to herself in all her
creatures, but has never taken pains to realize. He seemed, however, to
retain no very distinct perception either of the process of achieving
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 u