262 ON THE CHARACTERISTICS OF TPEES. 



" Meantime, the guardian of the Trojan state, 

 Great Hector, enter'd at the Scaean gate ; 

 Beneath the beech trees consecrated shades, 

 The Trojan matrons and the Trojan maids 

 Around him flock'd, all pressed with pious care, 

 For husbands, brothers, sons engag'd in war." 



HoM. ///. vi. 296—301. 



Humboldt has well observed on this point that "the poetry of 

 Greece, and the ruder song-s of the northern races, are in great 

 measure indebted for their different characteristics, to the forms 

 of animals and plants, to those of the mountains and valleys 

 which surrounded the poet, and to the air which fanned him." 

 "Who has not felt his mind," he continues, "very differently 

 attuned, when under the dark shade of a beech grove, or when 

 standing on a hill crowned with isolated fir trees, or when in a mea- 

 dow, the wind murmuring in the tremulous leaves of the birch; 

 melancholy, serious, or pleasing images are called up by these 

 vegetable forms of our father-land. The influence of the physical 

 on the moral, this mysterious connexion between the inner and 

 exteriorworlds,givesto the study of nature, when thus generalized, 

 a peculiar and hitherto little known charm."* 



I cannot at present enter upon the benefits productive to 

 barren land from plantations, or the profits that are derivable 

 therefrom : my object here being only to consider the subject in 

 a pictorial and poetical view. There are feelings connected with 

 trees that impress even the most indifferent minds. We trace 

 them in past ages as the seat of honoured tribunals, beneath 

 whose shade justice was dispensed, and the sacred rites of 

 hospitality performed. We behold them preserved to the ex- 

 tremest old age as landmarks, or as forming a mournful shade over 

 the ashes of those we love. We turn to them with rapture and 

 awe as associated with the names of bards and heroes, whose 

 memories are recorded in our annals, and with whom we would 

 converse as we gaze upon the trees beneath whose shade they 

 reposed . 



Dr. Johnson loved to visit a favourite willow near Lichfield, 

 and Salt, the Abyssinian traveller, in his letters from Egypt, asks 

 " if the great elm and willow are still standing ?"f and says the 

 assurance that the old pear and apple trees, and the mountain 

 ash were still living, gave him great delight. Such feelings have 

 led to the preservation of trees in every age, mentioned by various 

 authors — such as the Menelaid plane in Arcadia, seen by Pau- 

 sanias, A. D. 151, and believed to have been planted by Menelaus 

 previous to the siege of Troy — that also hanging over the temple 

 of Delphos, and the one by which Socrates used to swear — the 

 plane-tree called Caligula's nest, at his villa near Velitrae, capable 



• Essay on the characters of Vegetation, by Baron Humboldt. 

 t Halls' Memoirs of Salt, 2 vols. 8vo. Perhaps some Lichfield reader of " The 

 Analyst" can give an answer to Salt's quere, with the dimensions of the tree*. 



