Jan. i, 1895.J THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. 
453 
THE GLORY OF TREES. 
It can hardly be called an omission, but it is cer- 
tainly matter for surprise, that in the two bulky 
volumes of " The Forester."* the standard work on 
trees and their reproduction, now republished under 
th» editorship of Mr. Nisbet, almost no reference 
is made to the admiration inspired by the beauty of 
trees, and its effect in encouraging their preserva- 
tion. Now that the fire of autumn is touching the leaves, 
their beauty of colour is obvious. What else is it which 
makes the glory of trees ? Those who to power of 
analysis add the gift of sight, may some day give 
to the world a theory of what constitutes their strong 
attraction to the aesthetic sense. But they will have 
to explain a sentiment far older and more primi- 
tive than the admiration for almost any other form 
of natural beauty, and how it is that today, when — 
" The fair humanities of old religion, 
The power, the beauty, and the majesty 
That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain, 
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring," — 
have no longer a place in shaping the minds of men' 
the beauty of trees still awakens an echo of the 
ancient spirit of reverence and homage. 
" If in truth ye anoint me King over you, then 
come and put your trust in my shadow," said the 
bramble. "If not, let fire come out of the bramble, 
and devour the cedars of Lebanon." The shadow of 
the great tree was its first appeal to the peoples of 
the East. The banyan, under which fifty genera- 
tions have sheltered from the sun, is first an 
embodiment of benevolence, later, perhaps a sym- 
bol of endurance. But the size of the tree seems 
early to have awakened a sense of contrast and 
injustice. It lurks in the last line of Jotham's 
" parable." It awoke whenever Eastern tyranny at 
last inflamed the passive Eastern mind. " Cedar of 
Lebanon whom God hath not yet broken," exclaims 
Augustine. Perhaps this is a relic of Hebraism. 
How, Indeed, could they appreciate the beauty of 
trees, in a land so treeless that the poet's simile 
invokes not the shade of the branches, but "the 
shadow of a great rock in a dry land." There is 
none of this grudging spirit in Homer. His heroes 
ait "under a beautiful plane-tree," in which the 
sparrows build. The tender reverence for trees, 
from Dodona's oaks to Daphne's laurel, which 
assigned to them human souls suited to the suggestions 
of their form, is one of the contrasts of Hellenism 
with Hebraism. The fall of a mountain pine is 
a symbol of ruin, not of vengeance, and the cruel 
completeness of the doom, " Hew down the tree, and 
cut off his branches ; shake off his leaves, and 
scatter his fruit," is without a parallel in classic 
metaphor. The 'tree won a place in the affections of 
the Western peoples which it has never lost. Froni 
the days of the Druids till now we have never grud- 
ged the full-grown oak its -strength, nor stinted our 
admiration of its magnificence. The size of trees is 
part of their individuality. Among a hundred thou- 
sand oaks or beeches in a forest, the giants are 
always known and marked for centuries. A really 
great tree has a royal presence. It keeps a circle 
round its throno which it allows no others to 
approach. Thus the mere circumstance of its 
bulk, which keeps all others at a distance 
from the shadow of its branches, augments its im- 
Sortance, and is an element in its beauty, consi- 
ered merely as a spectacle. A long acquaintance 
with such a tree always increases our admiration 
for its grandeur. It amounts almost to a tempta- 
tion to live under its branches. We note its 
changes in sunshine and storm; its bearing in mis- 
fortune; the loss of its branches by snow and gales ; 
the cast-iron rigidity of the tons of timber in its 
stem ; the vigour with which it replenishes the losses 
from wind and frost. 
There are those who derive some part of the 
beauty of trees from their power of motion. Of 
aomo kinds this is tme, There is real beauty and 
solace in the quiver of the aspen, and the waft of 
* The Formtrr. by .lame-' Brown, I.T..D. Sixth Kdition, 
onlarged by John Niabet, I).<K -i \ol*. JLvmlvn ; black* 
wood & Sons, 
n 
the tresses of the weeping-willow. Their movement 
is in keeping with their place by running streams. 
It is a form of prettiness : — 
" Willows whiten, aspens quiver, 
Little breezes dusk and shiTer 
Through the wave that runs for erer 
By the island in the river 
Flowing down to Camelot." 
Note how the poet picked his words to paint the petti- 
ness. But this beauty of association does not apply 
to all trees. The timber-trees are tortured by the wind. 
They grow restless and vociferous. For our part, 
we would have them always still, these motionless 
forms in the hushed forest. The impression produced 
upon the mind by standing alone among really gigantic 
trees, is at first an ecstasy of pure admiration for their 
beauty. Yet, if anatysed, the feeling is one 
clearly not due only to the effect of size, mass, 
colour, and the play of light and »hade. 
It is something personal, due to the influence 
of the individual trees ; for the same feeling is 
neyer produced by the view of trees merged in masses, 
however great. A man may stand on the high mount 
of Lyndhurst Church, and look over wave after wave 
of forest, and breathe the wind laden with the odours 
of a million trees, and be untouched by the spell 
which falls upon him when alone, surrounded by the 
silent forms of the gigantic trees, the remnant of 
the ancient forest. What then, is the nature 
of their appeal to the imagination ? Highly com- 
plex, to judge by the recollection of the impression 
made ; and not dependent on mere grace of form, or on 
variety of kind, for they are nearly all beeches. Their 
beauty, analysed to the common ter - ms of arboreal 
growth, must depend upon the contras between the 
perfect lightness of the foliage with the solidity of 
their structure. The gradual subdivision of the trunk 
into branches, of the branches into lesser branches, 
of these into the leaf-bearing branchlets, and the 
lateral flattening of these into the pendent leaf, which 
has colour and the power of partial illumination by 
light pouring through it, possesses a scale of natural 
symmetry which is perhaps the main element of 
beauty, but with such exceeding differences, such 
rugged breaches of the law in different trees, as 
never to impose itself on the mind as an obvious 
cause for admiration. This natural architecture 
never invites criticism, or suggests a plan. The 
mind regrets the very notion of intentional symmetry, 
while rejoicing in the effects of some natural complete- 
ness of design. Yet every well-grown tree haa 
symmetry of a kind : and if this is destroyed by 
accident, its loss is felt. At the same time, nothing 
is more resented by the lover of trees than any 
attempt of art to teaze them into symmetry or to 
cut them into regular shapes and forms. Another 
element in the beauty of these great trees is the 
constant sense of inability to number or become 
familiar with the enormous detail of their forms. 
The eager brain which would grasp all their beauties, 
first in impression and later in detail, so as to 
carry away the splendid catalogue of their charms, 
is baffled and rebuked by the silent complexity of 
their myriad parts. The dry descriptive formulas of 
the botanic manuals, which allot the same space 
to the scientific identification of the privet and the 
oak, are not more inadequate to the task than is 
the eye of the keenest observer who would catalogue 
the prodigal wealth of ornament in the forest tree. 
But, unlike the lesser shrubs, these giants do leave 
on the mind associations of beauty so strange and 
so unique that the sober entvmeration of them sug- 
gests something fantastic, whereas these impres- 
sions are almost irresistible when among the 
surroundings which give rise to them. ft may 
be that their size imposes on the brain. They are 
the largest of all living things, and that alone 
though often unrecognised, must disturb the 
usual order of thought. When the first sensuous 1 
shock of their beauty has been received, the trees 
impose their personality, and seem endowed with 
some form of will which has made them what they 
are._ They dominate in their own realm. They are 
genii, latent forces, with power to become not only 
what they are, but what they will. No two ore 
oHke. The living force in each ha.3. used the natwrfcj 
