“TT have written many verses, but the poems I have pro- 
duced are the trees I planted on the hillside which over- 
looked the broad meadows, scalloped and rounded at their 
edges by the Simeon’s Houstanic. Nature finds rhymes for 
them in the recurring measures of the seasons; winter 
strips them of their ornaments, and gives them, as it.were, 
in prose translation, and summer reclothes them in all the 
splendid phrases of their leafy language. What are these 
maples and beeches and birches but odes and idyls and 
madrigals? What are these pines and firs and spruces but 
holy hymns, too solemn for the many-hued raiment of their 
gay deciduous neighbors. It is enough to know that when. 
we plant a tree we are doing what we can to make our 
planet a more wholesome and a happier dwelling-place for 
those who come after us, if not for ourselves.” 
OLIVER WENDELL HoLMEs. 
