264 IN BERKSHIRE FIELDS 



ter's" water-color sketches, that the "line of life" 

 exemplified by a naked twig is one of the most 

 beautiful things in nature — as well as one of the 

 most difficult to delineate. To make a faithful 

 study of a naked elm or sugar-maple, or even of 

 a lowly shrub, is to learn humbleness of wrist and 

 boundless respect for the marvelous rhythms of 

 nature. Consider any branch, from trunk to tip, 

 and see how individual are its various seasons of 

 growth, and yet how the impulse of growth, the 

 constant extension of itself, its reaching outward 

 or upward, its life-line, unifies each separate curve, 

 or twist, or rhythm, into the perfect, indivisible 

 whole. A slender twig, or a forty -foot tree limb, 

 has, when carefully considered, the same effect 

 on the eye that a perfect, spontaneous, completed 

 phrase of melody has on the ear. It flows and 

 grows, through variation, to the completed whole 

 that binds each bar to the predestined master 

 rhythm. 



Out in a pasture not many miles from my house 

 stands a big hop hornbeam, an unusual specimen, 

 at least with us, for the hornbeams, as a rule, are 

 found chiefly near the swamps, in thick mixed stands 

 where they do not reach large diameter and resemble, 

 in bark, an elm. The other day just the right light 

 cut this hornbeam's crown against the sky, with 

 its massive trunk against the red and gray of a dis- 

 tant snowy mountain. I greeted the old fellow 

 with real affection, for he had never before seemed 

 so rugged, so massive, so eloquent of his myriad 

 struggles for existence — since each limb and twig 

 is, after all, but a sign of struggle for air and nour- 



