of the fine, beautiful, or graceful words of poets as trees, and it would be simply a great pleasure to group together all these lines and sketch their appropriate and individual illustrations. Thus we should have Cowper's "Yardley Oak."

"Time made thee what thou wast, King of the Woods;
And time hath made thee what thou art-a cave
For owls to roost in.

Thine arms have left thee; winds have rent them off
Long since, and rovers of the forest wild,
With bow and shaft, have burnt them."

Then we should have Wordsworth's Yew-trees; some of the lines forming a wonderful subject for an artist

"There is a Yew-tree, pride of Lorton vale,

Which to this day stands single, in the midst
Of its own darkness, as it stood of yore.
This solitary tree, a living thing
Produced too slowly ever to decay;

Of form and aspect too magnificent

To be destroyed. But worthier still of note
Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale,
Joined in one solemn and capacious grove;
Huge trunks, and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
Upcoiling, and inveterately convolved;

Beneath whose sable roof

Of boughs, as if for festal purpose decked
With unrejoicing berries-ghostly shapes
May meet at noontide: Fear and trembling Hope,
Silence and Foresight, Death the Skeleton
And Time the Shadow!"

Then we should have the old Oak of Rogers-lines which seem quite to realise the desolate and blasted tree, without mention of which every dendrological catalogue would be incomplete-the old oak of Irerne the Hunter in Windsor Forest:

"Round thee, alas, no shadows move,
From thee no sacred murmurs breathe;
Yet within thee, thyself a grove,
Once did the eagle scream above,
And the wolf howl beneath.
Thy singed top and branches bare
Now struggle in the evening sky,
And the wan moon wheels round to glare
On the lone corse that shivers there

Of him who came to die!"

Trees must always have impressed the reverent imaginations of men. Bryant, in his magnificent "Forest Hymn," expresses the truth which all old history confirms, and especially the Bible annals:

"The groves were God's first temples!"

So it was with Abraham when he dwelt at Mamre, which was literally a village among the trees, the oaks apparently, in his case; so also with Deborah, the mighty mother in Israel, when she sat beneath the date-palm and poured forth her magnificent the old biographics of the Bible that the tree, or Hebrew melody. We have many illustrations from the grove of trees, formed the first temples of men; and from the same book we gather how soon trees became dangerously associated with idolatry. It was as if men confounded the glorious and magnificent window, through which glancing, they might see the King passing by, with the King Himself; it has been so usually the case that man has first adopted the symbol, and then transferred to the symbol the idea of inherent power residing in it; so trees were fabled to be the homes of dryads and wood-nymphs. Hence, in the historical books of the Bible, and in the words of the prophets, we are perpetually meeting with denunciations of the groves. Tree-worship is at once one of the oldest and the most prevalent forms of idolatry; nor is it wonderful that it should be so when we regard, not merely the manifold uses of trees, the extraordinary variety of ways in which they contribute to the necessities of man, but when we remember also, in many regions of the East, their vast proportions in bulk and height, the far-winding and mysterious avenues beneath the gorgeous architecture of the umbrageous boughs-when we remember how often in their remote, bewildering, and interlacing ambiguity they seem to be the retreat and receptacle of appropriate but inexplicable mysteries-all these circumstances, combined with many others we have not detailed, make trees to be singular objects through which faith and reverence learned their sometimes superstitious lessons.

Most nations have some tree especially dear because in so many ways providing for the necessities of the people. The author of the interesting "Sketches of Persia " describes his emotions when, in the midst of the desert and arid plains, he looked around him on the ignorant, half-naked, and swarthy men and women broiling under a burning sun; he says his bosom heaved with pity for their condition, which seemed to him so wretched. Yet they all seemed contented, and he regarded their contentment as derogatory to the dignity of human nature. He turned to an old Armenian, his companion in his travels, and said: "Surely these people cannot be so foolish as to be happy in this miserable and uninstructed state? They appear to be a lively, intelligent race. Can they be insensible to their wretched condition? Do they not hear of any other countries? Have they no envy; no desire for improvement?" The old Armenian smiled upon him, and said, “No, no! They are a very happy race of people, and so far from envying the condition of others, they would be more likely to pity them." The old man saw the surprise and incredulity of his companion, so he said, "I will give you an anecdote which will explain the ground of this feeling. Some time since, an Arab woman from this very neighbourhood

