How was I to show myself truly the possessor and mistress of those cherished Things of my own?
At last I propounded the question to my mother.
"I know no way," she said, "but to get Love to be lord and possessor of you and of them. For while Selfishness sinks us below the very Things we are supposed to possess, making us fade, and rust, and perish like them, Love lifts these very perishing things themselves into our higher world, transfiguring them into ladders on which angels go up and down, and into keys of the kingdom of heaven."
Sunshine, Daylight, and the Rock.
Sunshine and Daylight had one day a serious difference of opinion about a rocky waste, over which their course led them.
"I am not severe," said Daylight, fixing her clear, generalizing gray eyes on the Rock. "If I cannot, like some people, see nothing but what I wish to see, no one ever accused me of blackening any one's character. I have known that old Rock more years than I care to mention; not a jagged edge nor a whimsical cranny but I am intimately acquainted with; and I do not hesitate to say, that a more barren, unmitigated rock I seldom meet with. I do not slander it. I only say, it is nothing more or less than a rock."
Sunshine said nothing, but peeped round the shoulder of her cousin's gray cloak, until the smile of her soft eye met the eye of a little blue violet, which, by dint of hard living, had contrived to obtain a secure footing in a crevice of the old rock; and a flutter of joy passed through the blossoms and leaves of the violet, and communicated itself to a tuft of dry short grass, which had ensconced itself behind. The red and gray cups of some tiny moss and lichens, which had crept into corners here and there, next drank in her kind glances, and fancied themselves wine-cups at a feast. Here and there specks of colour and points of life revealed themselves, and, as they looked, expanded.