374 
ARBOR DA Y MANUAL. 
familiar to school boys, will acquire a kind of interest which they never 
those boys establish personal relations with trees and shrubs by planting 
them names. When they watch to see how Bryant and Longfellow are 
Longfel 
lin is drying up 
Mitchell 
: “ bays ” a 
ted the wre 
e victors i 
with a wreath of wild olives the Olympic victors. 
All such facts, familiar to school boys, - 
had before when thos 
them and giving ther 
growing; whether Abraham Lincoln i 
whether Asa Gray puts out his leaves as early as last year,"and whether Maria Mitchell 
and Abigail Adams and Dorothea Dix hold in their ample and embowering arms as many 
singing birds, as us 
that skims along i 
It is pleasant to remember on Arbor Day that Bryant, our oldest American poet and 
the father of our American literature, is especially the poet of trees. 
He grew up among the solitary hills of Western Massachusetts when the woods were- 
his nursery and the trees his earliest comrades. The solemnity of the forest breathes 
through all his verse, and he had always, even in the. city, a grave rustic air as of a man* 
who heard the bubbling brooks and to whom the trees told their secrets. His poems will 
be so naturally read on Arbor Day that it will keep his memory green, and the poet of the 
trees will become the familiar friend of American boys and girls who, by tender nurture 
of the trees, will have learned to say with him : 
My Dear Sir—I am 
•, N. Y., April io, i 
plication of 
labit beau- 
; in Japan, which is 
y years in Japat 
; beauty is largely due t 
:s surface. Its climate' is v 
e growth of luxuriant vegetation. But 
