THE LONGEVITY OF TREES. 97 



' ' O, couldst thou speak, 

 As in Dodona once thy kindred trees, 

 Oracular, I would not curious ask 

 The future, best unknown ; but, at thy mouth, 

 Inquisitive, the less ambiguous past ! 

 By thee I might correct, erroneous oft, 

 The clock of history ; facts and events 

 Timing more punctual ; unrecorded facts 

 Recovering ; and misstated, setting right." 



Rich although this country is, above all other parts of the 

 world, in different species of the Oak, it would not be diffi- 

 cult to explain why we cannot boast of such venerable trees, 



" Whose boughs are mossed with age, 

 And high top bald with dry antiquity." 



It is not merely, or chiefly, that, in clearing away the forest 

 which so recently covered the soil, " men were famous accord- 

 ing as they had lifted up axes upon the thick trees." The 

 close, stifling growth of our primeval forests, like the demo- 

 cratic institutions which they seem to foreshadow, although 

 favorable to mediocrity, forbids preeminence. " A chilly, 

 cheerless, everlasting shade " prevents the fullest individual 

 development ; and even if the woodman's axe had spared the 

 older trees, their high-drawn trunks, no longer shielded by 

 the dense array of their brethren, were sure to be overthrown 

 by the winds. Had the aboriginal inhabitants been tillers of 

 the ground, our White Oaks had long since spread their 

 broad brawny arms, and emulated their more renowned 

 brethren in the parks of England. The " Charter Oak " at 

 Hartford, so conspicuous in the colonial history of Connecti- 

 cut, and a few others of equal size, but less note, were prob- 

 ably mere saplings at the first settlement of the country. 

 " The Wadsworth Oak," in Geneseo, N. Y., however, may 

 claim a higher antiquity. It stands in an old " Indian clear- 

 ing," on the bank of the Genesee River, which, we are sorry 

 to say, is gradually undermining its roots and threatening its 

 destruction ; — a catastrophe which we beseech the worthy 

 proprietor of that princely estate to avert, by a seasonable 

 embankment. A note in an earlier volume of this Review * 

 1 Vol. xliv. p. 345, note. 



