearty volume of tone that it made the artist
shrink; especially as the question related to a subject so sacred as
the absorbing dream of his imagination. "Folks do say, that you are
trying to discover the Perpetual Motion."

"The Perpetual Motion? nonsense!" replied Owen Warland, with a
movement of disgust; for he was full of little petulances. "It never
can be discovered! It is a dream that may delude men whose brains
are mystified with matter, but not me. Besides, if such a discovery
were possible, it would not be worth my while to make it, only to have
the secret turned to such purposes as are now effected by steam and
water-power. I am not ambitious to be honored with the paternity of
a new kind of cotton-machine."

"That would be droll enough!" cried the blacksmith, breaking out
into such an uproar of laughter, that Owen himself, and the
bell-glasses on his work-board, quivered in unison. "No, no, Owen!
No child of yours will have iron joints and sinews. Well, I won't
hinder you any more. Good night, Owen, and success; and if you need
any assistance, so far as a downright blow of hammer upon anvil will
answer the purpose, I'm your man!"

And with another laugh, the man of main strength left the shop.

"How strange it is," whispered Owen Warland to himself, leaning his
head upon his hand, "that all my musings, my purposes, my passion
for the Beautiful, my consciousness of power to create it- a finer,
more ethereal power, of which this earthly giant can have no
conception- all, all, look so vain and idle, whenever my path is
crossed by Robert Danforth! He would drive me mad, were I to meet
him often. His hard, brute force darkens and confuses the spiritual
element within me. But I, too, will be strong in my own way. I will
not yield to him!"

He took from beneath a glass, a piece of minute machinery, which he
set in the condensed light of his lamp, and, looking intently at it
through a magnifying glass, proceeded to operate with a delicate
instrument of steel. In an instant, however, he fell back in his
chair, and clasped his hands, with a look of horror on his face,
that made its small features as impressive as those of a giant would
have been.

"Heaven! What have I done!" exclaimed he. "The vapor! the influence
of that brute force! it has bewildered me, and obscured my perception.
I have made the very stroke- the fatal stroke- that I have dreaded
from the first! It is all over- the toil of months- the object of my
life! I am ruined!"

And there he sat, in strange despair, until his lamp flickered in