4 TANGUAGE OF TREES. 



forest-trees, with the idea of nobleness. They are 

 to the landscape what living and moving people are 

 to the street, or to the interior of the hall or temple 

 an element that may be dispensed with, but at 

 the expense of the finest and most impressive in- 

 fluences. We may be overpowered by the stern 

 grandeur of a treeless waste, especially if it be 

 composed of mountains ; and the sensation is one 

 that gives a variety not unacceptable to our experi- 

 ences of external nature; but the scenes which 

 come home most closely to our sympathies, and that 

 maintain a perennial hold, are those which 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 " Lan- 

 guage of Flowers" would be incomplete did it not 

 include the " Language of Trees," since trees are 

 adapted, by their original and inalienable constitu- 

 tion, to serve as metaphors for everything good and 

 wise in human nature. Hence the countless cita- 

 tions 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 



