32 THE TREES OF AMERICA. 



through to secure to us this glorious heritage. His numerous descendants, who 

 are now scattered over the country, have shown in their lives how much influ- 

 ence a wise and good man exerts over those who come after him. There is not 

 one of them, they proudly say, who has done dishonor to the name. 



At this time the tree was called the Great Elm. It is enshrined in the mem- 

 ory of the author, as is also the venerable Captain Avery, who planted it, and 

 after whom it is named. In those days it was to me more than the " talking 

 tree " of the Arabian story to him who so earnestly sought it, for it spoke a 

 " various language." Then — 



"There was in every thing an inner shrine ; 

 And tree, and hill, and mountain, and the great 

 Magnificence of ocean, and the sweep 

 Of sounding storms, and all the choral state 

 Of octaved stars in Heaven's rejoicing deep 

 Were everlasting worship ..." 



Sometimes I used to stay all night at the old mansion, over which the guar- 

 dian tree had, from year to year, more widely spread its protecting arms, and 

 after listening with childish eagerness and awe to the stories of my venerable 

 friend, I would retire to my bed to hear the tree whisper to me in all its leaves, 

 as if with ten thousand voices, all night long, and the brook, which ran then, 

 as now it runs, close to its roots, sing its song, old as the universe, telling of 

 the other land, to which that silver-haired old man was so soon to take his 

 departure. Now all have passed like a dream away. The old man with the 

 white hair, his children in the strength and vigor of their manhood, and his 

 children's children, whose glad voices used to make the arches of the old elm 

 ring with their joyous shouts, are to the aged tree as if they never were. And 

 when I last visited it for the purpose of taking its portrait, on a cold gray day in 

 the fall of the year, when the leaves, in their faded colors, were beginning to de- 

 sert the branches to which they had clung all summer, spite of the storm and the 

 breeze, it seemed as if it were sighing over the buried past. I could but think 

 how soon this great tree, with its " hundred arms so strong," and the solemn 

 forest around, and we who were looking upon them, would, in the march of the 

 ages, become as specks upon the illimitable expanse of the past. 



