16 EEV. DR. GEE — FAMOFS TEEES IN HEETFOEDSITIRE. 



the tree, may keep up the rememhrance of this good work. I 

 myself have a weak hope that some Vicar of Abbot's Langley 

 (next but three, say, after me) may speak of my lime avenue in 

 our churchyard as they speak at Welwyn of the limes planted by 

 the writer of the ' Mght Thoughts,' and say of mine, "These 

 were planted in old Mr. Gee's time;" but the trees themselves 

 everywhere, to be noteworthy, are so old that we must rather say 

 that in our time and turn, " We belong to them, than that they 

 belong to us." How many generations of old and young have told 

 their tale of joy and sorrow under a Kiss Oak of 20 feet circum- 

 ference. How must the old tree smile to see a new generation 

 coming to it with the old, old story. I am myself inclined to 

 think of such a tree as the old monk thought of Leonardo's great 

 fresco in the refectory, opposite to which so many generations 

 came, and ate and di-ank, and went away, and came no more. 

 "Surely," said he, "the figures on the wall are the realities, we 

 in the hall are the shadows." But no, surely this suggests a 

 notion, or encourages and strengthens a belief, that the duration of 

 man takes place somewhere else. If 1000 years be the continuance 

 in the Maker's eyes of vegetable life, then the highest form of the 

 higher, or the animal life, cannot be on an average less than one- 

 twentieth of that term. There must be, as the Psalm says, " a 

 planting in the House of the Lord of those who shall flourish for 

 ever in the Court of our God." 



I check myself in an honest tendency to improve the occasion in 

 the direction of my own special vocation. I will end with a verse 

 from him, from whom you would scarcely expect a veiy earnest 

 aspiration of immortality, and yet it says all I want to say. It 

 is said that Lord Byron wrote the following epitaph for a tomb 

 in Harrow Churchyard. The allusion will explain itself. 



" Under these green trees pointing to the skies, 

 The planter of them, Isaac Greentree, lies. 

 The time will come when these green trees shall fall, 

 And Isaac Greentree rise above them all." 



