And the elm-tree is always bewitching. In summer, when you can 
tell this tree far as you can catch the contour across the fields by the 
grace of its pose, and its rhythmic swaying of branches as keeping time 
to music we do not hear,—in winter the tree has its winter array No 
tree in our woods has the beautiful network of branches the elm has. 
Flung on the snow or seen against the blue sky or gray, it is as graceful 
as any tree that spreads under the sky. Every branch has its own 
household of tracery and delicacies of invention, for you shall find the 
unexpected in the elm-tree’s goings. No palm branch waved at temple 
or at triumph, is fair as an elm branch. You can feast your eyes on it 
as on the traceries of a frosty window-pane. To try to wrestle an elm- 
tree down (despite its beauty, for beauty and virility do not often coin- 
cide), seems something the storm-winds of summer or winter do not 
have audacity to attempt. Elms have a firmer hold on the earth than 
an oak. They dig for rootage deep and far. They pre-empt the land 
where they sink their anchorage of roots. I do not recall to have seen 
an elm-tree uprooted by tempests, though I have seen tall pine-trees 
fallen like dead soldiers, and oaks lying, half-fallen or wholly, like a man 
sorely wounded; but elms have a tenacity of fiber and a sagacity in 
ramification of roots which all but defy storm-winds. Those who 
would kill an elm, girdle it, though I resent their cowardly practice. It 
seems so dastardly to open the veins of a man you have not the courage 
to face nor the force to kill) The Cambridge elm, with its glory of 
history seen through its leaves and sitting beneath its shadow, is scarcely 
so engaging as the elms of the ordinary forest; for they are so beautiful 
as to need no wealth of historical association to make them fair. 
The bark of elms, in corrugation and in tint, is enough like the ruts 
of dry country roads to be accused of plagiarism. Who knows but the 
elm has wrapped about him a cloak worn by dusty summer? There is 
in any case a dusty-road look to his garments, for which he must be 
held to account. I like the fit and tone of his garment. 
The oak-tree has the allegiancy of the centuries; for beneath its 
shadows the Druids worshiped and built altars, as if it were half-deity, 
or more. Words are weak as tears when they essay to tell an oak- 
tree's epic. Bashan was land of oaks as Lebanon was land of cedars 
but oaks are freesoilers. They live across the world. They voyage to 
all shores, and stand ready to greet the colonist when he sets foot upon 
the strand. They met the Puritans, and DeSoto and Coronado, and 
gave them welcome. Great ships have been debtors to them for hulls, 
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