TREES 255 



almost exactly the same height and girth, and yet, if 

 you look closely, no two are really alike. They differ 

 as the great doors of Notre Dame in Paris differ 

 individual yet harmonious. When the bulwarks of 

 willow around the river bends are turning to soft, 

 grayish silver in the low afternoon light, when the 

 shadows are creeping like long amethyst fingers over 

 the grass, these five trees rise in radiant lightness against 

 the west, every detail of their lovely symmetry out- 

 lined sharply against the sky, and from the topmost 

 branches a meadow lark pours out his vesper song. 

 They are like a row of figures by Botticelli arrested in a 

 stately dance. 



These same trees are scarcely less beautiful in Win- 

 ter. Some lovers of trees, indeed, delight in the body 

 more than the raiment. A nude tree may be pathetic 

 in its suggestion of vanished Summer, but it is seldom 

 or never unlovely. Did not Ruskin somewhere speak 

 of the wonderful life in the line of a twig or branch? 

 Certainly no line in Nature is so vital, whether it be 

 the straight taper of a Norway spruce trunk or the 

 radiating forked lightning of an aged locust top. The 

 locust tree, indeed, is too little appreciated, especially 

 by our artists. Those people who are enraptured by 

 the crooked pine branch in a Japanese print will often 

 pass beneath a fine old native locust without so much 

 as glancing up to observe its true aspect. Its branches 

 are always at the top, in flowering time hung with 



