architect of mountains and stars, and sculptor 
who fashions rocks, river beds, and sea cliffs, and 
tree branches and cloud landscapes into artistic 
and unfathomable loveliness. Each thing I see 
him make seems his masterpiece, though I know 
it is not that he has done above the ordinary for 
him, but that | am filled with his glory of doing, 
until | can contain no more, even as the sea’s 
channels can contain no more oceans. 
A walnut-tree is very beautiful. Its corruga- 
tions of bark, dark almost to blackness, are always 
possessed of witchery to my eyes. I see through 
the tree as if it were dusky amber, the black 
tawniness of walnut wood. No wonder that 
through centuries walnut has been favored wood; 
for who that has eyes to see but must love it? 
But walnut is never beautiful by the skill of man, 
be that skill however great, as when it stands 
solitary on the green woodland background of a 
hillside, and | seem to see through the graven 
tind its wine-dregs of wood, and feel its beauty as 
I do the beauty of the dawn. 
In winter, wild crab-trees are strong as 
strength. Their trunks are usually twisted as if 
some storm had wrenched them with violent and 
outrageous hands, but the virile tree refused to be 
twisted down, and wears its signs of struggle and 
survival on its front like scars on a soldier’s fore- 
head. Why, a Greek wrestler’s sinewy arm and 
leg carved in bronze are not to my eyes so hercu- 
lean and fascinating as a crab-apple trunk seen 
under a winter's gray sky. When spring comes 
and this bronze statue flashes into flower and 
perfume such as even spring with her bewildering 
riches of such, has only few of,—I do not thrill 
to that exotic loveliness of bloom as I do to the 
sheer bronze of the sinewy trunk, standing knee- 
deep in winter's snows. 
A soft maple is more beautiful in bark than 
50 
A WALNUT 
