38 TREES AND TREE-PLANTING. 
the voluptuous magnolias and the wide-winged apple-tree, 
bending down with loads of fruit to shade and cover all, 
convey to us at once the idea of human love and sym- 
pathy. These are the trees we are forced to love, be- 
cause they are beautiful; have souls that thrill a sympa- 
thetic chord in our own souls. The children will not 
cry when the stiff and stoical old balsam fir and Lom- 
bardy poplar are cut down; but lay low an old and 
favorite apple-tree, or oak, or maple, under whose shade 
they have played, and their hearts will be quick to feel 
the difference between trees. No tree has the highest 
beauty of its type without the appearance in its whole 
bearing of robust vigor. This is the essential condition 
of all beautiful trees. Thriftiness cannot make an elm 
look like an oak, but rather marks more sharply the 
difference between them, making the elm appear more 
graceful and the oak more majestic. Yet thriftiness 
changes the forms of some trees. Few trees attain the 
full measure of their beauty through thrift unless they 
are fully exposed on all sides to the sun. We do not 
mean that all trees will not be beautiful without such 
complete exposure, but that to realize the highest beauty 
of which any one is capable, it must be exposed. A 
greater variety of beauty can be attained by grouping 
one or more varieties or species, thus contrasting sev- 
eral expressions of form or foliage. But in this case we 
sacrifice the highest type of individual perfection to pro- 
duce a more striking effect with several trees. But the 
same fact may be observed with reference to the group; 
its full beauty can be realized only by having the trees 
in luxurious growth, and exposed collectively to the 
sun. 
What is a forest? How grand, how silent and beau- 
tiful! Let us saunter forth after breakfast in the grand 
old woods, and, finding a pleasant spot, sit on a moss- 
covered log that not long ago stood erect and for five 
hundred years waved his feathery crest to the gentle 
