THE GLORY OF TREES.

IT can hardly be called an omission, but it is certainly matter for surprise, that in the two bulky volumes of "The Forester,"* the standard work on trees and their repro- duction, now republished under the editorship of Mr. Nisbet,

almost no reference is made to the admiration inspired by the beauty of trees, and its effect in encouraging their preserva- tion. Now that the fire of autumn is touching the leaves,

their beauty of colour is obvious. What else is it which makes the glory of trees ? Those who to power of analysis add the gift of sight, may some day give to the world a theory of what constitutes their strong attraction to the unthetic sense. But they will have to explain a sentiment far older and more primitive than the admiration for almost any other form of natural beauty, and how it is that to-day, when— "The fair humanities of old religion,

The power, the beauty, and the majesty

That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain, Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,"—

have no longer a place in shaping the minds of men, the beauty of trees still awakens an echo of the ancient spirit of reverence and homage.

"If in truth ye anoint me King over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow," said the bramble. "If not, let fire come out of the bramble, and devour the cedars of Lebanon." The shadow of the great tree was its first appeal to the peoples of the East. The banyan, under which fifty generations have sheltered from the sun, is first an embodiment of benevolence, later, perhaps, a symbol of endurance. But the size of the tree seems early to have awakened a sense of contrast and injustice. It lurks in the last line of Jotham's "parable." It awoke whenever Eastern tyranny at last inflamed the passive Eastern mind. "Cedar of Lebanon whom God bath not yet broken," exclaims Augustine. Perhaps this is a relic of Hebraism. How, indeed, could they appreciate the beauty of trees, in a land so treeless that the poet's simile invokes not the shade of the branches, but "the shadow of a great rock in a dry land." There is none of this grudging spirit in Homer. His heroes sit "under a beautiful plane-tree," in which the sparrows build. The tender reverence for trees, from Dodona's oaks to Daphne's laurel, which assigned to them human souls suited to the suggestions of their forms, is one of the contrasts of Hellenism with Hebraism. The fall of a mountain pine is

* The Forester. By James Brown, LL.D. Sixth Edition, enlarged by John Nisbet, D.Gio. S ye!,. London : Blaokwood and Sono.

a symbol of mix], nob of vengeance, and the cruel complete- ness of the doom, "Hew down the tree, and cut off his branches ; shake off his leaves and scatter his fruit," is with- out a parallel in classic metaphor. The tree won a place in the affections of the Western peoples which it has never lost. From the days of the Druids till now we have never grudged the full-grown oak its strength, nor stinted our admiration of its magnificence. The size of trees is part of their individuality. Among a hundred thousand oaks or beeches in a forest, the giants are always known and marked for centuries. A really great tree has a royal presence. It keeps a circle round its throne which it allows no others to approach. Thus the mere circumstance of its bulk, which keeps all others at a distance from the shadow of its branches, augments its importance, and is an element in its beauty, considered merely as a spectacle. A long acquaintance with such a tree always increases our admiration for its grandeur. It amounts almost to a temptation to live under its branches. We note its changes in sunshine and storm ; its bearing in misfortune ; the loss of its branches by snow and gales ; the cast-iron rigidity of the tons of timber in its stem; the vigour with which it replenishes the losses from wind and frost.

There are those who derive some part of the beauty of trees from their power of motion. Of some kinds this is true. There is real beauty and solace in the quiver of the aspen, and the waft of the tresses of the weeping-willow. Their move- ment is in keeping with their place by running streams. It is a form of prettiness :—

"Willows whiten, aspens quiver, Little breezes dusk and shiver

Through the wave that runs for ever By the island in the river Flowing down to Camelot."

Note how the poet picked his words to paint the prettiness.

