[The schoolmistress came down with a rose in her hair,—a fresh June rose.
She has been walking early; she has brought back two others,—one on each
cheek.

I told her so, in some such pretty phrase as I could muster for the
occasion. Those two blush-roses I just spoke of turned into a couple of
damasks. I suppose all this went through my mind, for this was what I
went on to say:—]

I love the damask rose best of all. The flowers our mothers and sisters
used to love and cherish, those which grow beneath our eaves and by our
doorstep, are the ones we always love best. If the Houyhnhnms should
ever catch me, and, finding me particularly vicious and unmanageable,
send a man-tamer to Rareyfy me, I’ll tell you what drugs he would have to
take and how he would have to use them. Imagine yourself reading a
number of the Houyhnhnm Gazette, giving an account of such an experiment.

“MAN-TAMING EXTRAORDINARY.

“THE soft-hoofed semi-quadruped recently captured was subjected to
the art of our distinguished man-tamer in presence of a numerous
assembly. The animal was led in by two stout ponies, closely
confined by straps to prevent his sudden and dangerous tricks of
shoulder-hitting and foot-striking. His countenance expressed the
utmost degree of ferocity and cunning.

“The operator took a handful of budding lilac-leaves, and crushing
them slightly between his hoofs, so as to bring out their peculiar
fragrance, fastened them to the end of a long pole and held them
towards the creature. Its expression changed in an instant,—it drew
in their fragrance eagerly, and attempted to seize them with its soft
split hoofs. Having thus quieted his suspicious subject, the
operator proceeded to tie a blue hyacinth to the end of the pole
and held it out towards the wild animal. The effect was magical.
Its eyes filled as if with raindrops, and its lips trembled as it
pressed them to the flower. After this it was perfectly quiet, and
brought a measure of corn to the man-tamer, without showing the least
disposition to strike with the feet or hit from the shoulder.”

That will do for the Houyhnhnm Gazette.—Do you ever wonder why poets talk
so much about flowers? Did you ever hear of a poet who did not talk
about them? Don’t you think a poem, which, for the sake of being
original, should leave them out, would be like those verses where the
letter a or e or some other is omitted? No,—they will bloom over and
over again in poems as in the summer fields, to the end of time, always
old and always new. Why should we be more shy of repeating ourselves
than the spring be tired of blossoms or the night of stars? Look at
Nature. She never wearies of saying over her floral pater-noster. In
the crevices of Cyclopean walls,—in the dust where men lie, dust also,—on
the mounds that bury huge cities, the wreck of Nineveh and the
Babel-heap,—still that same sweet prayer and benediction. The Amen! of
Nature is always a flower.

Are you tired of my trivial personalities,—those splashes and streaks of
sentiment, sometimes perhaps of sentimentality, which you may see when I
show you my heart’s corolla as if it were a tulip? Pray, do not give
yourself the trouble to fancy me an idiot whose conceit it is to treat
himself as an exceptional being. It is because you are just like me that
I talk and know that you will listen. We are all splashed and streaked
with sentiments,—not with precisely the same tints, or in exactly the
same patterns, but by the same hand and from the same palette.

I don’t believe any of you happen to have just the same passion for the
blue hyacinth which I have,—very certainly not for the crushed
lilac-leaf-buds; many of you do not know how sweet they are. You love
the smell of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves, I don’t doubt; but I
hardly think that the last bewitches you with young memories as it does
me. For the same reason I come back to damask roses, after having raised
a good many of the rarer varieties. I like to go to operas and concerts,
but there are queer little old homely sounds that are better than music
to me. However, I suppose it’s foolish to tell such things.

—It is pleasant to be foolish at the right time,—said the
divinity-student;—saying it, however, in one of the dead languages, which
I think are unpopular for summer-reading, and therefore do not bear
quotation as such.

Well, now,—said I,—suppose a good, clean, wholesome-looking countryman’s
cart stops opposite my door.—Do I want any huckleberries?—If I do not,
there are those that do. Thereupon my soft-voiced handmaid bears out a
large tin pan, and then the wholesome countryman, heaping the
peck-measure, spreads his broad hands around its lower arc to confine the
wild and frisky berries, and so they run nimbly along the narrowing
channel until they tumble rustling down in a black cascade and tinkle on
the resounding metal beneath.—I won’t say that this rushing huckleberry
hail-storm has not more music for me than the “Anvil Chorus.”

—I wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer.

