" _These_ were curiously
adorned, broidered, and inwrought with flowers, many and brilliant as
those in a western prairie. Were I to undertake to describe them, I
might make an inventory as long as Homer's list of the ships. There
was the Canterbury bell of our garden; the white meadow sweet; the
blue and white campanula; the tall, slender harebell, and a little,
short-tufted variety of the same, which our guide tells me is called
"Les Clochettes," or the "little bells"--fairies might ring them, I
thought. Then there are whole beds of the little blue forget-me-not,
and a white flower which much resembles it in form. I also noticed,
hanging in the clefts of the rocks around Tete Noir, the long golden
tresses of the laburnum. It has seemed to me, when I have been
travelling here, as if every flower I ever saw in a garden met me some
where in rocks or meadows.
There is a strange, unsatisfying pleasure about flowers, which, like
all earthly pleasure, is akin to pain. What can you do with them?--you
want to do something, but what? Take them all up, and carry them with
you? You cannot do that. Get down and look at them? What, keep a whole
caravan waiting for your observations! That will never do.
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