“It will never be,” said Frances.
“I don’t know that,” replied Charlotte; “he seemed to set very little value on the city residence, and would fain have stripped his elegant rooms to dignify your rustic retreat; but I would not consent to the migration of a particle of gilding or damask, but told him he might send the marble slabs, with the mirrors,—and I speak for one of the slabs for the dairy. But I have been more thoughtful for you than you have for yourself: look at this list of books that I have ordered.”
Frances was surprised; she had never seen Charlotte with a book in her hand, and she candidly expressed her astonishment that, amidst all her hurry, she had remembered books.
“Where do you think I acquired all my knowledge,” said Charlotte, “if I never open a book? But you are half right; I certainly do not patronize book-making; and yet all summer I am reading the book of Nature. I open it with the first snow-drop and crocus which peeps
from under her white robe; and then, when she puts on her green mantle, strewed with
‘The yellow cowslip and the pale primrose,’
I study the lilies of the field. Depend upon it, there is more wisdom without doors than we can find within,—more wisdom there than in books.”
“I believe it,” said Frances; “all nature speaks of the Creator,—of the one great Mind which formed this endless variety, and can give life to the most insignificant flower that grows by the way-side.”
“I should like to know what flower you call insignificant,” said Charlotte; “not this little houstonia, I hope; that has a perfection of organization in which many of your splendid green-house flowers are deficient. But that is the way with us: we call those things sublime which are on a large scale, because they are magnified to our narrow minds, and we can comprehend them without any trouble.—But I must not display all my wisdom to you at once—how, like Solomon of old, I can speak of trees, from ‘the cedar-tree that is in Lebanon
even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall.’—And now, fair sister,