—Where are your great trees, Sir?—said the divinity-student.

Oh, all round about New England. I call all trees mine that I have put
my wedding-ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as Brigham Young has
human ones.

—One set’s as green as the other,—exclaimed a boarder, who has never been
identified.

They’re all Bloomers,—said the young fellow called John.

[I should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our landlady’s
daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by putting my
wedding-ring on a tree.]

Why, measuring it with my thirty-foot tape, my dear,—said I,—I have worn
a tape almost out on the rough barks of our old New England elms and
other big trees.—Don’t you want to hear me talk trees a little now? That
is one of my specialities.

[So they all agreed that they should like to hear me talk about trees.]

I want you to understand, in the first place, that I have a most intense,
passionate fondness for trees in general, and have had several romantic
attachments to certain trees in particular. Now, if you expect me to
hold forth in a “scientific” way about my tree-loves,—to talk, for
instance, of the Ulmus Americana, and describe the ciliated edges of its
samara, and all that,—you are an anserine individual, and I must refer
you to a dull friend who will discourse to you of such matters. What
should you think of a lover who should describe the idol of his heart in
the language of science, thus: Class, Mammalia; Order, Primates; Genus,
Homo; Species, Europeus; Variety, Brown; Individual, Ann Eliza; Dental
Formula

i(2—2 / 2—2) c(1—1 / 1—1) p(2—2 / 2—2) m(3—3/3—3’)

and so on?

No, my friends, I shall speak of trees as we see them, love them, adore
them in the fields, where they are alive, holding their green sun-shades
over our heads, talking to us with their hundred thousand whispering
tongues, looking down on us with that sweet meekness which belongs to
huge, but limited organisms,—which one sees in the brown eyes of oxen,
but most in the patient posture, the outstretched arms, and the
heavy-drooping robes of these vast beings endowed with life, but not with
soul,—which outgrow us and outlive us, but stand helpless,—poor
things!—while Nature dresses and undresses them, like so many full-sized,
but under-witted children.

Did you ever read old Daddy Gilpin? Slowest of men, even of English men;
yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a sleepy eye in woman.
I always supposed “Dr. Syntax” was written to make fun of him. I have a
whole set of his works, and am very proud of it, with its gray paper, and
open type, and long ff, and orange-juice landscapes. The Père Gilpin
had the kind of science I like in the study of Nature,—a little less
observation than White of Selborne, but a little more poetry.—Just think
of applying the Linnæan system to an elm! Who cares how many stamens or
pistils that little brown flower, which comes out before the leaf, may
have to classify it by? What we want is the meaning, the character, the
expression of a tree, as a kind and as an individual.

There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of tree, which, if well
marked, is probably embodied in the poetry of every language. Take the
oak, for instance, and we find it always standing as a type of strength
and endurance. I wonder if you ever thought of the single mark of
supremacy which distinguishes this tree from all our other forest-trees?
All the rest of them shirk the work of resisting gravity; the oak alone
defies it. It chooses the horizontal direction for its limbs, so that
their whole weight may tell,—and then stretches them out fifty or sixty
feet, so that the strain may be mighty enough to be worth resisting. You
will find, that, in passing from the extreme downward droop of the
branches of the weeping-willow to the extreme upward inclination of those
of the poplar, they sweep nearly half a circle. At 90° the oak stops
short; to slant upward another degree would mark infirmity of purpose; to
bend downwards, weakness of organization. The American elm betrays
something of both; yet sometimes, as we shall see, puts on a certain
resemblance to its sturdier neighbor.

It won’t do to be exclusive in our taste about trees. There is hardly
one of them which has not peculiar beauties in some fitting place for it.
I remember a tall poplar of monumental proportions and aspect, a vast
pillar of glossy green, placed on the summit of a lofty hill, and a
beacon to all the country round. A native of that region saw fit to
build his house very near it, and, having a fancy that it might blow down
some time or other, and exterminate himself and any incidental relatives
who might be “stopping” or “tarrying” with him,—also laboring under the
delusion that human life is under all circumstances to be preferred to
vegetable existence,—had the great poplar cut down. It is so easy to
say, “It is only a poplar!” and so much harder to replace its living cone
than to build a granite obelisk!

