dance,' and 'the bush with
frizzled hair.' For the bush form is essentially one taken by vegetation in
some kind of distress; scorched by heat, discouraged by darkness, or bitten
by frost; it is the form in which isolated knots of earnest plant life stay
{210} the flux of fiery sands, bind the rents of tottering crags, purge the
stagnant air of cave or chasm, and fringe with sudden hues of unhoped
spring the Arctic edge of retreating desolation.

On the other hand, the trees which, as in sacred dance, make the borders of
the rivers glad with their procession, and the mountain ridges statelier
with their pride, are all expressions of the vegetative power in its
accomplished felicities; gathering themselves into graceful companionship
with the fairest arts and serenest life of man; and providing not only the
sustenance and the instruments, but also the lessons and the delights, of
that life, in perfectness of order, and unblighted fruition of season and
time.

9. 'Interitura'--yet these not to-day, nor to-morrow, nor with the decline
of the summer's sun. We describe a plant as small or great; and think we
have given account enough of its nature and being. But the chief question
for the plant, as for the human creature, is the Number of its days; for to
the tree, as to its master, the words are forever true--"As thy Day is, so
shall thy Strength be."

10. I am astonished hourly, more and more, at the apathy and stupidity
which have prevented me hitherto from learning the most simple facts at the
base of this question! Here is this myrtille bush in my hand--its cluster
of some fifteen or twenty delicate green branches knitting themselves
downwards into the stubborn brown {211} of a stem on which my knife makes
little impression. I have not the slightest idea how old it is, still less
how old it might one day have been if I had not gathered it; and, less than
the least, what hinders it from becoming as old as it likes! What doom is
there over these bright green sprays, that they may never win to any height
or space of verdure, nor persist beyond their narrow scope of years?

11. And the more I think the more I bewilder myself; for these bushes,
which are pruned and clipped by the deathless Gardener into these lowly
thickets of bloom, do not strew the ground with fallen branches and faded
clippings in any wise,--it is the pining umbrage of the patriarchal trees
that tinges the ground and betrays the foot beneath them: but,