ELMS, AND OTHER TREES

I wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer. Where are your great trees, sir?

Oh, all round about New England. I call all trees mine that I have put my wedding-ring on. What I mean by putting my wedding-ring on a tree is measuring it with my thirty-foot tape. I have worn a tape almost out on the rough barks of our New England elms and other big trees. Don't you want to hear me talk trees a little now? That is one of my specialties.

In the first place, I have a most intense, passionate fondness for trees in general, and have had several romantic attachments to certain trees in particular. I speak of trees as we see them, love them, adore them in the fields, where they are alive, holding their green sunshades 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.

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 always find it 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 those around it? The others shirk the work of resisting gravity; the oak 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° the oak stops short; to slant upward another degree would mark infirmity of purpose; to bend downward, weakness of organization.

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, and exterminate himself and any incidental relatives that might be "stopping 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 shall never forget my ride and my introduction to the great Johnston elm [Rhode Island]. 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. 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, of 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 that has strangled so many false pretensions.

As I rode along the pleasant way, watching eagerly for the object of my journey, the rounded tops of the elms rose from time to time at the road-side. Wherever one looked taller and fuller than the rest, I asked myself,-"Is this it?" But as I drew nearer, they became smaller, or it proved perhaps that two standing in a line had looked like one, and so deceived me.

At last, all at once, when I was not thinking of it,—I declare to you it makes my flesh creep when I think of it now,-all at once I saw a great green cloud swelling in the horizon, so vast, so symmetrical, of such Olympian majesty and imperial supremacy among the lesser forest-growths, that my heart stopped short, then jumped at my ribs as a hunter springs at a five-barred gate, and I felt all through me without need of uttering the words,-"This is it!"

The largest actual girth I have ever found at five feet from the ground is in the great elm lying a stone's throw or two north of the main road in Springfield [Massachusetts]. But this has much the appearance of having been formed by the union of two trunks growing side by side. The West Springfield elm and one upon Northampton meadows belong also to the first class of trees.

What makes a first-class elm? Why, size, in the first place, and chiefly. Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet above the ground, with a spread of branches a hundred feet across, may claim that title, according to my scale. Elms of the second class, generally ranging from fourteen to eighteen feet, are comparatively common. The queen of them all is that glorious tree near one of the churches in Springfield. Beautiful and stately she is beyond praise. The "great tree" on Boston

Common comes in the second rank, as does the one at Cohasset, and that at Newburyport. These last two have, perhaps, been over-celebrated. Both, however, are pleasing vegetables.

pas'sion-ate, ardent. pos'ture, position.

em-bod'ied, formed into.

pro-vin'cial-ism,

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (Abridged).

narrowness of

thought or experience; said of

people who live in a small place and never go outside of it. O-lym'pi-an, of Olympus, a mountain in Thessaly celebrated as the home of the gods.

WOODMAN, SPARE THAT TREE

Woodman, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I'll protect it now.
'Twas my forefather's hand
That placed it near his cot;
There, woodman, let it stand—
Thy axe shall harm it not!

That old familiar tree,

Whose glory and renown

Are spread o'er land and sea

And wouldst thou hew it down?

Woodman, forbear thy stroke!

Cut not its earth-bound ties;
Oh, spare that aged oak,

Now towering to the skies!

GEORGE POPE MORRIS.

GEORGE POPE MORRIS (1802-64) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but passed most of his life in New York City. He wrote prose and poetry of his poems, the one reproduced here is the best known.