Look here. Here are some human lies laid down against the periods of
its growth, to which they corresponded. This is Shakspeare's. The tree
was seven inches in diameter when he was born; ten inches when he died.
A little less than ten inches when Milton was born; seventeen when he
died. Then comes a long interval, and this thread marks out Johnson's
life, during which the tree increased from twenty-two to twenty-nine
inches in diameter. Here is the span of Napoleon's career;--the tree
doesn't seem to have minded it.

I never saw the man yet who was not startled at looking on this
section. I have seen many wooden preachers,--never one like this. How
much more striking would be the calendar counted on the rings of one of
those awful trees which were standing when Christ was on earth, and
where that brief mortal life is chronicled with the stolid apathy of
vegetable being, which remembers all human history as a thing of
yesterday in its own dateless existence!

I have something more to say about elms. A relative tells me there is
one of great glory in Andover, near Bradford. I have some recollections
of the former place, pleasant and other. [I wonder if the old Seminary
clock strikes as slowly as it used to. My room-mate thought, when he
first came, it was the bell tolling deaths, and people's ages, as they
do in the country. He swore--(ministers' sons get so familiar with good
words that they are apt to handle them carelessly)--that the children
were dying by the dozen, of all ages, from one to twelve, and ran off
next day in recess, when it began to strike eleven, but was caught
before the clock got through striking.] At the foot of "the hill," down
in town, is, or was, a tidy old elm, which was said to have been hooped
with iron to protect it from Indian tomahawks, (_Credat Hahnemannus_,)
and to have grown round its hoops and buried them in its wood. Of
course, this is not the tree my relative means.

Also, I have a very pretty letter from Norwich, in Connecticut, telling
me of two noble elms which are to be seen in that town. One hundred and
twenty-seven feet from bough-end to bough-end! What do you say to that?
And gentle ladies beneath it, that love it and celebrate its praises!
And that in a town of such supreme, audacious, Alpine loveliness as
Norwich!--Only the dear people there must learn to call it Norridge,
and not be misled by the mere accident of spelling.

Nor_wich_.
Por_ch_mouth.
Cincinnat_ah