THE AMERICAN FORESTS. 3841 
of Central and Southern Europe have a great advantage over 
our own in the corresponding latitudes, in density of foliage as 
well as in depth of color and persistence of the leaves in 
deciduous species. An American, who, after a long absence 
from the United States, returns in the full height of summer, 
is painfully surprised at the thinness and poverty of the leafage 
even of the trees which he had habitually regarded as specially 
umbrageous, and he must wait for the autumnal frosts before 
he can recover his partiality for the glories of his native woods. 
None of our north-eastern evergreens resemble the umbrella 
pine sufficiently to be a fair object of comparison with it. A 
cedar, very common above the Highlands on the Hudson, and 
elsewhere, is extremely like the cypress, straight, slender, with 
erect, compressed ramification, and feathered to the ground, but 
its foliage is neither so dark nor so dense, the tree does not 
attain the majestic height of the cypress, nor has it the lithe 
flexibility of that tree.* In mere shape, the Lombardy poplar 
nearly resembles this latter, but it is almost a profanation to 
compare the two, especially when they are agitated by the 
wind; for under such circumstances, the one is the most 
the American October landscape a softer and more harmonious tone than 
marks the humble shrubbery of the forest hillsides of Dauphiny. 
Thoreau—who was not, like some very celebrated landscape critics of the 
present day, an outside spectator of the action and products of natural forces, 
but, in the old religious sense, an observer of organic nature, living, more than 
almost any other descriptive writer, among and with her children—has a very 
eloquent paper on the ‘‘ Autumnal Tints” of the New England landscape.— 
See his Hxeursions, pp. 215 et segq. 
Few men have personally noticed so many facts in natural history accessible 
to unscientific observation as Thoreau, and yet he had never seen that very 
common and striking spectacle, the phosphorescence of decaying wood, until, 
in the latter years of his life, it caught his attention in a bivouac in the forests 
of Maine. He seems to have been more excited by this phenomenon than by 
any other described in his works. It must be a capacious eye that takes in all 
the visible facts in the history of the most familiar natural object.—Te Maine 
Woods, p. 184. 
* The cold winter, or rather spring, of 1872 proved fatal to many cypresses as 
well as olive trees in the Val d’Arno, The cypress, therefore, could be intro- 
duced only into California and our Southern States. 
