[Passages from commonplace book of Gertrude Ann Parker, 1847]

Home

Our home! What images are brought before us by this one word! The meeting of cordial smiles, and the gathering round the evening hearth, and the interchange of thoughts in kindly words, and the glance of eyes to which our hearts lie open as the day - there is the true city of refuge! Where are we to turn when this is shut out from us or changed? And yet those calm, and deep and still delights, over which the world seems to have no breath of power, they too are like the beautiful summer clouds, tranquil as if fixed to sleep forever in the pure azure of the skies, yet all the while melting from us though imperceptibly passing away.

Nov. 28. 1847

Flowers!!
        Who would wish to live without flowers? Where would the poet fly for his images of beauty, if they were to perish forever? Are they not the emblems of loveliness and innocence? the living types of all that is pleasing and graceful? We compare young lips to the rose, and the white brow to the radiant lily; the winning eye gathers its glow from the violet, and the sweet voice is like a breeze kissing its way through the flowers. We hang delicate blossoms on the silken ringlets of the fair young bride, and with them strew her path, from the church. We place them round the marble face of the dead in the narrow coffin, & they become symbols of our affections, pleasures remembered & hopes faded, wishes flown, & scenes cherished the more that they can never return. Still we look to the far-off spring in other valleys - to the eternal summer beyond the grave, when the flowers that have faded, shall again bloom in starry fields, where no rude winter shall intrude. They come upon us in spring like the recollections of a dream, which hovered above us in sleep, peopled with shadowy beauties, and purple delights, fancy broidered. Sweet flowers! that bring before our eyes scenes of childhood - faces remembered in youth, when love was a stranger to himself! The mossy bank by the wayside, where we so often sat, drinking the beauty of the primrose with our eyes; the sheltered dell, darkly green, filled with the perfume of violets, that shone in their intense blue, like another sky spread upon the earth; the laughter of merry voices; the sweet song of the maiden - the down cast eye, the spreading blush, the kiss ashamed at its own sound - are all brought back to memory by a flower.