6

went to England with the children of Mr. BShe remained in your country four years. When she returned, all gathered round her to gratify their curiosity about England. What did you find there?' Is it a fine country? Are the people rich?' Are they happy?' She answered them: The country is like a garden. All the people seemed very rich; had fine clothes, fine houses, fine horses, fine carriages, and were said to be very wise and happy.' Those to whom she was speaking began to be filled with envy of the English, and a gloom began to spread itself over them, which showed discontent at their own condition, when the woman, accidentally it seemed, happened to say, England certainly wants one thing.' What is that?" said the Arabs eagerly. There is not a single datetree in the whole country!' Are you sure?' was the general exclamation. Positive,' said the old nurse; I looked for nothing else all the time I was there; but I never saw a date-palm,' and this produced an instantaneous change of feeling among all her Arab listeners, and instead of envy, pity seemed to take possession of all, and they went away wondering how men could live in a country where there were no date-trees." Thus, indeed, it is most true that the lone date-tree is the friendly child of the dry saharas, and, very singularly to us, it seems that the drier and more sandy the region, the more prolific is the benevolence of the palm; and thus, while the vine hangs like an emerald or amethyst necklace round our hills, or the banks of the Rhine, or the slopes of the Alps, the date is the mother of bounties to the far Eastern world.

What an extraordinary illustration of the comprehensive and compendious benevolence of the Creating King we find in the cocoa-bearing palm! When the fruit is old it yields a species of oil which is used for light; of its juices is made arrack, a kind of toddy; the cabbage is used in cookery; its leaf in many mechanical services; its trunk is used for building; its fibres for cordage; and of its shell are made many domestic utensils. And so valuable is it in a nautical sense that one of the kings of the Maldive Islands sent an ambassador to Ceylon in a ship, not only built, but entirely rigged out of cocoanut trees. They are, too, so conspicuous as landmarks, and so little affected by the sea air or the sea spray, that Captain Flinders, a distinguished voyager, used to say that any navigator who should distribute ten thousand cocoa-nuts upon the numerous sandbanks of the Indian and Pacific Oceans would be amply entitled to the gratitude of all maritime nations. And all this of the cocoa-palm reminds us that dear old Du Bartas, in his wonderful old poem "The Days," says all that we have said above through his great translator Sylvester:

"The admirable Tree

Beareth a fruit (called Cocoa commonly),
The which, alone, far richer wonders yields

Than all our Groves, Meads, Orchards, Gardens, Fields. What? Would'st thou drink? The wounded leaves drop wine.

Lack'st thou fine linen? Dress the tender rine,
Dress it like Flax, spin it, and weave it wel,
It shall the Cambrik and thy Lawn excel.
Long'st thou for Butter? Bite the poulpy part,
And never better came to any Mart.
Needest thou Oyl? Then boult it to and fro,
And passing Oyl it soon becometh so.

Or Vinegar, to whet thine appetite?
Then sun it wel, and it will sharply bite.
Or want'st thou Sugar? Steep the same a stound,
And sweeter sugar is not to be found.

'Tis what you will: or will be what you would;
Should Midas touch't (I think) it would be Gold
And God (I think) to crown our life with joyes,
The earth with plenty, and His Name with praise,
Had done enough, if He had made no more
But this one plant, so full of wondrous store."

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varieties-how significant is that text, "The rightIn the memory of all this-of the palm and its eous shall flourish like the palm tree," tall, stately, and fruitful, and bearing its glories as a crown of triumph.

In the description of trees, forests, and woods, travellers give to us pictures as rich as the poets. These pages will not permit us to do more than mention, though very especially, Humboldt's descriptions of life in the forests of America, glowing at once with graphic reality and imagination; or the pages of Darwin, in his voyage of the "Beagle."