I must tell you about some of my tree-wives. I was at one period of my
life much devoted to the young lady-population of Rhode Island, a small,
but delightful State in the neighborhood of Pawtucket. The number of
inhabitants being not very large, I had leisure, during my visits to the
Providence Plantations, to inspect the face of the country in the
intervals of more fascinating studies of physiognomy. I heard some talk
of a great elm a short distance from the locality just mentioned. “Let
us see the great elm,”—I said, and proceeded to find it,—knowing that it
was on a certain farm in a place called Johnston, if I remember rightly.
I shall never forget my ride and my introduction to the great Johnston
elm.

I always tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the first
time. Provincialism has no scale of excellence in man or vegetable; it
never knows a first-rate article of either kind when it has it, and is
constantly taking second and third rate ones for Nature’s best. I have
often fancied the tree was afraid of me, and that a sort of shiver came
over it as over a betrothed maiden when she first stands before the
unknown to whom she has been plighted. Before the measuring-tape the
proudest tree of them all quails and shrinks into itself. All those
stories of four or five men stretching their arms around it and not
touching each other’s fingers, if one’s pacing the shadow at noon and
making it so many hundred feet, die upon its leafy lips in the presence
of the awful ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions.

As I rode along the pleasant way, watching eagerly for the object of my
journey, the rounded tops of the elms rose from time to time at the
road-side. Wherever one looked taller and fuller than the rest, I asked
myself,—“Is this it?” But as I drew nearer, they grew smaller,—or it
proved, perhaps, that two standing in a line had looked like one, and so
deceived me. At last, all at once, when I was not thinking of it,—I
declare to you it makes my flesh creep when I think of it now,—all at
once I saw a great, green cloud swelling in the horizon, so vast, so
symmetrical, of such Olympian majesty and imperial supremacy among the
lesser forest-growths, that my heart stopped short, then jumped at my
ribs as a hunter springs at a five-barred gate, and I felt all through
me, without need of uttering the words,—“This is it!”

You will find this tree described, with many others, in the excellent
Report upon the Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts. The author has given
my friend the Professor credit for some of his measurements, but measured
this tree himself, carefully. It is a grand elm for size of trunk,
spread of limbs, and muscular development,—one of the first, perhaps the
first, of the first class of New England elms.

The largest actual girth I have ever found at five feet from the ground
is in the great elm lying a stone’s throw or two north of the main road
(if my points of compass are right) in Springfield. But this has much
the appearance of having been formed by the union of two trunks growing
side by side.

The West-Springfield elm and one upon Northampton meadows, belong also to
the first class of trees.

There is a noble old wreck of an elm at Hatfield, which used to spread
its claws out over a circumference of thirty-five feet or more before
they covered the foot of its bole up with earth. This is the American
elm most like an oak of any I have ever seen.

The Sheffield elm is equally remarkable for size and perfection of form.
I have seen nothing that comes near it in Berkshire County, and few to
compare with it anywhere. I am not sure that I remember any other
first-class elms in New England, but there may be many.

—What makes a first-class elm?—Why, size, in the first place, and
chiefly. Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet above the
ground, and with a spread of branches a hundred feet across, may claim
that title, according to my scale. All of them, with the questionable
exception of the Springfield tree above referred to, stop, so far as my
experience goes, at about twenty-two or twenty-three feet of girth and a
hundred and twenty of spread.

Elms of the second class, generally ranging from fourteen to eighteen
feet, are comparatively common. The queen of them all is that glorious
tree near one of the churches in Springfield. Beautiful and stately she
is beyond all praise. The “great tree” on Boston Common comes in the
second rank, as does the one at Cohasset, which used to have, and
probably has still, a head as round as an apple-tree, and that at
Newburyport, with scores of others which might be mentioned. These last
two have perhaps been over-celebrated. Both, however, are pleasing
vegetables. The poor old Pittsfield elm lives on its past reputation. A
wig of false leaves is indispensable to make it presentable.

[I don’t doubt there may be some monster-elm or other, vegetating green,
but inglorious, in some remote New England village, which only wants a
sacred singer to make it celebrated. Send us your
measurements,—(certified by the postmaster, to avoid possible
imposition,)—circumference five feet from soil, length of line from
bough-end to bough-end, and we will see what can be done for you.]

—I wish somebody would get us up the following work:—

SYLVA NOVANGLICA.

Photographs of New England Elms and other Trees, taken upon the Same
Scale of Magnitude. With Letter-Press Descriptions, by a
Distinguished Literary Gentleman. Boston — — & Co. 185..

The same camera should be used,—so far as possible,—at a fixed distance.
Our friend, who has given us so many interesting figures in his “Tr