156 TREES IN ASSEMBLAGES. 



ing with palisades of naked pillars, unrelieved by any 

 foliage below their summits. They remind me of city 

 houses which have been cut asunder to widen an ave- 

 nue, leaving their interior walls exposed to sight. These 

 fragments of forest, and the acres of stumps in the recent 

 clearings, are the grand picturesque deformity of the 

 newly settled parts of the country. But when a wall of 

 these forest palisades, a hundred feet in height, bounds 

 the plain for miles of prospect, it forms a scene of unex- 

 ceptionable grandeur. 



It is chiefly in the old States that we see anything like 

 a picturesque grouping of trees. There the wood as- 

 sumes the character of both forest and grove, displaying 

 a beautiful intermixture of them, combined with groups 

 of coppice and shrubbery. Thickets generally occupy the 

 low grounds, and coppice the elevations. The New Eng- 

 land system of farming has been more favorable to the 

 picturesque grouping of wood, and other objects, than that 

 of any other part of the country. At the South, where 

 agriculture is carried on in large plantations, we see spa- 

 cious fields of tillage, and forest groups of corresponding 

 size. But the small, independent farming of New Eng- 

 land has produced a charming variety of wood, pasture, 

 and tillage, so agreeably intermixed that we are never 

 weary of looking upon it. The varied surface of the land 

 has increased these advantages, producing an endless 

 succession of those limited views which we call pictu- 

 resque. 



When a considerable space is covered with a dense 

 growth of tall trees, the assemblage represents overhead 

 an immense canopy of verdure, supported by innumerable 

 pillars. No man could enter one of these dark solitudes 

 without a deep impression of sublimity, especially during 

 a general stillness of the winds. The voices of solitary 

 birds, and other sounds peculiar to the woods, exalt this 



