96 



ing -which opens all the treasures of knowledge and wisdom to him 

 who has it, — next to these, and their proper companion and com- 

 plement, is the love of the beautiful in nature. 



Nothing furnishes a larger, a more varying or a more un- 

 failing gratification to this love of beauty than the forest. At 

 all times the forest is full of exquisite beauty ; and the forest 

 and the garden are the schools in which the first lessons in the 

 perception and enjoyment of beauty are to be learnt. The cul- 

 tivated fields, alternating with wood and mowing lands and pas- 

 tures, orchards and gardens and dwelling houses and barns ; 

 herds and flocks ; the colors and shapes and motions of birds ; 

 how beautiful ! And with Avhat infinite beauty are fraught the 

 changing clouds, the sky with its deep expanse of blue, the colors 

 going and coming, varying from morning till night, the purple 

 mists on the hills, the coming on of twilight and darkness, with 

 its hosts of stars, — what a loss, to every creature capable of this 

 never-ceasing, exhaustless enjoyment, what a loss not to have the 

 capacity awakened ! 



A capacity for the enjoyment of this beauty is nearly universal. 

 By cultivating it we shall awaken a susceptibility for the higher 

 moral and spiritual beauty which also every where is near us. 

 I suppose that nature's beauty was intended to train the eye and 

 the heart to this higher. 



The sources of beauty in the forest are inexhaustible. Each 

 mass of trees of one kind is an element of distinct and separate 

 beauty. Each has its own shape, its own colors, its own charac- 

 ter. How unlike in all these particulars, are an elm and an oak. 

 Not less unlike are two forests made up chiefly, the one, of elms, 

 the other, of oaks. 



Nearly allied to the elms, when seen in masses, are the os- 

 trya or hop-hornbeam, the carpinus or hornbeam, and the cel- 

 tis or nettle tree and hackberry. Of the same character with 

 the oaks, are the chestnuts, and, somewhat nearly, the beeches. 

 But how different is a mass of linden trees. Entirely unlike each 

 of these and each other, are the birches and poplars, Avhen seen 

 growing together in numbers ; the birches grading down with 

 alders, on one side, and connected by the estrya with the oaks, 

 on another. 



A different element of landscape beauty are the willows, and a 

 still more different, the tupelos. A grove of liriodendrons or tu- 

 lip trees has an aspect quite different from that of any other forest 

 trees. 



The pines, wholly dissimilar in their effect from any of the 

 trees with deciduous leaves, form, among themselves, several 

 groups as unlike each other as the elms and the oaks. The true 

 pines, the Pitch Pine, the White and the Norway, form one strik- 

 ingly natural group. Yet how unlike arc the separate members. 



