io choose between leatless trees and leafy trees, I confess not to be 
certain as to my clioice, though | am sure the winter trees enjoy them- 
selves not less than trees of summer time. To think that winter trees 
are forlorn and beautyless is common. They are to my belief warlike, 
strenuous, conquering, magnificent. Summer is the trees’ furlough: 
winter is their campaign—one long battle both by night and day. 
Winter rules them and gives them a hundred giants’ thews. They are 
as strong as Cezsar’s soldiers and heroic as Mark Antony's veterans 
In winter the individuality of trees comes out. In summer their 
leaves are their chief circumstance and obscure their individuality. We 
can not get at a tree's shape in summer. It is shut in of its own leaves 
and shadow; but when winter, with icy sword blade, hacks away the last 
tatter of summer finery, and leaves the tree to stand, naked as an 
Indian warrior, then does it proclaim itself. To see the shadow cast 
upon the snow or brown leaves (snow is better for taking a tree's 
silhouette, and moonlight is better than sunlight), is to get acquainted 
with the tree. But by moonlight, on the snow, stand long and see the 
black and white picture of an elm-tree, or oak, or willow, or walnut, or 
sycamore. Pine and cedar take poor pictures so, because their foliage 
is perennial. To take a picture of a pine-tree always take it at noon 
against a sky of intense blue (than such sight there is no lovelier in 
heaven, especially if one could in the picture take the music winds and 
pines, twin minstrels, make). | love trees all the year through—in 
spring when their coy green is hinted at rather than come; in summer 
when they make dense siadow and one might sleep from sunrise until 
the night, nor have an intruding sunbeam peer into his face and make 
him turn like a sleeper in pain; in autumn, when summer greens are 
forgotten and trees are a sunset’s splendor. I love this procession of 
changing charm and meaning, but confess to the heterodoxy of believing 
that winter trees are more beautiful to my eyes than those of spring, 
summer, or autumn. 
Tree branches are works of God's art than which even that Chief 
Artist has done nothing lovelier, save only the face in child or woman. 
All this beauty is lost in summer, like a woman's face hid under a 
mourning veil. Than the tracery of elm twigs at the ends of curved 
branches nothing could be more poetical. Think it not strange that 
Turner and Ruskin should love trees to rapture; for in all the woods is 
not one positively ungraceful tree The snarly gnarliness of certain 
oaks minds a man of how true might grows when whipped with furious 
42 
