- Project Runeberg -  Life, letters, and posthumous works of Fredrika Bremer /
230

(1868) [MARC] Author: Fredrika Bremer Translator: Emily Nonnen With: Charlotte Bremer
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230 LETTERS.

the Rochefoucauld wisdom, which I hate like the plague,
because it sucks all its juice, or rather its venom, out of
mankind’s plague-blister, egotism, which it mistakes for
the true, sound nature of man. My faith in the latter is
firmly rooted as a rock, and I know its loveableness and its
power to feel sympathy; “to weep with them that weep,
and rejoice with them that are happy ;” and I am, there-
fore, by no means afraid of telling you what I felt in going
out to Arsta, little as it is to speak of.

It was a splendid winter’s day. The sun was shining so
brightly on the new-fallen snow, and the pine forests smelt
so fresh. The rocks were clothed in draperies of snow;
the mosses and lichen — my best friends amongst plants —
shone so fresh and many-colored from the moisture which
they drank out of the melting snow. They are the kind,
the pious folks in the vegetable kingdom; there is no
nakedness, no poverty, no ugliness which they scorn to
hide with their beautiful living carpets, and, through these,
to unite with the regions of beauty and light. It is only
the really rotten and putrid which they abandon to the
parasitical mushrooms. Across the frozen lakes were glid-
ing long lines of peasants’ sleighs, and my own covered
sledge, with its clear, tinkling bells, flew so merrily along
over lake and through forest. It was a winter’s day in its
most beautiful garb, and to me as charming as summer in
all its splendor. Beside me sat my good Marie, with her
warm heart and her keen sense of Nature’s beauties; ready,
at the slightest hint, to melt from mere ecstasy. When,
after my pleasant and easy drive, I came out here to these
good, benevolent people; to these quiet, large, and lofty
rooms, in which many flowers were blooming ; when at
night I beheld, through a transparent, silvery frost-vapor,
the red lights from the windows in the work-people’s
homes, in which I knew that the households of the labor-
ers on the estate were living coinfortably and decently ;
when I then saw my beloved constellations — Orion and

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