I want you to understand, in the first place, that I have a most intense, passionate fondness for trees in general, and have had several romantic attachments to certain trees in particular.Now, if you expect me to hold forth in a "scientific" way about my tree-loves, - to talk, for instance, of the Ulmus Americana, and describe the ciliated edges of its samara, and all that, - you are an anserine individual, and I must refer you to a dull friend who will discourse to you of such matters.What should you think of a lover who should describe the idol of his heart in the language of science, thus: Class, Mammalia; Order, Primates; Genus, Homo;Species, Europeus; Variety, Brown; Individual, Ann Eliza; Dental Formula2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3i---c---p---m---
2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3'
and so on?
No, my friends, I shall speak of trees as we see them, love them, adore them in the fields, where they are alive, holding their green sun-shades over our heads, talking to us with their hundred thousand whispering tongues, looking down on us with that sweet meekness which belongs to huge, but limited organisms, - which one sees in the brown eyes of oxen, but most in the patient posture, the outstretched arms, and the heavy-drooping robes of these vast beings endowed with life, but not with soul, - which outgrow us and outlive us, but stand helpless, - poor things! - while Nature dresses and undresses them, like so many full-sized, but under-witted children.
Did you ever read old Daddy Gilpin? Slowest of men, even of English men; yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a sleepy eye in woman.I always supposed "Dr.Syntax" was written to make fun of him.I have a whole set of his works, and am very proud of it, with its gray paper, and open type, and long ff, and orange-juice landscapes.The PERE Gilpin had the kind of science Ilike in the study of Nature, - a little less observation than White of Selborne, but a little more poetry.- Just think of applying the Linnaean system to an elm! Who cares how many stamens or pistils that little brown flower, which comes out before the leaf, may have to classify it by? What we want is the meaning, the character, the expression of a tree, as a kind and as an individual.
There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of tree, which, if well marked, is probably embodied in the poetry of every language.
Take the oak, for instance, and we find it always standing as a type of strength and endurance.I wonder if you ever thought of the single mark of supremacy which distinguishes this tree from all our other forest-trees? All the rest of them shirk the work of resisting gravity; the oak alone defies it.It chooses the horizontal direction for its limbs, so that their whole weight may tell, - and then stretches them out fifty or sixty feet, so that the strain may be mighty enough to be worth resisting.You will find, that, in passing from the extreme downward droop of the branches of the weeping-willow to the extreme upward inclination of those of the poplar, they sweep nearly half a circle.At 90degrees the oak stops short; to slant upward another degree would mark infirmity of purpose; to bend downwards, weakness of organization.The American elm betrays something of both; yet sometimes, as we shall see, puts on a certain resemblance to its sturdier neighbor.
It won't do to be exclusive in our taste about trees.There is hardly one of them which has not peculiar beauties in some fitting place for it.I remember a tall poplar of monumental proportions and aspect, a vast pillar of glossy green, placed on the summit of a lofty hill, and a beacon to all the country round.A native of that region saw fit to build his house very near it, and, having a fancy that it might blow down some time or other, and exterminate himself and any incidental relatives who might be "stopping" or "tarrying" with him, - also laboring under the delusion that human life is under all circumstances to be preferred to vegetable existence, - had the great poplar cut down.It is so easy to say, "It is only a poplar!" and so much harder to replace its living cone than to build a granite obelisk!
I must tell you about some of my tree-wives.I was at one period of my life much devoted to the young lady-population of Rhode Island, a small, but delightful State in the neighborhood of Pawtucket.The number of inhabitants being not very large, I had leisure, during my visits to the Providence Plantations, to inspect the face of the country in the intervals of more fascinating studies of physiognomy.I heard some talk of a great elm a short distance from the locality just mentioned."Let us see the great elm," - I said, and proceeded to find it, - knowing that it was on a certain farm in a place called Johnston, if I remember rightly.
I shall never forget my ride and my introduction to the great Johnston elm.
I always tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the first time.Provincialism has no SCALE of excellence in man or vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when it has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for Nature's best.I have often fancied the tree was afraid of me, and that a sort of shiver came over it as over a betrothed maiden when she first stands before the unknown to whom she has been plighted.
Before the measuring-tape the proudest tree of them all quails and shrinks into itself.All those stories of four or five men stretching their arms around it and not touching each other's fingers, if one's pacing the shadow at noon and making it so many hundred feet, die upon its leafy lips in the presence of the awful ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions.