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Trees
FLOWERS
are so small, so easily cultivated, so personal, so brilliant,
that they have gained almost more than their share of
human attention. While their elder sisters, the trees,
keep their unobtrusive estate, and minister untiringly
to our comfort with little praise or recognition. Yet,
how necessary they are! I do not mean how useful, I mean
spiritually needful.
Apart from their humble office
as givers of shade and preserves of streams, they minister
more than we guess to our hourly pleasure. Yet we are
so thoughtless of them that we take their benefits without
a word of gratitude for the most part. If you have seen
a wooded hillside in winter you will remember how [Page
193] lonely and bleak it looked. Only the bare
skeletons of the trees spread over the mountain, and all
the great primitive strength and ruggedness and sorry
age of the earth exposed to sight, – the ribs of
the world. These are the same hills, perhaps, that you
knew in summer, so green and so luxuriant, bare now and
stern, showing all their scars, bitter evidences of their
strenuous, enduring history. The calm, unimpassioned whiteness
of the snow has folded them in its chilly oblivion. It
is impossible to believe that spring can repeat her ancient
miracle; surely, here is the veriest desolation, the mere
geology of life, inorganic dust, the inert mass of the
firmament given over to the stealthy depredation of elemental
time; no hope nor assurance anywhere.
And yet, in contradiction of all
the probabilities of sense, that desolation will grow
vivid and lovely as the sun comes north. All those gaunt
spectres that now seem so ghostly will put on their gala
attire, the April orange and May-time green. That soft,
purplish mist [Page 194] of the far spring
woods means in reality the reds and yellows of the maple
blossoms, and the paler yellows and silver of the willow
catkins. It is the first flush of reviving life that comes
before the green of leaf. And carefully as you may watch,
the green banners will seem to be flung abroad suddenly
at last. If you single out one tree for your care, and
observe it every day, you may think to trace the gradual
assumption of its full robes for June. You will be disappointed.
There will come a day of rain or a night of warmth, and
when you next see your friend you will stand astonished
at the change. You have been surprised again by nature.
The ancient sorceress had no mind to be spied upon; and
must guard well the secret of her power over your wondering
admiration. There you are, outwitted, after all; for the
tree unfolded every leaf while you slept. So the grass
springs, and the dandelions are born, — by magic,
in a twinkling, myriads at once, — so that yesterday
they were unheard of, and to-day they [Page 195]
possess the earth in their gay panoply and simple
golden pomp.
The trees are the great mitigators
and temperers of the elements to man. They shelter us
from the fury of the rain and snow, yet conserve it for
our gradual use. They shade us from the glare of the open
sun, yet in time furnish us with heat and light. A treeless
country is not the best of countries. Its usefulness is
limited and specialized. A normal earth for man has both
forest and prairie. But these are only the gross material
blessings of the trees. There remains all their beauty.
How few of us ever heed those
goodly, patient friends of man. We go forth and rifle
the wilderness of its laurel or its arbutus, but not one
in ten among us knows a beech from a maple, nor a pine
from a spruce. It is a part of our dense indifference
to everything save personal luxury. But a nation which
does not know one tree from another is in peril of vanishing
from the earth. Puny [Page 196] dwellers
in cities, let us get down to earth more often than we
do.
I suppose one’s love of
trees changes like one’s love of everything else.
At one time of life we adore the oak; at another the elm
commands our allegiance. It is a matter of circumstance
and environment, since each tree differs from its fellow
and each is lovely after its kind. To name the elm is
to have a vision of great meadows, and summer barns, and
fields of hay, and sweeps of blue river. The elm is a
lover of such scenes, and if we have lived through them
in youth, its swaying, feathery top will always recall
the memories of that perished time, – remembrances
of a native country, of intervale lands, with some great
river winding slowly down between the hills, blue under
the summer sky. There are its broad, deep-soiled islands,
shoulder high with hay, where the few gray, wide-chinked
barns stand awaiting their harvest. Along the edges of
the islands are a few chokecherries and water maples,
but no great trees save the [Page 197] stately
elms here and there, solitary under the blue.
Or, again, it may be the marvellous
maple of the north that would enlist all your friendship.
Its brave scarlet and golden coat makes the autumn world
a mediaeval crusade for brilliancy and courage. It is
surely impossible to be craven or hopeless in the face
of such gorgeous beauty! October in the mountains, when
the maples are in all their splendour, is no time for
the trifling or the mean. To see those beautiful trees
arrayed for the closing days of the year is to partake
of the nobleness of nature. While we know it not, something
of that wondrous Oriental richness of colour enters into
our subtler make-up, and we arise on the morrow with unguessed
acquisitions of soul.
Again, there are the pines. And
how different the pine regions of the south from those
of the north. There is one thing, however, that marks
a pine-tree, one quality in which none of the other children
of the forest can [Page 198] rival it
– its delicacy of line against the sky. No other
tree throws on the pale blue curtain so graceful a tracery
of tiny pencillings. Look at the branch of a pine-tree
in the twilight seen clear against the open heaven. And
so, indeed, you may run through your list of acquaintance
among the trees. Note the shaft of the spruce, the trembling
leaf of the aspen set on differently from all other leaves,
and the sound of the palms like the patter of rain, and
the colour of the beech boles. A master could write a
volume on any one of these traits. On some mountainside,
where the wildest thrushes prefer to dwell, and where
beech-trees come to their perfection , note, the next
time you pass, the beautiful gray and blue and purple
of those smooth-barked boles. The trunk of a full-grown
beech is subject enough for any painter. Like Monet’s
haystack, it might be painted in a hundred lights, and
still stand there unexhausted in suggestion and beauty.
When Arnold was in America our
tulip-trees [Page 199] took his fancy,
and he wished to be remembered when they come in flower.
So every season has its distinctive tree; the dark-painted
fir full of snow in midwinter, and the greenish-white
flowered chestnuts showing pale in the forests of July.
But at all times of the round year the trees of the wild
forest are there, only waiting to be known and loved [Page
200].
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