to choose between leafless trees and leafy trees, I confess not to be 

 certain as to my choice, though I am sure the winter trees enjoy them- 

 selves not less than trees of summer time. To think that winter trees 

 are forlorn and beautyless is common. They are to my belief warlike, 

 strenuous, conquering, magnificent. Summer is the trees' furlough: 

 winter is their campaign one long battle both by night and day. 

 Winter rules them and gives them a hundred giants' thews. They are 

 as strong as Cassar's soldiers and heroic as Mark Antony's veterans. 



In winter the individuality of trees comes out. In summer their 

 leaves are their chief circumstance and obscure their individuality. We 

 can not get at a tree's shape in summer. It is shut in of its own leaves 

 and shadow; but when winter, with icy sword blade, hacks away the last 

 tatter of summer finery, and leaves the tree to stand, naked as an 

 Indian warrior, then does it proclaim itself. To see the shadow cast 

 upon the snow or brown leaves (snow is better for taking a tree's 

 silhouette, and moonlight is better than sunlight), is to get acquainted 

 with the tree. But by moonlight, on the snow, stand long and see the 

 black and white picture of an elm-tree, or oak, or willow, or walnut, or 

 sycamore. Pine and cedar take poor pictures so, because their foliage 

 is perennial. To take a picture of a pine-tree always take it at noon 

 against a sky of intense blue (than such sight there is no lovelier in 

 heaven, especially if one could in the picture take the music winds and 

 pines, twin minstrels, make). I love trees all the year through in 

 spring when their coy green is hinted at rather than come ; in summer 

 when they make dense shadow and one might sleep from sunrise until 

 the night, nor have an intruding sunbeam peer into his face and make 

 him turn like a sleeper in pain; in autumn, when summer greens are 

 forgotten and trees are a sunset's splendor. I love this procession of 

 changing charm and meaning, but confess to the heterodoxy of believing 

 that winter trees are more beautiful to my eyes than those of spring, 

 summer, or autumn. 



Tree branches are works of God's art than which even that Chief 

 Artist has done nothing lovelier, save only the face in child or woman. 

 All this beauty is lost in summer, like a woman's face hid under a 

 mourning veil. Than the tracery of elm twigs at the ends of curved 

 branches nothing could be more poetical. Think it not strange that 

 Turner and Ruskin should love trees to rapture; for in all the woods is 

 not one positively ungraceful tree The snarly gnarliness of certain 

 oaks minds a man of how true might grows when whipped with furious 



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