VI. 



EAEE EVERGREEN TREES. 



June, 1847. 



AN! American may be aHow,ed' some honest pride in the beauty 

 and profusion of fine forest trees,.natives of our western hemi- 

 sphere. , North America is the land, of oats, pines, and magnolias, 

 to say nothing of .the lesser genera; and the parks, and gardens of 

 all Europe owe their choicest sylyan treasures to our native woods 

 and hills. ,. - 



!Put there is one tree, almost every w^iere naturalized in Europe 

 — an evergreen tree, as pre-eminently grand ^nd beautiful among 

 evergreens, as a proud ship of the line among, little coasting-vessels 

 — a historical tree, as ridh in sacred and poetic association as Mount 

 Sinai itself-^a hardy tree, from a region of inountain snows, which 

 bears the winter of the middle States f and yet, notwithstanding all 

 these unrivalled .claims to attention,, we believe theie are not at this 

 moment a dozen good specimens of it, twenty feet high, in the 

 United' States. 



We mean, of course, that world-renowned tree, the Cedar pf 

 Lebanon :■ that tree- which was the favorite of the wisest of kings ; 

 the wood of which kindled the burpt-offerings of the Israelites in the 

 time of Moses; of which was built the temple of Solomon, and 

 which the Prophet Ezekiel so finely used as a simile in describing 

 a great empire ;^" Behold-, the. Assyrian was a cedar' in Lebanon, 

 with fair branches, and with a shadowing shroud, and of a high 

 stature ; and Ws top was among the thick boughs. His boughs 

 were multiplied) and his branches became long. The fir-trees were 



