342 RELATIONS OF TREES TO POETRY. 



As man is nomadic before he is agricultural, and a 

 maker of tents and wigwams before lie is a builder of 

 houses and temples, in like manner he is an architect and 

 an idolater before he becomes a student of wisdom. He 

 is a sacrificer in temples and a priest at their altars before 

 he is a teacher of philosophy and an interpreter of na- 

 ture. After the perfection of mechanical science, a higher 

 state of mental culture succeeds, causing us to see all 

 nature invested with beauty, and fraught with imagina- 

 tive charms, adding new wonders to our views of creation 

 and new dignity to life. Man learns now to regard trees 

 in other relations beside their capacity to supply his 

 physical and mechanical wants. He looks upon them as 

 the principal ornaments of the landscape, and as the con- 

 servatories in which nature preserves certain plants and 

 small animals and birds that will thrive only under their 

 protection, and those insect hosts that charm the student 

 with their beauty and excite his wonder by their mys- 

 terious instincts. Science has built an altar under the 

 trees, and delivers thence new oracles of wisdom, teach- 

 ing men how they are mysteriously wedded to the clouds, 

 and are the instruments of their beneficence to the earth. 



It is difficult to estimate how great a part of all that is 

 cheerful and delightful in the recollections of our life is 

 associated with trees. They are allied with the songs of 

 morn, with the quiet of noonday, with social gatherings 

 under the evening sky, and with the beauty and attrac- 

 tiveness of every season. "Nowhere does nature look 

 more lovely, or the sounds from birds and insects affect 

 us more deeply, than under their benevolent shade. 

 Never does the blue sky look more serene than when its 

 dappled azure glimmers through their green trembling 

 leaves. Their recesses, which in the early ages were the 

 temples of religion and science, are still the favorite re- 

 sorts of the studious, the scenes of sport for the active 



