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woods breathing about us in As You Like It ? Where else but 

 beneath the " verdant roof," under " venerable columns," 



" Massy and tall and dark ;" 

 or in 



" Quiet valley and shaded glen," 



does Bryant refresh himself with pictures of early years, and forget 



" The eating cares of earth ?" 



The forest thus affords us inexhaustible means of giving variety 

 and beauty to the face of the country ; and every person may avail 

 himself of them, from him who owns a single acre to him who has 

 a thousand. 



The planter is a painter on a vast scale, with the plains and 

 slopes and hills of a township or a county for his canvas, all the 

 colors of vegetable life for his tints, and real clouds, real rainbows 

 and real rocks, streams and lakes, for his back ground. Every tree 

 has not only its own shape and outline, but its own shades and colors, 

 always preserving the same general character, but varying, in its 

 hues and tintings, from earliest spring to latest autumn, and yet 

 Avith an undertone fixed, or but slightly changing, through the year. 



Every mass of trees, of one kind, has the shapes and colors of 

 the individual tree intensified by grouping and brought into strong 

 relief by brighter lights and deeper shadows. 



The painter has thus, for his pallet, fifty marked and decided 

 colors, with the power of modifying each by the introduction of 

 any one or of any number of all the rest. And, combined with 

 these leading and substantive features, are the forms and colors of 

 all the numerous vines and climbers of our woods, which are con- 

 tinually modifying the impression of the branches and of the outline, 

 the lichens which spot or shade the trunks mth colors gay or grave, 

 the tracery of mosses, and the characteristic trailing plants and 

 ferns which show themselves about the lowest part of the stem. 



Of shrubs he has a choice not less ample, both in color and 

 shape, from the whortleberry, which rises a few inches from the 

 ground, up through ledums, rodoras, andromedas, kalmias, sweet 

 ferns, candleberry myrtle, rhododendrons, azaleas, cornels, vibur- 

 nums, dwarf oaks, the mountain and Pennsylvania maples, the 

 glaucous magnolia, and how many others, till the imperceptible 

 line is passed which separates shrubs from trees. 



To each point in the picture he may give the color, the promi- 

 nence and the expression which shall most fitly belong to it, and 

 shall best harmonize or contrast with the recesses and projections, 

 the forms and hues around. Much may be done to give breadth 

 and extent. The apparent height of low hills may be increased 

 by planting them with trees of gradually loftier stature, the 

 summit being crowned with the tallest trees of the forest. To 



