in
beauty that out of its mere redundancy he might have wrought the
beautiful into many a worthier type than he had toiled for; but the
guise in which his sorrow came to him, the sense that the angel of his
life had been snatched away and given to a rude man of earth and iron,
who could neither need nor appreciate her ministrations,--this was the
very perversity of fate that makes human existence appear too absurd
and contradictory to be the scene of one other hope or one other fear.
There was nothing left for Owen Warland but to sit down like a man that
had been stunned.

He went through a fit of illness. After his recovery his small and
slender frame assumed an obtuser garniture of flesh than it had ever
before worn. His thin cheeks became round; his delicate little hand, so
spiritually fashioned to achieve fairy task-work, grew plumper than the
hand of a thriving infant. His aspect had a childishness such as might
have induced a stranger to pat him on the head--pausing, however, in
the act, to wonder what manner of child was here. It was as if the
spirit had gone out of him, leaving the body to flourish in a sort of
vegetable existence. Not that Owen Warland was idiotic. He could talk,
and not irrationally. Somewhat of a babbler, indeed, did people begin
to think him; for he was apt to discourse at wearisome length of
marvels of mechanism that he had read about in books, but which he had
learned to consider as absolutely fabulous. Among them he enumerated
the Man of Brass, constructed by Albertus Magnus, and the Brazen Head
of Friar Bacon; and, coming down to later times, the automata of a
little coach and horses, which it was pretended had been manufactured
for the Dauphin of France; together with an insect that buzzed about
the ear like a living fly, and yet was but a contrivance of minute
steel springs. There was a story, too, of a duck that waddled, and
quacked, and ate; though, had any honest citizen purchased it for
dinner, he would have found himself cheated with the mere mechanical
apparition of a duck.

"But all these accounts," said Owen Warland, "I am now satisfied are
mere impositions."

Then, in a mysterious way, he would confess that he once thought
differently. In his idle and dreamy days he had considered it possible,
in a certain sense, to spiritualize machinery, and to combine with the
new species of life and motion thus produced a beauty that should
attain to the ideal which Nature has proposed