She was old and wizened and yellow-faced; but she had kind eyes, and it was certainly a kindly thought.
The whole of that garden, some forty by twenty feet, was filled with Madonna lilies, growing like grass in a field, with only a narrow path whereby to walk round them.
“Consider the lilies how they grow.... Not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these!”
The child that saw them was too unyeared and ignorant to apply these wonderful words if she had ever heard them. She could not feel her pleasure sharpened by the exquisite sensation of having the vision phrased in language as beautiful as itself. But she has carried away the memory, as sacredly as Wordsworth that of his daffodils—
“I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
“For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,