50 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 



wisdom is involved, and, to turn to Holy Writ, how appropriately 

 does Job burst forth in laudation of the latter, as God's handiwork, 

 in the xxviii. chapter. 



The sighing of the wind as it sways the branches of the forest, 

 which now bend before the summer zephyr like courtiers doing hom- 

 age, now bend before the fury of the storm like strong men in 

 adversity, sounds to our naturalist as angels' whispers in its gentle- 

 ness, or in its fury as the voice of One mightier than Manoah's son 

 speaking in anger — " The voice of One who breaketh the cedars, 

 yea, the cedars of Lebanon." But he will tell you this Nature's 

 music is never still, never silent, though often varied : for each tree 

 has its part — the surging of the oak, the whispering of the elm, the 

 rustling of the beech, the laugh of the birch, the sighing of the 

 willow, the moaning of the hemlock, the dirge of the Cyprus. The 

 pine alone remains constant to melody throughout the year. Every 

 breeze that touches the pine in any season of the year wakes up 

 myriads of fairy harps which, united, set the air trembling with the 

 most moving harmony that Nature affords — the harp-music of Nature's 

 orchestra. Even the aspect of the woodland itself: if thick with 

 tangled underbrush, the unexplored impervious forests of the Amazon 

 rise up to the imagination ; or, if thick with fern and grass, it recalls 

 visions of Australian fern-trees and wattles — fern-trees, now the only 

 corresponding and connecting link to the fossil plants of the coal 

 formation, beneath whose heavy coverts the Saurian monsters roamed, 

 the giants in the earth of those days ; monsters extinct and passed 

 away, leaving their epitaph in stone to be deciphered only by the 

 researches of science centuries after their existence. 



Should the road lead by or near a pond, our naturalist shrinks 

 not from the wet and swampy ground surrounding it, for the forget- 

 me-not is there, with blossom blue as the sky of Heaven, and its 

 golden eye bright as Hope itself; there is the calamus, or sweet- 

 scented flag, the iris, the bulrush, heavy and swaying in the wind, 

 the water-lily, rivalling in its blossom the magnolia of the southern 

 climes, and harboring under its broad leaves the pike and the perch, 

 the bass and the pickerel, those favorites of meek Walton's follow- 

 ers. The delicate whites and pinks and yellows and blues of the 

 aquatic blossoms — how bewitching are they in the sunlight ! Adher- 

 ing to the pond weed, or slowly drawing their homes along with 



