Art Out-of-Doors 
green, or form so eccentric as to be hardly 
normal — as in the case of fastigiate or of 
weeping trees. A tree is sturdy-looking or 
graceful chiefly by reason of its form ; but 
such degrees of sturdiness as may be ex- 
pressed by the words severity, sombreness, 
majesty, picturesqueness, and such degrees 
of grace as are called fragility, weakness, 
delicacy, lightness — these spring in very 
large part from the texture of its foliage. 
Small leaves, and especially those which are 
small and elongated, or small and quivering, 
do more than a light color to give a tree a 
fragile aspect, a feminine kind of grace, 
while large and simple leaves almost of 
themselves imply a masculine air, and large, 
simple, and thick-textured leaves mean a 
certain majesty even in a plant so small that 
we call it a shrub. 
A small magnolia, for example, has more 
dignity than the biggest honey-locust. A 
catalpa is more masculine-looking than a 
willow of even the largest size ; and if we 
imagine the thin tissue of its leaves ex- 
changed for a thicker, stifler tissue, we can 
easily see how its dignity would be still 
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