BLUE DOUGLAS OAK. 71 



occasionally almost groved, in nearly contiguous mosses; 

 the crooked branches are very picturesque in strong hori- 

 zontal sunlight, they even show to greater advantage for the 



paucity of leaves; but perhaps even this is partly illusive, 

 on account of the softened tint of sky blue, or bloomy hue. 

 Some smaller trees of poorer white, or yellowish clay soils of 

 our hill-sides, have brighter blue foliage, of exceeding great 

 beauty; but such timber is a great vexation to the wood- 

 man, as it is next to impossible to split it, and when dry, 

 with a little figure of speech, hard as iron, hence, also called, 

 out of compliment, Iron Oak; heart, small and black, often 

 none at all, and entire wood white. The branches of these 

 are more horizontally spread, and of flatter top, stiff and 

 angularly kneed; branchlets, short, often brittle-jointed, 

 never pendent, of vagrant habit. This poor representative 

 of the Post Oak (Q. obtusiloba) has a tumuloid cloud-like 

 spray, only moderately spreading; in general, all the forms 

 tend towards the hemispheric top; the plumed, lyred, and 

 urned are the most graceful, varied in general forms, diver- 

 sified in branch, like most of their kin, they are redeemed 

 from formality; but the shade is too uncertain, has a hot 

 and unrefreshing air of aridness about it that one never feels 

 beneath the evergreen or denser deciduous oaks; the leaves, 

 too, seem to lack character, or rather express parsimony, as 

 they are not only scant but too much retracted in among the 

 hairy twigs, especially is this the case in those varieties with 

 smaller and narrower leaves; these more common forms 

 rather suggest meagre plebian vulgarity than magnanimity; 

 nevertheless, they adorn the landscape when viewed from 

 afar, and go to make up a picture of much beauty. These 

 remarks are more applicable to the sun-scorched hill and 

 plain of late Summer and Autumn ; in early Spring and 

 Summer, when the tender buds and young leaves first put 

 forth afresh, and all the land is one broad green carpet as 

 far as the eye can reach, with myriads of beautiful flowers of 

 every dye, the scene is marvelously changed, we would then 

 fain forget and forgive those shortcomings to an abstract 

 standard of taste, so harmoniously are they in keeping with 

 their own surroundings; nor is this relation less by night 

 than by day, for doth not Governor Trumbull say: 



'• Xow night came down, and rose full soon, 

 That patroness of rogues, the moon ; 

 Beneath whose kind protecting ray 

 Wolves, brute and human, prowl for prey." 



Then these pale quirky apparitions of a lively imagination 

 become the moon-lit ghosts that nightly stalk the plains, and 

 with rugged horns go round about the oaks, climb hills, or 

 dimly seen evanishing down dale, nervously gesticulating 



