"Twilight grey
Had in her sober livery all things clad:
Silence accompanied; for beast and bird,
They to their grassy couch; these to their nests
Were slunk, all save the wakeful nightingale:
Hesperus that led
The starry host rode brightest, till the moon
Unveiled her peerless light,
And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw."
Milton.
Running all along one side of our orchard, garden, and lawn are a row of
tall and graceful poplar trees. So tall are they that they may be seen
many miles away; they are quite a feature of the landscape, and tell the
position of our village to those coming towards it long before a single
house is visible.
These trees are the admiration of all that behold them, but, to my eye,
there seems always connected with them an air of solemnity. All the
other trees about--the spreading limes, the broad-leaved planes, and the
rugged oaks and elms--seem dwarfed by their presence, so high do they
tower above them. Their tips appear to touch the very sky itself, their
topmost branches pierce the clouds. Around the stem of each the
beautiful ivy climbs and clings for support; and this ivy gives shelter
by night to hundreds of birds, and to bats too, for aught I know.
Their very position standing there in a row, like giant sentinels,
surrounds them with an air of mystery to which the fact that they follow
each other's motions--all bending and nodding in the same direction at
once--only tends to add. And spring, summer, autumn, or winter they are
ever pointing skywards. In the winter months they are leafless and
bare, and there is a wild, weird look about them on a still night, when
the moon and stars are shining, which it would be difficult to describe
in words. But sometimes in winter, when the hoar-frost falls and
silvers every twiglet and branch till they resemble nothing so much as
the snowiest of coral, then, indeed, the beauty with which they are
adorned, once seen must ever be remembered.
But hardly has spring really come, and long before the cuckoo's dual
notes are heard in the glade, or the nightingale's street, unearthly
music fills every copse and orchard, making the hearts of all that hear
it glad, ere those stately poplars are clothed from tip to stem in robes
of yellow green, and their myriad leaves dance and quiver in the
sunlight, when there is hardly wind enough to bend a blade of grass. As
the summer wears on, those leaves assume a darker tint, and approach
more nearly to the colour of the ivy that crowds and climbs around their
stems. The wind is then more easily heard, sighing and whispering
through the branches even when there is not a breath of air down on the
lawn or in the orchard. On what we might well call still evenings, if
you cast your eye away aloft, you may see those tree-tops all swaying
and moving in rhythm against the sky; and if you listen you may catch
the sound of their leaves like that of wavelets breaking on a beach of
smoothest sand.
I remember it was one still summer's night, long after sundown, for the
gloaming star was shining, that we were all together on the rose lawn.
The noisy sparrows were quiet, every bird had ceased to sing, there
wasn't a sound to be heard anywhere save the sighing among the topmost
branches of the poplars. Far up there, a breeze seemed to be blowing
gently from the west, and as it kissed the tree-tops they bent and bowed
before it.
Ida lay in a hammock of grass, the book she could no longer see to read
lying on her lap in a listless hand.
"No matter how still it is down here," she said, "those trees up there
are always whispering."
"What do you think they are saying?" I asked.
"Oh," she answered, "I would give worlds to know."
"Perhaps," she added, after a pause, "they hear voices up in the sky
there that we cannot hear, that they catch sounds of--"
"Stop, Ida, stop," I cried; "why, if you go on like this, instead of the
wise, sensible, old-fashioned little girl that I'm so fond of having as
my companion in my rambles, you will degenerate into a poet."
"Ha! ha!" laughed Frank; "well, that is a funny expression to be sure.
Degenerate into a poet. How complimentary to the sons and daughters of
the lyre, how complimentary to your own bonnie Bobby Burns, for
instance!"
Ida half raised herself in her hammock. She was smiling as she spoke.
"It was you, uncle, that taught me," she said. "Did you not tell me
everything that grows around us has life, and even feeling; that in
winter the great trees go to sleep, and do not suffer from the cold, but
that in summer they are filled with a glow of warmth, and that if you
lop a branch off one, though it does not feel pain, it experiences cold
at the place where the axe has done its work? Haven't you taught me to
look upon the flowers as living things? and don't I feel them to be so
when I stoop to kiss the roses? Yes, and I love them too; I love them
all--all."
"And I've no doubt the love is reciprocated, my little mouse. But now,
talking about trees, if Frank will bring the lamp, I'll read you a kind
of a story about two trees. It isn't quite a tale either--it is a kind
of reverie; but the descriptive parts of it are painted from the life.
Thank you, Frank. Now if the moths will only keep away for a minute, if
it wasn't for that bit of displayed humanity on the top of the glass in
the shape of a morsel of wire gauze, that big white moth would go pop in
and immolate himself. Ahem!"
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