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Trees

What trees Mr. Yates found and described in his 'Naturalist on the Amazons;" what varieties of forest life; and what must it be merely to attempt to conceive those mammoth trees he discovered! With what enthusiasm he speaks of what he calls the glorious forests. "There was," he says, "a cedar whose colossal trunk towered up for more than a hundred feet, straight as an arrow. I never saw its crown, which was lost to view from below beyond a crowd of lesser trees which surrounded it." whose column-like stems were sixty feet in girth at the point where they become cylindrical, and their height a hundred feet from the ground to the lowest branch. Who planted all these mighty leagues of forest land? Probably in the same way were they planted as many of our English forests. A pleasing writer says, "While England may take pride in her oaks, it is not generally known that those which are called spontaneous are planted by the squirrel. This little animal has performed a most essential service to the English navy." And then he goes on to tell how, in the county of Monmouth, he came upon a squirrel sitting very composedly on the ground. Like lightning it darted to the top of a tree, and was presently back with an acorn in its mouth. It burrowed the earth with its hands, and in the tolerably deep hole which it made it deposited the acorn, darted up to the tree again, and presently returned with another, and continued in this employment so long as the amused and interested observer watched it. Thus the little creature was providing against want in winter, and as its memory was probably frequently defective, and as its industry and mental obliviousness were no doubt shared by innumerable brethren of the same tribe, we may form some idea of what we owe t the industry and bad memory of a squirrel, as he "Leaps from tree to tree,

And shells his nuts at liberty."

A clergyman, a student of natural history, tells how he was interested in watching a colony of rooks burying something in the ground, and he ascertained that they had planted acorns enough to make a grove of oaks; he lived to see a number of them spring up into something more than saplings, and most likely the planters lived to build their nests in

the branches. We have all heard of "the centuryliving crow." Our artist appears to have gone into one of the deep pine forests. The solitude and the silence, not less than the mysterious sound of a pine forest are wonderful; but more especially are they noticeable in the Canadas for the large parties of what are called lumberers who camp in their depths supplying the navies of the world with choicest masts. Among the deep utterances of the Book of God concerning the creation, not one is more wonderful than that in Genesis ii. 5, that "the Lord God made every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew," the developed idea was in the mind of God before it was formed. He saw the end before the thought had a beginning in creation; then He gave to every kind its own body, answering to the germinating life within. This singular announcement of revelation in the story of creation has received remarkable illustration in one of the later chapters of botanical science-in what may be called now the law of Goethe. His announcement of it was mocked by the men of science as merely a gleam of poetic imagination; but he lived long enough to see his doctrine adopted by every scientific man of his day. The doctrine that not merely the life-the respiration of every tree-every flower-is in the leaf, but that the whole idea of the entire plant is in the leaf; this is the exposition of the text, "The Lord made every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb before it grew." Whether lifting a tower of spiral strength, or weaving the umbrageous roof over sylvan green arcades, twining into an arbour, or springing aloft crowned with flowery tops, so that, whether we climb the hills, or rove the woods, or walk by the stream, or pause by moss-grown wells, we may be sure that in each floral-vegetative creation, we find a thought of God. Each green thing ought to be a speaker of parables, an utterer forth of Nature's sweet gospel; for then only, has Nature a sweet gospel to deliver, when interpreted and shone upon by the Divine word. For the kingdom of trees spreads everywhere before the eye an immense portrait of the Divine mind. Are we charmed by contriving skill? Does a lavish and profuse imagination delight us; conceptions which look like genius, or exquisite and faultless taste and grace? They are all here, conjoined to gracious benignity and benevolent munificence. If the thunder and the tempest awe and overwhelm us by the assurance of our helplessness beneath tremendous omnipotence, the world of trees, with all their glorious variety of flowers and fruits, assure us of our Father's unforgetting sympathy and condescending care.

Ezekiel, among the prophets of God, may be called pre-eminently the prophet of the trees. Trees were to him as the King's Windows. What a description of a vast empire in the thirty-first chapter: "Whom art thou like in thy greatness? a cedar in Lebanon with fair branches, and with a shadowing shroud, and of a high stature; the top among the thick boughs. Thus was he fair in his greatness, in the length of his branches for his root was by great waters. The cedars in the garden of God could not hide him: the fir trees were not like his boughs, and the chestnut trees were not like his branches: nor any tree in the garden of God was like unto him in his beauty, so that all the trees of Eden that were in the garden of God envied him”!

