The Beautiful in a Tree 165 



frequently goes loo far, injures the perfect maturity of 

 the crop and hastens the decline of the tree by depriving 

 it of the fair proportions which nature has established 

 between the leaf and the fruit. 



But for the most part, we imagine that the practice we 

 complain of is a want of perception of what is truly beautiful 

 in an ornamental tree. It seems to us indisputable that 

 no one who has any perception of the beautiful in nature 

 could ever doubt for a moment that a fine single elm or oak 

 such as we may find in the valley of the Connecticut or the 

 Genesee, which has never been touched by the knife, is the 

 most perfect standard of sylvan grace, symmetry, dignity, 

 and finely balanced proportions that it is possible to con- 

 ceive. One would no more wish to touch it with saw or 

 axe (unless to remove some branch that has fallen into 

 decay) than to give a nicer curve to the rainbow or add 

 freshness to the dew-drop. If any of our readers who still 

 stand by the priming-knife will only give themselves up to 

 the study of such trees as these - - trees that have the most 

 completely developed forms that nature stamps upon the 

 species - - they are certain to arrive at the same conclusions. 

 For the beautiful in nature, though not alike visible to 

 every man, never fails to dawn sooner or later upon all who 

 seek her in the right spirit. 



And in art too, no great master of landscape, no Claude, 

 or Poussin, or Turner, paints mutilated trees, but trees of 

 grand and majestic heads, full of health and majesty, or 

 grandly stamped with the wild irregularity of nature in her 

 sterner types. The few Dutch or French artists who are 

 the exceptions to this, and have copied those emblems of 

 pruned deformity - the pollard trees that figure in the 

 landscapes of the Low Countries - - have given local truth- 

 fulness to their landscapes at the expense of every thing like 

 sylvan loveliness. A pollard willow should be the very type 

 and model of beauty in the eye of the champion of the 

 pruning saw. Its finest parallels in the art of mending 

 nature's proportions for the sake of beauty are in the flat- 

 tened heads of a certain tribe of Indians and the deformed 



