506 



THE POETRY OF TREES. 



had the happiness to be born among the murmurs 

 of hereditary trees, can ye be blind to the system 

 pursued by that planter — Nature? Nature plants 

 often on a great scale, darkening, far as the tele- 

 scope can command the umbrage, sides of moun- 

 tains that are heard roaring still with hundreds of 

 hidden cataracts. And Nature often plants on a 

 small scale, dropping down the stately birk so 

 beautiful, among the sprinkled hazels, by the side 

 of the little water-fall of the wimpling burnie, 

 that stands dishevelling there her tresses to the 

 dew-wind, like a queen's daughter who hath just 

 issued from the pool of pearls, and shines aloft and 

 aloof from her attendant maidens. But man is so 

 proud of his own works, that he ceases to regard 

 those of Nature. Why keep poring on that book 

 of plates, purchased at less than half price at a 

 sale, when Nature flutters before your eyes her 

 own folio, which all who run may read — although 

 to study it as it ought to be studied, you must 

 certainly sit down on mossy stump, ledge of an 

 old bridge, stone- wall, stream-bank, or broomy 

 brae, and gaze, till woods and sky become like 

 your very self, and your very self like them, at 

 once incorporated together and spiritualized. Af- 

 ter a few years' such lessons — you may become a 

 planter — and under your hands not only shall the 

 desert blossom like the rose, but murmur like the 

 palm, and if " southward through Eden goes a 

 river large," and your name be Adam, what a 

 skeptic not to believe yourself the first of men, 

 your wife the fairest of her daughters Eve, and 

 your policy Paradise ! 



Unless you look and listen, and lay to heart 

 what you see and hear, you will make a pretty 

 pickle of planting. Huge wagons come hulking 

 along the cross-roads, piled up with all sorts of 

 youn<r trees swathed in mats, and you and your 

 Grieve and his men cannot rest till they are all 

 stuck into the soil — higgledy, piggledy, promis- 

 ky, and on the principle of liberty and equality — 

 each plant being allowed the same want of elbow- 

 room, and the same chance — no choice — of dry or 

 moisture. Here a great awkward overgrown 

 hobbledehoy of a poplar, who keeps perpetually 

 turning up the whites of his leaves at every breath 

 that blows, stands shivering like an aspen, cheek 

 by jowl with a squat, sturdy, short-necked, bandy- 

 legged pech of a Scotch fir, as dour as the devil 

 in a squall, though, unlike that gentleman, unable 

 to stand hot weather, and looking in a brown 

 study, indeed, during the dog-days. Here, again, 

 the greenest of all saughs, brightening with the 

 love of life, in a small marsh — for the saugh loves 

 wet like the whaup — by the side of the yellowest 

 of all larches, pining and dwindling in the fear of 

 death, but which is the top-shoot no man can 

 tell, and eaten alive by insects. There, seven as 

 pretty young oaks as you may see on a summer's 

 morning, committing fratricide for possession of 

 that knoll ! Now that yonder ash has, after a 

 sore tussle, got these two elms down, you may 

 depend upon it he will not let them up again in a 



hurry; or if he does, why that sycamore will set- 

 tle him for such stupidity, having the advantage 

 of the ground, and being his superior in height, 

 weight, and length, and at least his equal in sci- 

 ence. And then is there not something exceed- 

 ingly pretty in the variegation of such patchwork 

 policy? Pretty as any coverlet to any old wo- 

 man's bed in all the parish? No great, huge, 

 black, sullen, sulky masses of shade, no broad 

 bright bursts of sunshine, enough to drive a man 

 mad with sudden mirth or melancholy, as he 

 wanders among the woods — but every tree stand- 

 ing by itself, with an enormous organ of individu- 

 ality, so that you cannot help trying to count 

 them, yet never get beyond a score, being put out 

 of your reckoning by an unexpected poplar stand- 

 ing with his back against a rock, in vain combat 

 with a sharp-nailed silver fir, scratching his very 

 eyes out — a beech bathing in a puddle of moss- 

 water — or something in the shape of an orna- 

 mented shrub, struggling in the many-fingered 

 grasp of the strangulation heather, like a Cockney 

 entangled among the Scottish Thistle. 



Then what a pest are your prigs of professional 

 planters. They walk with such an air about your 

 rural premises, as if you had not a single eye in 

 your head, and did not know a frowning ash from 

 a weeping birch, a bour-tree from a gooseberry 

 bush, whins from broom, or rasps from rowans. 

 If there be a barn or byre, on the estate, they be- 

 gin with planting it out as if it were a poors' 

 house, or an infirmary, or a tan-yard, or perhaps 

 pulling it down; in which case, what becomes of 

 the corn and the cows? 



" Of a' the airts the wind can blaw, 

 You dearly lo'e the west ; 

 For there the bonny lassie lives, 

 The lass that you lo'e best." 



And with many a beautiful sunset has your soul 

 sunk away behind the gorgeous weather-gleam, 

 into her fair and far-off bosom. The monster 

 plants it out, too, and be hanged to him, with a 

 spindle-shanked grove, that will continue to wear 

 a truly transplanted and haggard appearance to 

 the day of judgment. 



Having thus, day after day. planted out all 

 " old familiar faces," nothing will satisfy him but 

 to open up ; and down go temples and towers that 

 never can be rebuilt — trees old as Sin, stately as 

 Satan, beautiful as Virtue, and reverend as Reli- 

 gion. The river, robbed of all the magnificence 

 with which imagination blackened and whitened 

 it, as it moved unseen through the woods — un- 

 seen, but in one bright bend here, one sullen 

 stretch there — one deadened cataract steaming 

 and gleaming yonder through its oak canopy, now 

 rolls on disenchanted through the light of common 

 day ; and you may see ladies, and ladies' maids, 

 with green parasols, hunting butterflies all by 

 themselves, or flirting with dragoon officers, and 

 under-graduates from Oxford. That mile-long 

 elm avenue — a cathedral in which a hundred thou- 

 sand penitentials might have prayed — is swept 



