THE MAPLE AND THE SYCAMORE. 73 



and the plane. Hence is it so much the more regretful that a tree 

 of such ancient fame, consecrated alike by tradition, poetry, and 

 philosophy, for they were planes which constituted the sacred groves 

 and colonnades of the Academia, should have had confounded with it 

 one of pretensions so inferior. Not that the sycamore is an unworthy 

 tree. The dimensions it attains are often truly grand, and standing 

 alone upon the sward of a park, where its imposing oval outline can be 

 well realized, it has qualities, in regard to the picturesque, excelled by 

 none. We must never judge of trees from the deformed and stunted 

 examples that occur in hedgerows and in suburban gardens, or even 

 from those which occur in plantations, nor always even from foresters. 

 Trees, to develope their princely or queenly nature, as the case may be, 

 require space, the free circling around and through them of admiring 

 and nourishing winds, plenty of sunlight, to be clean, and to be refreshed 



English Maple, leaf and fruit. 



by unsullied rain. Good timber may be yielded, likely enough, by trees: 

 unhappily placed as regards free growth, but the dignity of their figure, 

 the repose of the outline, the sumptuous massing of the foliage of the 

 masculine kinds, the graceful trail of those of feminine habit, these, and, 

 all other such qualities, are possible only to a life of freedom. Precisely* 

 the difference between a ship laid up in a dock-yard, and, glorious in her 

 white sails, afar off upon the sea, "walking the waters, like a thing of 

 life," is that of a tree as ordinarily seen, and the same species when 

 robed in its grand privileges, and fulfilling the destiny assigned to it in, 

 the beginning. 



The maple, ordinarily seen only as a bushy mass in the hedgerow, 

 attains, under congenial circumstances, the height of at least thirty feet ; 



