In the summer, of course, this daily routine was frequently varied by most delightful excursions in the country. Mrs. Hamilton earnestly longing to implant a love of Nature and all its fresh, pure associations in the minds of her children while yet young, knowing that once obtained, the pleasures of the world would be far less likely to obtain too powerful dominion. That which the world often terms romance, she felt to be a high, pure sense of poetry in the Universe and in Man, which she was quite as anxious to instill as many mothers to root out. She did not believe that to cultivate the spiritual needed the banishment of the matter of fact; but she believed, that to infuse the latter with the former would be their best and surest preventive against all that was low and mean; their best help in the realization of a constant unfailing piety. For the same reason she cultivated a taste for the beautiful, not only in her girls, but in her boys--and beauty, not in arts and nature alone, but in character. She did not allude to beauty of merely the high and striking kind, but to the lowly virtues, struggles, faith, and heroism in the poor--their forbearance and kindness to one another--marking something to admire, even in the most rugged and surly, that at first sight would seem so little worthy of notice. It was gradually, and almost unconsciously, to accustom her daughters to such a train of thought and sentiment, that she so particularly laid aside one part of the day to have them with her alone; ostensibly, it was to give part of their day to working for the many poor, to whom gifts of ready-made clothing are sometimes much more valuable than money; but the _education_ of that one hour she knew might, for the right cultivation of the heart, do more than the mere _teaching_ of five or six, and that education, much as she loved and valued Miss Harcourt, she had from the first resolved should come from her alone.