2 oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



" Unwatched, the garden bough shall sway, 

 The tender blossom flutter down, 

 Unloved that beech will gather brown, 

 This maple burn itself away." 



The rich autumn tints of the foliage of the maple are here alluded to. 

 Cedars, cypresses, and yews, all members of the great coniferous 

 family, are prominent objects in Mr. Tennyson's landscapes. In the 

 eighteenth section of " Maud " — beginning, 



" I have led her home, my love, my only friend " — 



and which contains some passages full of solemn tenderness and beauty, 

 and a splendor of language worthy of Shakespeare himself, occurs the 

 oft-quoted apostrophe addressed to the cedar of Lebanon by Maud's 

 somewhat distempered, though now happy lover : 



" Oh, art thou sighing for Lebanon 

 In the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East, 

 Sighing for Lebanon, 

 Dark cedar. .... 



• ••••• 



" And over whom thy darkness must have spread 

 With such delight as theirs of old, thy great 

 Forefathers of the thornless garden, there 

 Shadowing the snow-limbed Eve from whom she came. 

 Here will I lie, while these loug branches sway." 



The yew, though usually regarded as the emblem of death — 



" Cheerless, unsocial plant, that loves to dwell 

 Midst skulls and coffins, epitaphs and tombs " — 



might, in its extreme tenacity and length of days, be a fitter repre- 

 sentative of life and endurance. In the second chapter of " In Me- 

 moriam " the yew is described in the most masterly manner. These 

 are two of the verses : 



" Old Yew, which graspest at the stones 

 That name the underlying dead, 

 Thy fibres net the dreamless head, 

 Thy roots are wrapped about the bones." 



" Oh, not for thee the glow, the bloom, 

 Who changest not in any gale, 

 Nor branding summer suns avail 

 To touch thy thousand years of gloom." 



The locality, the hue, the prolonged life, and the general unchange- 

 ableness of appearance, are all here summarily noticed. The laureate 

 seems, however, to share the popular dislike to this tree, a feeling 

 which Gilpin, in his " Forest Scenery," ridicules as weakness. In 

 " Amphion," yews are called " a dismal coterie ; " in " Maud " a 

 " black yew gloomed the stagnant air ; " and, in "Love and Death," 



