APRIL DAYS 73 
As the spring comes on, and the changing 
outlines of the elm give daily a new design for 
a Grecian urn, — its hue first brown with blos- 
soms, then emerald with leaves, — we appreci- 
ate the vanishing beauty of the bare boughs. 
In our favored temperate zone the trees denude 
themselves each year, like the goddesses before 
Paris, that we may see which unadorned loveli- 
ness is the fairest. Only the unconquerable 
delicacy of the beech still keeps its soft vest- 
ments about it: far into spring, when worn to 
thin rags and tatters, they cling there still; and 
when they fall, the new appear as by magic. 
It must be owned, however, that the beech has 
good reasons for this prudishness, and has here- 
abouts little beauty of figure ; while the elms, 
maples, chestnuts, walnuts, and even oaks have 
not exhausted all their store of charms for us 
until we have seen them disrobed. Only yon- 
der magnificent pine-tree,— that pitch pine, 
nobler when seen in perfection than white pine, 
or Norwegian, or Norfolk Islander, —that pitch 
pine, herself a grove, wna nemus, holds her un- 
changing beauty throughout the year, like her 
half brother, the ocean, whose voice she shares ; 
and only marks the flowing of her annual tide 
of life by the new verdure that yearly sub- 
merges all trace of last year’s ebb. 
How many lessons of faith and beauty we 
