A DISCOURSE ON TREES 227 



Whoever sees a hawthorn or a sweetbrier (the 

 eglantine) that his thoughts do not, like a bolt of 

 light, burst through ranks of poets, and ranges of 

 sparkling conceits which have been born since 

 England had a written language, and of which the 

 rose, the willow, the eglantine, the hawthorn, and 

 scores of other vines or trees, have been the cause, as 

 they are now and forevermore the suggestors and 

 remembrancers ? Whoever looks upon an oak, and 

 does not think of navies, of storms, of battles on the 

 ocean, of the noble lyrics of the sea, of English 

 glades, of the fugitive Charles, the tree-mounted 

 monarch, of the Herne oak, of parks and forests, 

 of Robin Hood and his merry men, Friar Tuck not 

 excepted; of old baronial halls with mellow light 

 streaming through diamond-shaped panes upon 

 oaken floors, and of carved oaken wainscotings; 

 And who that has ever traveled in English second- 

 class, cushionless cars has not other and less genial 

 remembrances of the enduring solidity of the imper- 

 vious, unelastic oak? 



One stalwart oak I have, and only one, yet dis- 

 covered. On my west line is a fringe of forest, 

 through which rushes, in spring, trickles in early 

 summer, and dies out entirely in August, the issues 

 of a noble spring from the near hillside. On the 

 eastern edge of this belt of trees stands the monarch- 

 ical oak, wide-branching on the east toward the open 

 pasture and the free light, but on its western side 



