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 thing, which is always more or less of a secret.     

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