ii 4 ARBOR DAY 



never witnessed a single one. Nature works the 

 same things without seeming repetition. There, 

 for instance, is the apple-tree. Every year since our 

 boyhood it has been doing the same thing; standing 

 low to the ground, with a round and homely head, 

 without an element of grandeur or poetry, except once 

 a year. In the month of May, apple-trees go a-court- 

 ing. Love is evermore father of poetry. And the 

 month of May finds the orchard no longer a 

 plain, sober business affair, but the gayest and 

 most radiant frolicker of the year. We have seen 

 human creatures whose ordinary life was dutiful 

 and prosaic; but when some extraordinary excite- 

 ment of grief, or, more likely, of deep love, had 

 thoroughly mastered them, they broke forth into 

 a richness of feeling, an inspiration of sentiment, 

 that mounted up into the very kingdom of 

 beauty, and for the transient hour they glowed 

 with the very elements of poetry. And so to us 

 seems the apple-tree. From June to May it is a 

 homely, duty-performing, sober, matter-of-fact 

 tree. But May seems to stir up a love-beat in 

 its veins. 



The old round-topped, crooked-trunked, and 

 ungainly boughed fellow drops all world-ways and 

 takes to itself a new idea of life. Those little 

 stubbed spurs, that all the year had seemed like 

 rheumatic fingers, or thumbs and fingers, stiffened 

 and stubbed by work, now are transformed. Forth 



