150 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



a taste for trees. It argues, I think, a sweet and generous nature 

 to have this strong relish for the beauties of vegetation, and this 

 friendship for the hardy and glorious sons of the forest. There is a 

 grandeur of thought connected with this part of rural economy. It 

 is worthy of liberal, free-born, and aspiring men. He who 

 plants an oak looks forward to future ages, and plants for posterity. 

 Nothing can be less selfish than this. He cannot expect to sit in 

 its shade nor enjoy its shelter ; but he exults in the idea that the 

 acorn which he has buried in the earth shall grow up into a lofty 

 pile, and shall keep on flourishing and increasing and benefiting man- 

 kind long after he shall have ceased to tread his paternal fields." 



Chairman. We will hear what O. W. Holmes says on this sub- 

 ject. 



White Elm. Dr. O. W. Holmes says: "I have written many 

 verses, but the best poems I have produced are the trees J planted 

 on the hillside which overlooks the broad meadows, scalloped and 

 rounded at their edges by loops of the sinuous Housatonic. Nature 

 finds rhymes for them in the recurring measures of the seasons. 

 Winter strips them of their ornaments and gives them, as it were, 

 in prose translation, and summer reclothes them in all the splendid 

 phrases of their leafy language. 



''What are these maples and beeches and birches but odes and idyls 

 and madrigals? What are these pines and firs and spruces but holy 

 rhymes, too solemn for the many hued raiment of their gay deciduous 

 neighbors ? 



"As you drop the seed, as you plant the sapling, your left hand 

 hardly knows what your right hand is doing. But nature knows, 

 and in due time the power that sees and works in secret will reward 

 you openly." 



Chairman. This concludes what we had on the program for this 

 convention. 



Hemlock. I move we have some more music and then adjourn. 



Chairman. If there be no objections we shall have the music. 



Chairman. This convention stands adjourned until again con- 

 vened by the proper authorities. 