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And in the same sublime prophet what a noble and distinctive prophecy is that concerning Christ the Cedar of God: "Thus saith the Lord God; I will also take of the highest branch of the high cedar, and will set it; I will crop off from the top of his young twigs a tender one, and will plant it upon an high mountain and eminent: in the mountain of the height of Israel will I plant it: and it shall bring forth boughs, and bear fruit, and be a goodly cedar and under it shall dwell all fowl of every wing; in the shadow of the branches thereof shall they dwell. And all the trees of the field shall know that I the Lord have brought down the high tree, have exalted the low tree, have dried up the green tree, and have made the dry tree to flourish: I the Lord have spoken and have done it”! The trees of England do not seem to possess the attractive romance of many foreign children of the forest; yet, we suppose, in beauty, in winning gracefulness, scarcely the trees of any other country could transcend our own, even the Lime, the linden-tree of Germany-if the latter name seem more romantic and historical-we doubt whether there could be found more graceful and lovable specimens than among our own English parks and groves. The lime is surely the lady among our English trees. Many an old English park boasts a fine avenue of lime-trees-like that of Brambridge in the New Forest. Our own more affectionate memories loiter beneath a stately and imposing line of limes in Buxted Park, in Sussex. The lime-tree is the sculptor's tree; carvers in wood prefer this as furnishing them with those attributes most needed to give at once effect and permanence to their creations. Many of the carvings of Grinling Gibbons are wrought from the lime. Is the Yew a peculiarly English tree? Perhaps not, but we suppose that in no country could such extraordinary illustrations of its weird, ghostly, and sombre magnificence be found in no country-especially, if, somewhat in Irish fashion, we assimilate Ireland with our own, and make the little island a peninsula ; for the most astonishing yew-tree of which we ever did hear is that at Crom Castle, at Fermanagh. Its appearance is that of an enormous dark-green mushroom; the branches spread out in great numbers horizontally from the trunk, and are supported by a number of wooden pillars, and cover a space about seventy feet in diameter; winding alloys stretch about beneath the tree, and two hundred persons have often dined beneath its branches. The yewtree is usually called the churchyard-tree; perhaps its weird and sombre character, its winding, skeleton-like roots, and dark shady branches may be sufficient to account for this, though the more generally accepted reason is that it was the tree on which many ages since England's greatness was supposed to depend; for, long before we formed and founded our "hearts of oak," we fashioned our arms of yew. Poitiers, Agincourt, and other such fields, were won by the English bow; and the tree was so national and so important that the exportation of its wood was forbidden. This tree furnishes some of the most wonderful pieces of forest effect in our country; usually, we know, it stands solitary, but there are some spots where the effect of almost a forest of yew-trees is nearly as strange, weird, and ghastly as that through which Dante conducts us in the "Inferno." The most extraordinary we have

ever seen in this way, is that called the Kingly Vale, about four miles from Chichester. The trees are immemorial. What the place is, when, and by whom they were planted, is lost to all knowledge, only that tradition describes the place as the spot of burial of a number of old Danish sea-kings. It is a long dark grove, dense and dark, and if anything were wanting to supply sombreness and shadow to the valley, some of the finest specimens of juniper and holly lend their interlacing darkness to the scene. It is a long vale in which these strange giants are assembled-perfectly solitary, although a favourite retreat on summer afternoons for visitors from Brighton or Chichester. Nine hundred years this long, grand, irregular arena has been known to stand. We have mentioned it at this length because, while it is one of the grandest things we possess in England, it is so singularly unknown.

But what a beautiful variety, and how impossible to do more than mention such pleasant names as the beech, the birch, the walnut, the chestnut-have you not seen the stately avenue in Bushey Park in its coronation month?-the wych elm, the willow, and the ash, then the apple-tree, the pear and the cherry, these are all the windows of the King. And as every tree has its own distinctive character-character as distinct as any of the creatures of the forest or field, or as any members of the great human family, so, no doubt, every tree has its own distinctive purpose and affections and uses. A pleasing, butquite unknown poet, although an affluent writer, says,

"Varied as sounds that speak of joy or grief

Each tree had its own music with the wind,
As many-toned as notes of birds. Each leaf
Answers the breeze according to its kind,
As human accidents in diverse mind
Diverse affections move."

