THE ELM. 41 



year's tranquil evening, bathed in the beautiful light of the declining 

 sun, the tree presents a cheerful though never a gorgeous spectacle. 



It is early in spring, perhaps, when the elm is in flower, that the eye ^ 

 is most attracted to its botanical traits. Often as early as Lent, and 

 certainly by April, the twigs seern covered with hard black knots, some- 

 thing like ill-strung beads. Presently, in calm forenoons, when the 

 daffodils open their golden cups, and the almond and the mezereon 

 cover their bare branches with sweet pink bloom, reminding us of those 

 happy little children of genius who before they have been to school, and Y 

 become leafy with book-knowledge, play forth verses, and song, and 

 Art, producing, like the birds in spring, not from instruction, but 

 because they cannot help ; presently, while these livelier sweet sights 

 invite our hearts, the dark elm-knots ako expand, and then we have 

 dense round clusters of tender vases, tinted brown, and purple, and 

 green, in delicate intermixture, while in the midst are lifted up stamens 

 and a ruddy pistil that seems clipped out of fairy velvet. So abundant 

 are these pretty flowers, and so deep and vinous is the hue, that when 

 the sunbeams fall on the tree, it seems almost to purple the surround- 

 ing air. Not a leaf, not an opening leaf-bud, is to be discerned while 

 the tree is in bloom, so that between our eyes and the pale sky there is 

 nothing but twig and bloom. Talk not of flowers as born only of the 

 summer. In the dreariest and coldest seasons that precede there are 

 always plenty. It is not that flowers are wanting, but that we have 

 not yet quite learned that seeing, like conversation, is one of the Fine 

 Arts, the principles of which come by nature, but which requires culture 

 quite as *much as our capacity for writing or working out a sum in 

 arithmetic. 



By the time that the leaves are completing their green promise, 

 mingled with them in countless numbers, are the fruits into which the 

 pistils have ripened. Now the ruddy fur is entirely gone, and we have 

 flat green circular plates with a notch at the summit,' and a seed em- 

 bedded in the centre, the whole seeming an image in little of those 

 ancient shields that had a boss in the middle. Hanging upon the tree 

 they seem green hop-clusters gone astray; when they fall to the ground, 

 they lie thick as the chaff on a threshing-floor. Showiness in the detail 

 of its parts, the elm is thus not gifted with : yet the aggregate makes 

 iiuicuds, and is it not by the aggregate of our nature that we ourselves 

 desire to be judged ? Partly, perhaps, because of this little pretension 

 on the part of the elm to floral beauty, the ancient Italian gardeners 

 selected it as a living prop for their vines, giving to the tree which 



