232 ARBOR DAY 



sacrilege in the very thought of property in such a 

 creature of God as this cathedral-topped tree! Does 

 a man bare his head in some old church? So did 

 I, standing in the shadow of this regal tree, and 

 looking up into that completed glory, at which 

 three hundred years have been at work with noise- 

 less fingers! What was I in its presence but a 

 grasshopper? My heart said: "I may not call 

 thee property, and that property mine! Thou 

 belongest to the air. Thou art the child of summer. 

 Thou art the mighty temple where birds praise 

 God. Thou belongest to no man's hand, but to all 

 men's eyes that do love beauty, and that have 

 learned through beauty to behold God! Stand, 

 then, in thine own beauty and grandeur! I shall 

 be a lover and a protector, to keep drought from 

 thy roots, and the axe from thy trunk." 



For, remorseless men there are crawling yet 

 upon the face of the earth, smitten blind and inwardly 

 dead, whose only thought of a tree of ages is, that it 

 is food for the axe and the saw! These are the 

 wretches of whom the Scripture speaks: "A man 

 was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon 

 the thick trees. 11 



Thus famous, or rather infamous, was the last 

 owner but one, before me, of this farm. Upon the 

 crown of the hill, just where an artist would have 

 planted them, had he wished to have them exactly 

 in the right place, grew some two hundred stalwart 



