44 THE OLIVE LEAF. CHAP. 



is indeed one of the grandest of our forest trees. No- 

 thing can be lovelier than its translucent foliage in 

 spring, making, as Coleridge says, " the level sunshine 

 glimmer with green light" Nothing can be more 

 splendid than its blaze of amber tints lighting up the 

 whole woodland in autumn like a pillar of fire. Its 

 shade is ample ; its leaves are sweet and tender ; its 

 nuts pleasant and nutritious. And yet all creatures, 

 with the exception of the pig, which feeds upon its 

 nuts, seem to shun it ; and hardly any moss or lichen 

 ornaments its trunk and arms with its quaint jewellery. 

 It stands in the natural world of pictures around us as a 

 type of a thoroughly selfish and unsocial nature. Only 

 the lover seeks it to carve upon its smooth, hard bark 

 the name of the beloved one, fondly hoping that it may 

 long retain, clear and sharp as if cut in stone, the 

 cherished inscription. But even this tender secret it 

 refuses to keep ; its trunk swells, and the letters be- 

 come dilated and distorted, and in a few years a new 

 growth smooths out and obliterates the name, without 

 leaving a trace on its callous wood. Perhaps this 

 smoothness and hardness of the bark and wood, as 

 well as the dryness of its shade for no other woods 

 are so free from damp and so pleasant to walk in as 

 beech woods may be the reason why it shelters so 

 little dependent life. Even the rain-drops refuse to 

 linger about it, and though the sunbeams may play 

 through the green meshes of its transparent foliage and 

 tremble on the lines of silky hairs that project from the 

 margins of its young leaves " like eyelashes from the 



