The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Blue Flower, and Others, by Henry van Dyke

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Title: The Blue Flower, and Others

Author: Henry van Dyke

Posting Date: September 21, 2008 [EBook #1603]
Release Date: January, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE BLUE FLOWER

By Henry Van Dyke

The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion for something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.
--SHELLEY.

To
THE DEAR MEMORY OF
BERNARD VAN DYKE
1887-1897
AND THE LOVE THAT LIVES
BEYOND THE YEARS

PREFACE

Sometimes short stories are brought together like parcels in a basket.
Sometimes they grow together like blossoms on a bush. Then, of course,
they really belong to one another, because they have the same life in
them.

The stories in this book have been growing together for a long time. It
is at least ten years since the first of them, the story of The Other
Wise Man, came to me; and all the others I knew quite well by heart a
good while before I could find the time, in a hard-worked life, to write
them down and try to make them clear and true to others. It has been a
slow task, because the right word has not always been easy to find, and
I wanted to keep free from conventionality in the thought and close to
nature in the picture. It is enough to cause a man no little shame to
see how small is the fruit of so long labour.

And yet, after all, when one wishes to write about life, especially
about that part of it which is inward, the inwrought experience of
living may be of value. And that is a thing which one cannot get in
haste, neither can it be made to order. Patient waiting belongs to it;
and rainy days belong to it; and the best of it sometimes comes in the
doing of tasks that seem not to amount to much. So in the long run, I
suppose, while delay and failure and interruption may keep a piece of
work very small, yet in the end they enter into the quality of it and
bring it a little nearer to the real