to see Mrs. Sprinx, and thank her for having done her
best; and to take Eddie such presents as my uncle
only knew how to buy for children. When he went
to school, I know he sent him a gold watch. From
that time till now that she is my wife, Chrissy has
had no more such adventures; and if Uncle Peter did
not die on Christmas-day, it did not matter much, for
Christmas-day makes all the days of the year as sacred
as itself.”
The giant’s heart.
When Harry had finished reading, the colonel gallantly
declared that the story was the best they had had.
Mrs. Armstrong received this as a joke, and begged
him not to be so unsparing.
“Ah! Mrs. Armstrong,” returned he
laughing, “you are not old enough yet, to know
the truth from a joke. Don’t you agree with
me about the story, Mrs. Cathcart?”
“I think it is very pretty and romantic.
Such men as Uncle Peter are not very common in the
world. The story is not too true to Nature.”
This she said in a tone intended to indicate superior
acquaintance with the world and its nature. I
fear Mrs. Cathcart and some others whom I could name,
mean by Nature something very bad indeed, which
yet an artist is bound to be loyal to. The colonel
however seemed to be of a different opinion.
“If there never was such a man as Uncle Peter,”
said he, “there ought to have been; and it is
all the more reason for putting him into a story that
he is not to be found in the world.”
“Bravo!” cried I. “You have
answered a great question in a few words.”
“I don’t know,” rejoined our host.
“Have I? It seems to me as plain as the
catechism.”
I thought he might have found a more apt simile, but
I held my peace.
Next morning, I walked out in the snow. Since
the storm of that terrible night, it had fallen again
quietly and plentifully; and now in the sunlight,
the world—houses and trees, ponds and rivers—was
like a creation, more than blocked out, but far from
finished—in marble.
“And this,” I said to myself, as I regarded
the wondrous loveliness with which the snow had at
once clothed and disfigured the bare branches of the
trees, “this is what has come of the chaos of
falling flakes! To this repose of beauty has
that storm settled and sunk! Will it not be so
with our mental storms as well?”
But here the figure displeased me; for those were
not the true right shapes of the things; and the truth
does not stick to things, but shows itself out of
them.
“This lovely show,” I said, “is
the result of a busy fancy. This white world
is the creation of a poet such as Shelley, in whom
the fancy was too much for the intellect. Fancy
settles upon anything; half destroys its form, half
beautifies it with something that is not its own.
But the true creative imagination, the form-seer,
and the form-bestower, falls like the rain in the
spring night, vanishing amid the roots of the trees;
not settling upon them in clouds of wintry white,
but breaking forth from them in clouds of summer green.”
