LANGUAGE OF TREES. 8 



ceptable to our experiences of external nature ; but the scenes that 

 come home most closely to our sympathies, and that have a perennial 

 hold, are those that are enriched by the abundance of their trees. 



Poetry finds in trees no little of its sustenance. From the most 

 ancient poets downwards, all verses that have immortality in them, 

 abound more or less with allusions to trees, finding in them either 

 images for the events both glad and sorrowful of human life, or 

 emblems, in their higher nature, of what pertains to the heart and mind. 

 The "Language of Flowers" would be incomplete did it not include 

 the "Language of Trees," since trees are adapted, by their original 

 and inalienable constitution, to serve as metaphors for almost every- 

 thing great and good, and wise and beautiful, in human nature. 

 Hence the countless citations of trees in Holy Writ, wherein the 

 cedar and the fir, the vine and the olive, the palm and the fig, are a 

 portion of the ordinary vocabulary not mentioned arbitrarily, or as 

 a sportive act of the fancy, but on account of their being the absolute 

 representatives and pictured forms in the temporal world of the high 

 and sacred realities that belong to the invisible and eternal. 



Because of these admirable attributes and characters of Trees, we 

 purpose in this series of papers to examine somewhat closely into their 

 nature and life -history, marking out the features and physiognomy of 

 such kinds as belong to our own island, and inquiring into the 

 specialities that give them their several places in art and poetry. For 

 a tree is not merely an oak, or an ash, or an elm. It has qualities 

 for the imagination and the heart, moving men in its own way, and 

 vindicating prerogatives that are peculiar to it. The mind of the man 

 who in his youth was accustomed to contemplate oaks, grows up very ' 

 differently from that of him whose boyhood was spent near pines and 

 firs. Where evergreen trees prevail, and are a daily spectacle, a very 

 different frame of mind is induced compared with that which exists 

 where the branches are leafless throughout the winter. As the stars 

 and planets, from the inaccessible altitude of their sweet lustre, make 

 the heart great by the contemplation of them ; so, after the same 

 manner, imposing and magnificent trees, whose branches, when we go 

 beneath, seem the clouds of a green heaven,*have a power of ennobling 

 and elevating the soul, such as all who have lived among them are 

 more or less clearly conscious of, and which is totally unpossessed by 

 small ones. 



In England, the trees are all of the class called " exogenous," that is 

 to say, they have numerous and spreading branches ; the leaves, when 



