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The Queen of Hearts by Wilkie Collins
page 25 of 529 (04%)
successor, Is this the sort of occupation (I ask myself) in which
a modern young lady is likely to feel the slightest interest?
Once again, clearly not.

Owen's favorite employment is, in its way, quite as
characteristic as Morgan's, and it has the great additional
advantage of appealing to a much larger variety of tastes. My
eldest brother--great at drawing and painting when he was a lad,
always interested in artists and their works in after life--has
resumed, in his declining years, the holiday occupation of his
schoolboy days. As an amateur landscape-painter, he works with
more satisfaction to himself, uses more color, wears out more
brushes, and makes a greater smell of paint in his studio than
any artist by profession, native or foreign, whom I ever met
with. In look, in manner, and in disposition, the gentlest of
mankind, Owen, by some singular anomaly in his character, which
he seems to have caught from Morgan, glories placidly in the
wildest and most frightful range of subjects which his art is
capable of representing. Immeasurable ruins, in howling
wildernesses, with blood-red sunsets gleaming over them;
thunder-clouds rent with lightning, hovering over splitting trees
on the verges of awful precipices; hurricanes, shipwrecks, waves,
and whirlpools follow each other on his canvas, without an
intervening glimpse of quiet everyday nature to relieve the
succession of pictorial horrors. When I see him at his easel, so
neat and quiet, so unpretending and modest in himself, with such
a composed expression on his attentive face, with such a weak
white hand to guide such bold, big brushes, and when I look at
the frightful canvasful of terrors which he is serenely
aggravating in fierceness and intensity with every successive
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