ARBOR DA Y MANUAL. 



375 



Specimen Programs. Port Henry, X. Y. Continued. 



4. Extract from a letter : 



I have written many verses, but the best poems I have produced are the trees I 

 planted on the hill-side 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. 



5. Extract from a letter : 



What are these maples and beeches and birches but odes and idyls and madrigals? 

 What are these pines and firs and spruces but holy hymns, too solemn for the many-hued 

 raiment of their gay deciduous neighbors ? 



6. Extract from a letter : 



The trees may outlive the memory of more than one of those in whose honor they 

 were planted. But if it is something to make two blades of grass grow where only one 

 was growing, it is much more to have been the occasion of the planting of an oak which 

 shall defy twenty scores of winters, or of an elm which shall canopy with its green 

 cloud of foliage half as many generations of mortal immortalities. 



7. From " Spring has Come : " 



The willow's whistling lashes, wrung 

 By the wild winds of gusty March, 



With 'sallow leaflets lightly strung, 

 Are swayed by the tufted larch : 



8. From " After a Lecture on Wordsworth : " 



The elms have robed their slender spray 



With full-blown flower and embryo leaf; 



Wide o'er the clasping arch of day 

 Soars like a cloud their hoary chief. 



Beauty runs virgin in the woods 

 Robed in her rustic green. 



And oft a longing thought intrudes, 

 As if we might have seen 



9. From the same : 



Take what she gives, her pine's tall stem, 

 Her elm with hanging spray ; 



She wears her mountain diadem 

 Still in her own proud way. 



Her everv finger's every joint 

 Ringed with some golden line. 



Poet whom Nature did anoint ! 

 Had our wild home been thine. 



Look on the forests' ancient kings, 

 The hemlock's towering pride : 



Yon trunk had thrice a hundred rings, 

 And fell before it died. 



9. From *" Talks on Trees " in " Autocrat of the Breakfast Table : " " I shall speak of 

 trees as we know them," etc. See Index, " Talks on Trees." 



THE WHITE BIRCH, DEDICATED TO JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



By Second Intermediate Department. 



GEMS FROM LOWELL : 



1. From "To a Pine Tree :" " Spite of winter," etc. See Index. 



2. From "The Birch Tree." First two stanzas. See Index. 



3. From " An Indian Summer Reverie : " 



The birch, most shy and ladylike of trees, 



Her poverty, as best she may. retrieves, 



And hints at her foregone gentilities. 



With some saved relics of ner wealth of leaves; 



4. From the same : 



The red-oak softer-grained, yields all for lost, 

 And, with his crumpled foliage stiff and dry, 

 After the first betrayal of the frost. 

 Rebuffs the kiss of the relenting sky; 



5. Extract: 



A little of thy steadfastness. 

 Rounded with leafy gracefulness. 



Old oak, give me 

 That the world's blast may round me blow. 



The swamp-oak, with his royal purples on. 

 Glares red as blood across the sinking sun, 

 As one who proudlier to a falling fortune cleaves. 



The chestnuts, lavish of their long-hid gold. 

 To the faint summer, beggared now and old. 

 Pour back the sunshine hoarded 'neath her favoring 

 eye. 



And I yield gently to and fro, 

 While my stout-hearted trunk below, 

 And tinn-set roots unshaken be. 



