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 I
like 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 90 degrees 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
hard