e 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 unutility 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 gayly 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 or
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.

"Ah," exclaimed Owen, who had drank 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 t