262 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
Sing of all things in the air, 
All things in the sunny air, 
All things in the sea! 
And I'll sing a song as rare 
Of the apple tree. 
“Winter comes, as winter will, 
Bringing dark days, frost and rime; 
But the apple is in vogue 
At the Christmas time. 
Then they bring out apples prime, 
Then you the roast apple see, 
While they toast the apple tree, 
Singing rhyme in jolly chime 
To the brave old apple tree!” 
If our souls are properly attuned, trees may talk to us, as the oak did 
to Tennyson, and that will make us love them more, and plant mere 
numerously and guard more tenderly. 
“To yonder oak within the field 
I spoke without restraint, 
And with a larger faith appealed 
Than Papist unto saint. 
“Tho’ what he whispered under heaven 
None else could understand, 
I found him garrulously given, 
A babbler in the land.” 
Not all poetry is written in rhyme, and I herewith give you an example; 
and he who plants, preserves or restores a forest is contributing to a picture 
of an edifice like this, so magnificently described by the historian, Parkman. 
He is describing one of the rooms in that gigantic wilderness home of the 
aboriginal tribes of North America, of which he wrote so accurately and en- 
tertainingly. The English language contains few finer gems: 
“Deep recesses where, veiled in foliage, some wild, shy rivulet steals with 
timid music through breathless caves of verdure; gulfs where feathered crags 
rise like castle walls, where noonday sun pierces with keen rays athwart 
the torrent, and the mossed arms of fallen pines cast wavering shadows on 
the illumined foam; pools of liquid crystal turned emerald in the reflected 
green of impending woods; rocks on whose rugged front the gleam of sun- 
lit waters dances in quivering light; ancient trees hurled headlong by the 
storm, to dam the stream with their forlorn and savage ruin; or the stern 
depths of immemorial forests, dim and silent as a cavern with innumerable 
trunks, each like an Atlas upholding its world of leaves and sweating per- 
petual moisture down its dark and channeled rind—some strong in youth, 
some grisly with decrepid age, nightmares of strange distortion, gnarled 
and knotted with wens and goitres; roots intertwined beneath like serpents 
petrified in an agony of contorted strife; green and glistening mosses car- 
peting the rough ground, mantling the rough rocks, turning the pulpy 
stumps to mounds of verdure, and swathing trunks as, bent in the impotence 
of rottenness, they lie out-stretched over knoll and hollow, like mouldering 
reptiles of the primeval world, while around and on and through them 
springs the young growth that fattens on their decay—the forest devouring 
its own dead!” 
Who that has seen the primeval forest, as it came from the hand of God, 
