"Unwatched, the garden bough shall sway,
The tender blossom flutter down,
Unloved that beech will gather brown,
This maple burn itself away."
The rich autumn tints of the foliage of the maple are here alluded to.
Cedars, cypresses, and yews, all members of the great coniferous family, are prominent objects in Mr. Tennyson's landscapes. In the eighteenth section of "Maud"—beginning,
"I have led her home, my love, my only friend"—
and which contains some passages full of solemn tenderness and beauty, and a splendor of language worthy of Shakespeare himself, occurs the oft-quoted apostrophe addressed to the cedar of Lebanon by Maud's somewhat distempered, though now happy lover:
"Oh, art thou sighing for Lebanon
In the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East,
Sighing for Lebanon,
Dark cedar. . . . .
······
And over whom thy darkness must have spread
With such delight as theirs of old, thy great
Forefathers of the thornless garden, there
Shadowing the snow-limbed Eve from whom she came.
Here will I lie, while these long branches sway."
The yew, though usually regarded as the emblem of death—
"Cheerless, unsocial plant, that loves to dwell
Midst skulls and coffins, epitaphs and tombs"—
might, in its extreme tenacity and length of days, be a fitter representative of life and endurance. In the second chapter of "In Memoriam" the yew is described in the most masterly manner. These are two of the verses:
"Old Yew, which graspest at the stones
That name the underlying dead,
Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
Thy roots are wrapped about the bones."
"Oh, not for thee the glow, the bloom,
Who changest not in any gale,
Nor branding summer suns avail
To touch thy thousand years of gloom."
The locality, the hue, the prolonged life, and the general unchangeableness of appearance, are all here summarily noticed. The laureate seems, however, to share the popular dislike to this tree, a feeling which Gilpin, in his "Forest Scenery," ridicules as weakness. In "Amphion," yews are called "a dismal coterie;" in "Maud" a "black yew gloomed the stagnant air;" and, in "Love and Death,"
