ich beautify the world and provide for us a thousand
comforts and conveniences. Our houses and the furniture in them, our
boats and ships, the cars in which we fly so swiftly, the many
beautiful and useful things which are manufactured from wood of
various kinds, all these, by the help of the sun, are furnished us by
the tiny leaves of the trees.

BRYANT, THE POET OF TREES.

"It is pleasant," as Mr. George W. Curtis has said, "to
remember, on Arbor Day, that Bryant, our oldest American
poet and the father of our American literature, is
especially the poet of trees. He grew up among the solitary
hills of western Massachusetts, where the woods were his
nursery and the trees his earliest comrades. The solemnity
of the forest breathes through all his verse, and he had
always, even in the city, a grave, rustic air, as of a man
who heard the babbling brooks and to whom the trees told
their secrets."

His "Forest Hymn" is familiar to many, but it cannot be too
familiar. It would be well if teachers would encourage their
pupils to commit the whole, or portions of it, at least, to
memory. Let it be made a reading lesson, but, in making it
such, let pains be taken to point out its felicities of
expression, its beautiful moral tone and lofty sentiment,
and its wise counsels for life and conduct. Nothing could be
more appropriate, especially for the indoor portion of the
Arbor Day exercises, than to have this poem, or portions of
it, read by some pupil in full sympathy with its spirit, or
by some class in concert.

FOREST HYMN.

The groves were God's first temples, ere man learned
To hew the shaft and lay the architrave
And spread the roof above them, ere he framed
The lofty vault to gather and roll back
The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood,
Amidst the cool and silence, he knelt down
And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks
And supplications. For his simple heart
Might not resist the sacred influences
Which from the stilly twilight of the place
And from the gray old trunks that high in heaven
Mingled their mossy boughs, and from the sound
Of the invisible breath that swayed at once
All their green tops, stole over him and bowed
His spirit with the thought of boundless power
And inaccessible majesty. Ah, why
Should we, in the world's riper