ARBOR DA V MANUAL. 
215 
But the palms are not only poets, they are prophets as well. They are like 
heralds sent forth upon £he farthest points to celebrate to the traveler the glor¬ 
ies they show. Like spring birds, they sing a summer unfading, and climes 
where time wears the year as a queen a rosary of diamonds. The mariner, 
eastward sailing, hears tidings from the chance palms that hang along the 
southern Italian shore. They Call out to him across the gleaming calm of a 
Mediterranean noon, “Thou happy mariner, our souls sail with thee.” 
In the land of Egypt palms are perpetual. They are the only foliage of the 
Nile, for we will not harm the modesty of a few mimosas and sycamores by 
foolish claims. They are the shade of the mud villages, marking their site in 
the landscape, so that the groups of palms are the number of the villages. They 
fringe the shore and the horizon. The sun sets golden behind them, and birds, 
sit swinging upon their boughs and float glorious among their trunks ; the 
sugar cane is not harmed by the ghostly shade ; and the yellow flowers of the 
cotton plant star its dusk at evening. The children pl^y under them, and the 
old men crone and smoke, the donkeys graze, and there the surly bison and 
the conceited camels repose. 
The eye never wearies of palms, more than the ear of singing birds. Solitary 
they stand upon the sand, or upon the level fertile land in groups, with a grace 
and dignity that no tree surpasses. Very soon the eye beholds, in their forms, 
the original type of the columns which it will afterwards admire in the temples. 
Almost the first palm is architecturally suggestive, even in western gardens — 
but to artists living among them and seeing only them ! Men’s hands are not 
delicate in the early ages, and the fountain fairness of the palms is not very 
flowingly fashioned in the capitals; but in the flowery perfection of the Par¬ 
thenon the palm triumphs. The forms of those columns came from Egypt, and 
that which was the suspicion of the earlier workers, was the success of more 
delicate designing. So is the palm inwound with our art, and poetry, and 
religion. George William Curtis. 
FOREST FLOWERS. 
UR forests are fast disappearing. In their sheltering shade and the rich 
u mould of their annually decaying leaves, the greater number of our love¬ 
liest plants are found; and when the axe comes, that cruel weapon that wars, 
upon nature’s freshness, and the noble oak, the elm, the beech, the maple, and 
the tulip tree fall with a loud crash in the peaceful solitude, even the very 
birds can understand that a floral death knell sounds through the melodious 
wilderness. 
A number of our choicest plants are threatened with extinction; for as the woods, 
are cleared away these tender offsprings, the pretty flowers which we so dearly 
cherish, will perish utterly. It is, therefore, well to prevent as far as possible 
the destruction of our native forests, as well as to plant forest trees if for no 
other purpose than the preservation of the little helpless, blooming beauties 
that adorn our woodland shades. 
Gustavus Frankenstein. 
