82 TREES. 



ows, and touch the imagination with agreeable sense 

 of fruitfulness ; or if they be timber and forest-trees, 

 with the idea of nobleness and grandeur. 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 ex- 

 pense of the finest and most impressive influences. 

 We may be overpowered by the stern and solemn 

 grandeur of a treeless waste, especially if it be com- 

 posed of mountains ; and the sensation is one that 

 gives a variety not unacceptable 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 per- 

 tains 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 everything great and good, and 

 wise and beautiful, in human nature. Hence the 

 countless citations of trees in Holy Writ, wherein 



