Forty years in the pulpit of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Henry Ward
Beecher stood and poured forth a stream of eloquence which shook
the world. During the stress of civil war he stemmed the current of
English sentiment with his peculiar powers and brought about a change
of feeling which was the salvation of our Union. This greatest of our
pulpit orators was a lover of trees, and some of his finer passages
were inspired by them.
Without doubt, better trees there might be than even the most noble
and beautiful now. I suppose God has, in his thoughts, much better
ones than he has ever planted on this globe. They are reserved for the
glorious land. Beneath them may we walk!
To most people a grove is a grove, and all groves are alike. But no two
groves are alike. There is as marked a difference between different
forests as between different communities. A grove of pines without
underbrush, carpeted with the fine-fingered russet leaves of the pine,
and odorous of resinous gums, has scarcely a trace of likeness to a
maple woods, either in the insects, the birds, the shrubs, the light
and shade, or the sound of its leaves. If we lived in olden times,
among young mythologies, we should say that pines held the imprisoned
spirit of naiads and water-nymphs, and that their sounds were of the
water for whose lucid depths they always sighed. At any rate, the first
pines must have grown on the seashore, and learned their first accents
from the surf and the waves; and all their posterity have inherited the
sound, and borne it inland to the mountains.
I like best a forest of mingled trees, ash, maple, oak, beech, hickory,
and evergreens, with birches growing along the edges of the brook that
carries itself through the roots and stones, toward the willows that
grow in yonder meadow. It should be deep and sombre in some directions,
running off into shadowy recesses and coverts beyond all footsteps. In
such a wood there is endless variety. It will breathe as many voices
to your fancy as might be brought from any organ beneath the pressure
of some Handel's hands. By the way, Handel and Beethoven always remind
me of forests. So do some poets, whose numbers are as various as the
infinity of vegetation, fine as the choicest cut leaves, strong
and rugged in places as the unbarked trunk and gnarled roots at the
ground's surface. Is there any other place, except the seaside, where
hours are so short and moments so swift as in the forest? Where else
except in the rare communion of those friends much loved, do we awake
from pleasure, whose calm flow is without a ripple, into surprise that
whole hours are gone which we thought but just begun--blossomed and
dropped, which we thought but just budding?
Thus do you stand, noble elms! Lifted up so high are your topmost
boughs that no indolent birds care to seek you, and only those of
nimble wings, and they with unwonted beat, that love exertion and
aspire to sing where none sing higher. Aspiration! so heaven gives
it pure as flames to the noble bosom. But debased with passion and
selfishness it comes to be only Ambition!
It was in the presence of this pasture-elm, which we name the Queen,
that we first felt to our very marrow that we had indeed become owners
of the soil! It was with a feeling of awe that we looked up into its
face, and when I whispered to myself, "This is mine," there was a
shrinking as if there were sacrilege in the very thought of _property_
in such a creature of God as this cathedral-topped tree! Does a man
bare his head in some old church? So did I, standing in the shadow of
this regal tree, and looking up into that completed glory, at which
three hundred years have been at work with noiseless fingers! What was
I in its presence but a grasshopper? My heart said, "I may not call
thee property, and that property mine! Thou belongest to the air. Thou
art the child of summer. Thou art the mighty temple where birds praise
God. Thou belongest to no man's hand, but to all men's eyes that do
love beauty, and that have learned through beauty to behold God! Stand,
then, in thine own beauty and grandeur! I shall be a lover and a
protector, to keep drought from thy roots, and the axe from thy trunk."
For, remorseless men there are crawling yet upon the face of the earth,
smitten blind and inwardly dead, whose only thought of a tree of ages
is, that it is food for the axe and the saw! These are the wretches of
whom the scripture speaks: "A man was famous according as he had lifted
up axes upon the thick trees."
Thus famous, or rather infamous, was the last owner but one, before me,
of this farm. Upon the crown of the hill, just where an artist would
have planted them, had he wished to have them exactly in the right
place, grew some two hundred stalwart and ancient maples, beeches,
ashes and oaks, a narrow belt-like forest, forming a screen from the
northern and western winds in winter, and a harp of endless music for
the summer. The wretched owner of this farm, tempted of the devil, cut
down the whole blessed band and brotherhood of trees, that he might
fill his pocket with two pitiful dollars a cord for the wood! Well,
his pocket was the best part of him. The iron furnaces have devoured
my grove, and their huge stumps that stood like gravestones have been
cleared away, that a grove may be planted in the same spot, for the
next hundred years to nourish into the stature and glory of that which
is gone.
In many other places I find the memorials of many noble trees slain;
here a hemlock that carried up its eternal green a hundred feet into
the winter air; there, a huge double-trunked chestnut, dear old
grandfather of hundreds of children that have for generations clubbed
its boughs, or shook its nut-laden top, and laughed and shouted as
bushels of chestnuts rattled down. Now, the tree exists only in the
form of loop-holed posts and weather-browned rails. I do hope the
fellow got a sliver in his fingers every time he touched the hemlock
plank, or let down the bars made of those chestnut rails!