thing
is that nature should ever be ruinous or wasteful, or deathful! I look
at this wild piece of crystallisation with endless astonishment.

MARY. Where does it come from?

L. The Tete Noire of Chamonix. What makes it more strange is that it
should be in a vein of fine quartz rock. If it were in a mouldering
rock, it would be natural enough; but in the midst of so fine substance,
here are the crystals tossed in a heap; some large, myriads small
(almost as small as dust), tumbling over each other like a terrified
crowd, and glued together by the sides, and edges, and backs, and heads;
some warped, and some pushed out and in, and all spoiled and each
spoiling the rest.

MARY. And how flat they all are!

L. Yes; that's the fashion at the Tete Noire.

MARY. But surely this is ruin, not caprice?

L. I believe it is in great part misfortune; and we will examine these
crystal troubles in next lecture. But if you want to see the
gracefullest and happiest caprices of which dust is capable, you must go
to the Hartz; not that I ever mean to go there myself, for I want to
retain the romantic feeling about the name; and I have done myself some
harm already by seeing the monotonous and heavy form of the Brocken from
the suburbs of Brunswick. But whether the mountains be picturesque or
not, the tricks which the goblins (as I am told) teach the crystals in
them, are incomparably pretty. They work chiefly on the mind of a
docile, bluish coloured, carbonate of lime; which comes out of a grey
limestone. The goblins take the greatest possible care of its education,
and see that nothing happens to it to hurt its temper; and when it may
be supposed to have arrived at the crisis which is, to a well brought up
mineral, what presentation at court is to a young lady--after which it
is expected to set fashions--there's no end to its pretty ways of
behaving. First it will make itself into pointed darts as fine as
hoar-frost; here, it is changed into a white fur as fine as silk; here
into little crowns and circlets, as bright as silver; as if for the
gnome princesses to wear; here it is in beautiful little plates, for
them to eat off; presently it is in towers which they might be
imprisoned in; presently in caves and cells, where they may make
nun-gnomes of themselves, and no gnome ever hear of them more; here is
some of it in sheaves, like corn; here, some in drifts, like snow; here,
some in rays, like stars: and, though these are, all o