44 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



They seek sylvan retreats for the dehumanizing pastimes of hunting and 

 fishing— a survival of those same barbaric times which this poet describes. 

 Not to such, and not to any eye fixed merely on advantages, does nature 

 yield her humanizing influences. For " the eye sees what it brings." If 

 '' the groves were God's first temples," and if their interlaced boughs 

 suggested the pointed Gothic arch frozen so many centuries agone into 

 cathedral poems of matchless beauty and religious suggestion, it is also 

 true that in these same ages the woods were the strongholds of savage, 

 lawless life, and the cities, generally speaking, the centers of whatever 

 humanizing influences were abroad in those days. And if we compare 

 metropolitan with rural civilization, while we may grant all that 

 Washington Irving or any other person has said about the nobility of 

 rural occupation, the independence of the life, the first production of 

 values, the freedom from such contaminating associations as are often 

 unavoidable in cities, and the potential refinements from the close 

 association with nature, still, insensibility to nature's teachings may 

 contravene this benefit, and isolation and the lack of wholesome friction 

 with the world's action and passion may narrow the horizon of one's 

 understanding and sympathies nearly down to a geometric point. Our 

 true inner destiny depends not so much on where our lot is cast, as on the 

 mold in which we are cast. 



But, given the " love of nature " and " the philosophic mind," how great 

 the advantages of communion with her " visible form!" Who is there that 

 loves the woods and streams but feels with the poet Wordsworth? 



" The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 

 Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; 

 Little we see in nature that is ours; 

 We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! 

 And we for everything are out of tune; 

 It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be 

 A pagan suckled in a creed outworn. 

 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 

 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 

 Have sights of Proteus coming from the sea, 

 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 



When I have lived for a time the free outdoor life of the forest, it seems 

 to me I will never again submit to the inclosed methods of existence which 

 make one's house not so much his protection as his prison. The trees 

 become companions. I find my "whispering oaks" and elms and willows, 

 everywhere. They take a human quality, not that of Dante's grotesque 

 picturing, but a sociable, brooding, protecting, yet lofty and half 

 patronizing companionshiiD which breeds a reciprocal tenderness and 

 respect. Then with w^iat sadness one who loves them must witness their 

 wanton destruction! Longfellow pleaded so eloquently for the life of a 

 beloved elm, but it was sacrificed to the march of needful public 

 improvements. Helen Hunt Jackson sang sadly before her hickory fire: 



" O strong, white body of hickory tree. 

 What do I burn in burning thee?" 



But that burning tree warmed and comforted a lover, at least. The 

 birches and hemlocks that "shuddering, trembling," yielding to Hiawatha's 

 demands in behalf of his bark canoe, were confederates in a noble art of 

 civilization; the monarchs of the forests that are fashioned into the beams 

 and timbers of our dwellings, roads, bridges, and ships, suffer in a worthy 



