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are sweet and pleasant. The elms gather together, rubbing their branches in the gale till the bark is worn off and the boughs die; the shadow is deep under them, and moist, favorable to rank grass and coarse mushrooms. Beneath the ashes, after the first frost, the air is full of the bitterness of their blackened leaves, which have all come down at once. By the beeches there is little underwood, and the hollows are filled ankle-deep with their leaves. From the pines comes a fragrant odor, and thus the character of each group dominates the surrounding ground. The shade is too much for many flowers, which prefer the nooks of hedgerows. If there is no scope for the use of "express" rifles, this southern forest really is a forest and not an open hillside. It is a forest of trees, and there are no woodlands so beautiful and enjoyable as these, where it is possible to be lost a while without fear of serious consequences; where you can walk without stepping up to the waist in a decayed tree-trunk, or floundering in a bog; where neither venomous snake nor torturing mosquito causes constant apprehensions and constant irritation. To the eye there is nothing but beauty; to the imagination pleasant pageants of old time; to the ear the soothing cadence of the leaves as the gentle breeze goes over. The beeches rear their Gothic architecture; the oaks are planted firm like castles, unassailable. Quick squirrels climb and dart hither and thither, deer cross the

distant glade, and, occasionally, a hawk passes like thought.

The something that may be in the shadow or the thicket, the vain, pleasant chase that beckons us on, still leads the footsteps from tree to tree, till by and by a lark sings, and, going to look for it, we find the stubble outside the forest-stubble still bright with the blue and white flowers of gray speedwell. One of the earliest to bloom in the spring, it continues till the plow comes again in autumn. Now looking back from the open stubble on the high wall of trees, the touch of autumn here and there is the more visible oaks dotted with brown, horse chestnuts yellow, maples orange, and the bushes beneath red with haws.

THE VOICE OF THE PINE*

BY RICHARD WATSON GILDER

'Tis night upon the lake. Our bed of boughs
Is built where, high above, the pine-tree soughs.
'Tis still — and yet what woody noises loom
Against the background of the silent gloom!
One well might hear the opening of a flower
If day were hushed as this. A mimic shower
Just shaken from a branch, how large it sounded,
As 'gainst our canvas roof its three drops bounded!

* By permission of the Century Company, New York.

Across the rumpling waves the hoot-owl's bark
Tolls forth the midnight hour upon the dark.
What mellow booming from the hills doth come?
The mountain quarry strikes its mighty drum.
Long had we lain beside our pine-wood fire,

From things of sport our talk had risen higher.
How frank and intimate the words of men

When tented lonely in some forest glen!

No dallying now with masks, from whence emerges
Scarce one true feature forth. The night-wind urges
To straight and simple speech. So we had thought
Aloud; no secrets but to light were brought.
The hid and spiritual hopes, the wild,
Unreasoned longings that, from child to child,
Mortals still cherish (though with modern shame) -
To these, and things like these, we gave a name;
And as we talked, the intense and resinous fire
Lit up the towering boles, till nigh and nigher
They gathered round, a ghostly company,
Like beasts who seek to know what men may be.

Then to our hemlock beds, but not to sleep-
For listening to the stealthy steps that creep
About the tent, or falling branch, but most
A noise was like the rustling of a host,

Or like the sea that breaks upon the shore-
It was the pine-tree's murmur. More and more
It took a human sound. These words I felt
Into the skyey darkness float and melt:

"Heardst thou these wanderers reasoning of a time
When men more near the Eternal One shall climb?
How like the new-born child, who cannot tell
A mother's arm that wraps it warm and well!
Leaves of His rose; drops in His sea that flow —
Are they, alas! so blind they may not know
Here, in this breathing world of joy and fear,
They can no nearer get to God than here?"

FORMS AND EXPRESSIONS OF TREES

BY WILSON FLAGG

THE different forms of trees, and their endless variety of foliage and spray, have, from the earliest times, been favorite studies of the painter and the naturalist. Not only has each species certain distinguishing marks, but their specific characters are greatly modified in individual trees. The Psalmist compares a godly man to a tree that is planted by rivers of water, whose leaf shall not wither seeing in the stateliness and beauty of such tree an emblem of the noble virtues of the human heart. Trees are distinguished by their grandeur or their elegance, by their primness or their grace, by the stiffness of their leaves and branches, or by their waving and tremulous motions. Some stand forth as if in defiance of the wind and the tempest; others, with long, drooping branches,

find security in bending to the gale, like the slender herbs in the meadow.

Trees are generally classed as landscape ornaments, according to their general outlines. "Some trees ascend vertically," says St. Pierre, "and having arrived at a certain height, in an air perfectly unobstructed, fork off in various tiers, and send out their branches horizontally, like an apple-tree; or incline them toward the earth, like a fir; or hollow them in the form of a cup, like the sassafras; or round them into the shape of a mushroom, like the pine; or straighten them into a pyramid, like the poplar; or roll them as wool upon the distaff, like the cypress; or suffer them to float at the discretion of the winds, like the birch." These are the normal varieties in the shape of trees. Others may be termed accidental, like those of the tall and imperfectly developed trees, which have been cramped by growing in dense assemblages, and of the pollards that have issued from the stumps and roots of other trees.

Trees are generally wanting in that kind of beauty which we admire in a vase, or an elegant piece of furniture. They have more of those qualities we look for in a picture and in the ruder works of architecture. Nature is neither geometrical nor precise in her delineations. She betrays a design in all her works, but never casts two objects in the same mold. She does not paint by formulas, nor build by square and compass, nor plant by a

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