_Sept. 1_.--I should not take either the biggest or the most picturesque
tree to illustrate it. Here is one of my favorites now before me, a fine
yellow poplar, quite straight, perhaps 90 feet high, and four thick
at the butt. How strong, vital, enduring! how dumbly eloquent! What
suggestions of imperturbability and _being_, as against the human
trait of mere _seeming_. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably
artistic, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It
_is_, yet says nothing. How it rebukes by its tough and equable serenity
all weathers, this gusty-temper'd little whiffet, man, that runs indoors
at a mite of rain or snow. Science (or rather half-way science) scoffs
at reminiscence of dryad and hamadryad, and of trees speaking. But,
if they don't, they do as well as most speaking, writing, poetry,
sermons--or rather they do a great deal better. I should say indeed that
those old dryad-reminiscences are quite as true as any, and profounder
than most reminiscences we get. ("Cut this out," as the quack mediciners
say, and keep by you.) Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more
of those voiceless companions, and read the foregoing, and think.
One lesson from affiliating a tree--perhaps the greatest moral lesson
anyhow from earth, rocks, animals, is that same lesson of inherency, of
_what is_, without the least regard to what the looker-on (the critic)
supposes or says, or whether he likes or dislikes. What worse--what more
general malady pervades each and all of us, our literature, education,
attitude toward each other, (even toward ourselves,) than a morbid
trouble about _seems_, (generally temporarily seems too,) and no trouble
at all, or hardly any, about the sane, slow-growing, perennial, real
parts of character, books, friendship, marriage--humanity's invisible
foundations and hold-together? (As the all-basis, the nerve, the
great-sympathetic, the plenum within humanity, giving stamp to
everything, is necessarily invisible.)
_Aug. 4, 6 P.M._--Lights and shades and rare effects on tree-foliage and
grass--transparent greens, grays, &c., all in sunset pomp and dazzle.
The clear beams are now thrown in many new places, on the quilted,
seam'd, bronze-drab, lower tree-trunks, shadow'd except at this
hour--now flooding their young and old columnar ruggedness with strong
light, unfolding to my sense new amazing features of silent, shaggy
charm, the solid bark, the expression of harmless impassiveness, with
many a bulge and gnarl unreck'd before. In the revealings of such light,
such exceptional hour, such mood, one does not wonder at the old story
fables, (indeed, why fables?) of people falling into love-sickness with
trees, seiz'd extatic with the mystic realism of the resistless silent
strength in them--_strength_, which after all is perhaps the last,
completest, highest beauty.
_Trees I am familiar with here_.
Oaks, (many kinds--one sturdy Willows.
old fellow, vital, green, bushy, Catalpas.
five feet thick at the butt, I sit Persimmons.
under every day,) Mountain-ash.
Cedars plenty. Hickories.
Tulip trees, (_Liriodendron,_) is of Maples, many kinds.
the magnolia family--I have Locusts.
seen it in Michigan and southern Birches.
Illinois, 140 feet high and Dogwood.
8 feet thick at the butt [A]; does Pine.
not transplant well; best rais'd the Elm.
from seeds--(the lumbermen Chesnut.
call it yellow poplar.) Linden.
Sycamores. Aspen.
Gum trees, both sweet and sour. Spruce.
Beeches. Hornbeam.
Black-walnuts. Laurel.
Sassafras. Holly.