The varying language of trees, however unknown to dwellers in town, must have been noticed by those who have walked through woods or forests when the winds were up, or who have lain wakeful at night in some house in the neighbourhood of varying groves, plantations, or woods when tongues were busy talking in the trees.

It is quite remarkable to notice from the testimony of travellers what a change in forest vegetation has passed over the region of Palestine, what we call the Holy Land. In the ancient Bible days, in the times of David and from thence down to the time of our Lord and later still, Palestine must have been covered with vernal forests. We read of the forest, or wood, of Ephraim; the forest of Hareth; there were forests of oak amongst the mountains of Bashan; and what cedar forests there were, we know in Lebanon. The palm groves of Jericho must have been, according to Dean Stanley, eight miles long; these have all disappeared. This seems especially affecting as we think of the Cedar of Lebanon, the object of most intense veneration to the Jews; it was beyond all trees, the tree: what the oak is to England, the birch to Scotland, the pine to Norway, the orange to Spain, the olive to Italy. From the cedar of Lebanon inspired writers fetched some of their finest illustrations and allusions; the good man was to "grow like the cedar in Lebanon;" "the trees of the Lord were full of sap, the cedars of Lebanon which He planted." It is said now that the whole of Lebanon does not contain as many cedar-trees as are to be seen in the parks and lawns of England.

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The prophecy has been literally fulfilled in a very remarkable manner, that "the remainder of the trees of the forest"-Lebanon-" shall be few, so that a child may write them," and the "remainder" of the ancient forests are not scattered about over the mountains, but there is one little grove over a Maronite village. No other tree is visible for miles, and this is guarded with intense reverence and superstitious awe. The trees are considered by the Maronites even to possess something of a saintly character. But how curious it is in connection with this that another prophecy should be literally fulfilled, "Upon the land of My people shall come up thorns and briars; yea, upon all the houses of joy in the joyous city," so that the land of the cedar and the palm is now called by travellers "the land of thorns." Thorny and spinous plants strike every traveller's eye as the most prolific forms of vegetation, and are formidable barriers in travelling the country. This is not wonderful, regarded from a natural point of view. The extermination of magnificent forests, and stately and fruitful trees, would cause a degenerated but more hardy and intractable vegetation. Bonar and M'Cheyne say that, for hours together, they marched through extensive tracts of briars and thorns such as they had seen in no other part of the world. The once glorious plains of Esdraelon are covered with thickets of these dangerous plants; so are the once fair and flourishing hills of Judah; so is the whole country between Nazareth and the shores of the ever-memorable lake.

Dr. Clarke thought that from hence, more readily than from any other region, could be obtained a valuable collection of every variety of thistles; and it is curious that the most frequent and remarkable of all these prickly plants is that called the Spina Christi, Christ's Thorn, and its botanic appellation is derived from the tradition that it is the plant from which the Crown of Thorns was made. Its appearance is said to be very different from that thorn which we see in the representations of the art of great painters surrounding the brow of the Incarnate and Crucified One. It does not look so cruel; its branches are long, slender, and pliable, so as more easily to be plaited into any shape; also its leaves are like those of the ivy, a rich, glossy green, looking, when shaped like a crown, like the old classic crown of victory, so that it conveyed an insult while it produced the most exquisite pain; for nothing can be more treacherous than this innocent-looking shrub or trailing creeper; its beauty seems to contrast with the desolation of the places in which it is found. An unsuspecting traveller, at first, greatly admires it; but it conceals under every leaf a sharp thorn, often an inch in length, curved like a fishhook, and it grasps and tears everything that it touches; it runs into the feet of men and animals; it is more troublesome than a military weapon. There is every probability that this was thorn which was plaited as a crown for the Redeemer, and now all the hills round about Jerusalem, as well as the plains of Galilee, are crowned with the thorn. It is hardly possible to read these things-the testimony of all accomplished travellers-without seeming to hear a very significant tongue in the trees.

the

Such are one or two of the ten thousand sights which might meet us from these windows of the Great King!