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How diiFerent the appearance of a forest of pitch pines and of one 

 of white pines. The larches form another group not less distinct. 

 The firs and spruces, another ; the cedars and arbor vitnes, 

 another, and the hemlocks, more beautiful than all, still another. 



We see the cause of these different effects when we come to 

 study the individual trees. What an image of strength and 

 majesty is an oak. An old chestnut hardly less. In the beech, 

 the character is softened into a kindly, domestic beauty. A 

 beech, with its clean bark and rich, lasting leaves, glistening in 

 the sun's light, should be near a home, for children to play under 

 and women to admire. 



What majestic grace in the American Elm I Whether it spread 

 abroad its arms in a gradual upward curve, bending down again 

 at their extremities and almost reaching the ground, forming deep 

 vaulted arches of shade, or whether it rise in an unbroken col- 

 umn to seventy or a hundred feet, and there form an urnshaped 

 head, or a Grecian cup, or a light, feathery plume. 



With what queenly stateliness rises the hickory, left, by the 

 native taste of the proprietor, in some green field sloping down to 

 the Nashua in Lancaster, or on some other pleasant stream of the 

 Atlantic slope in New England. Of the four or five species of 

 this beautiful tree, a natural group is formed interfering with no 

 other and including in its outer limits the black walnut and the 

 butternut, by which it is allied in its characteristics to the oaks, 

 though still so remote. 



The maples, giving their peculiar splendor to our mountains and 

 river sides, would form still another alliance. The rich colors of 

 their spray in the early days of spring and of their leaves as they 

 ripen in autumn, are not its only claims to admiration. What 

 hopeful vigor in the aspiring trunk of a young rock maple. 

 What dignity in the loftiness of the ancient tree. 



I know of nothing more delicately graceful than the pensile 

 spray of the fragrant birch, whether decked with its golden cat- 

 kins in April, or its light green leaves at midsummer. So the 

 silvery flash from the stem of a yellow birch, how charmingly it 

 mingles with the lights and shadows of the depths of a forest. How 

 startling, almost, is the effect of the gleam of white light from 

 the bark of the canoe birch or the white or grey birch, in the 

 same situation. 



How magnificent the vast columnar trunk of one of the few old 

 plane trees, or button woods, which some unexplained disease 

 or plague has left us. 



What beauty is there in the manner in which the climbing 

 plants, the drapery of the forest, are disposed. The trunks 

 within the wood are occupied by a great variety of closely ad- 

 hering epiphytes, lichens, which form upon the bark a thin 