But this beauty of association does not apply to all trees. The timber-trees are tortured by the wind. They grow restless and vociferous. For our part, we would have them always still, these motionless forms in the hushed forest. The impression produced upon the mind by standing alone among really gigantic trees, is at first an ecstasy of pure admiration for their beauty. Yet, if analysed, the feeling is one clearly not due only to the effect of size, mass, colour, and the play of light and shade. It is something personal, due to the influence of the individual trees ; for the same feeling is never produced by the view of trees merged in masses, however great. A. man may stand on the high mount of Lyndhurst Church, and look over wave after wave of forest, and breathe the wind laden with the odours of a million trees, and be untouched by the spell which falls upon him when alone, surrounded by the silent forms of the gigantic trees, the remnant of the ancient forest. What, then, is the nature of their appeal to the imagination Highly complex, to judge by the recollection of the impression made ; and not dependent on mere grace of form, or on variety of kind, for they are nearly all beeches. 'Their beauty, analysed to the common terms of arboreal growth, must depend upon the contrast between the perfect lightness of the foliage with the solidity of their structure. The gradual subdivision of the trunk into branches, of the branches into lesser branches, of these into the leaf-bearing branchlets, and the lateral flattening of these into the pendent leaf, which has colour and the power of partial illumination by light pouring through it, possesses a scale of natural symmetry which is perhaps the main element of beauty, but with such exceeding differences, such rugged breaches of the law in different trees, as never to impose itself on the mind as an obvious cause for admiration. This natural architecture never invites criticism, or suggests a plan. The mind regrets the very notion of intentional symmetry, while rejoicing in the effects of some natural completeness of design. Yet every well-grown tree has symmetry of

a kind ; and if this is destroyed by accident, its loss is felt. At the same time, nothing is more resented by

the lover of trees than any attempt of art to team them into symmetry or to cut them into regular shapes and forms.

Another element in the beauty of these great trees is the constant sense of inability to number or become familiar with the enormous detail of their forms. The eager brain which would grasp all their beauties, first in impression and later in detail, so as to carry away the splendid catalogue of their charms, is baffled and rebuked by the silent complexity of

their myriad parts. The dry descriptive formulas of the botanic manuals, which allot the same space to the scientific identification of the privet and the oak, are not more inadequate to the task than is the eye of the keenest observer who would catalogue the prodigal wealth of ornament in the forest tree. But, unlike the lesser shrubs, these giants do leave on the mind associations of beauty so strange and so unique that the sober enumeration of them suggests something fantastic, whereas these impressions are almost irresistible when among the sur- roundings which give rise to them. It may be that their size imposes on the brain. They are the largest of all living things, and that alone, though often unrecognised, must disturb the usual order of thought. When the first sensuous shock of their beauty has been received, the trees impose their personality, and seem endowed with some form of will which has made them what they are. They dominate in their own realm. They are genii, latent forces, with power to become not only what they are, but what they will. No two are alike. The living force in each has used the natural forces in a different way. They owe nothing to man, not even the sowing of the parent seed, and "the human being's pride" asks, how came they to be there, and to be what they are, an embodiment of that idea of magnificence, which we so often wish to realise, and fail The grandeur of a tree does, in a great measure, depend upon its size. The national pride of America in its giant trees is well founded. In the Sierra Nevada, there are three groves of the "Mammoth tree," which, like the beeches of the New Forest, will for ever be protected as a national inheritance. At the head-waters of the San Antonio river, the number still standing is about two hundred, of which ninety-two are of the largest size. Six hundred more of these giants stand at a distance of fifty miles, on the slopes of the mountains. At a short distance beyond there are five hundred more, and it is said that a fourth grove has been discovered, which is to be included among the national parks. The average dimensions of these trees are 300 ft. in height and 30 ft. in diameter near the ground; but some specimens are 400 ft. high,—a few feet lower than the cross of St. Paul's. If the giants of our own woods appeal to us as an embodiment of magnificence, what must be the impression created by this hall of columns, in which each equals in height the spires of a cathedral, and has stood through ages of whose duration the years of the oak are an inconsiderable fraction ? These Californian giants lack one element of impressiveness. They have no associations other than those which their size conjures up. Human fancy has never played with their mighty forms; so far as is known, no human eyes have watched the ages of their growth. They have no place in the story of nations, they have built no temples, furnished no navies. They have no place in story. They were found alone in the wilder- ness, as the Siberian fur-hunter found the ice-cased mammoth, in a world of their own. To the mind of the educated West, the groves of the cedars of Lebanon would appeal more strongly than the groves of the Sierra Nevada ; the bulk of the one could not outweigh the associations of the other. But to the primitive notions of Eastern peoples, the giant tree makes a direct appeal, not only for respect, but for worship. Whatever departs from the ordinary course of nature strikes them as the immediate work of God, and one which necessarily preserves something of the divine, Such, for example, is the holy pine of Japan, with its double stem, pictures of which are presented to every bride and bridegroom on the marriage day; and this claim to worship is shared potentially in the East by every great tree that overtops its fellows.