Trees.
By Alfred B. Street.
Wether pluming the mountain, edging the lake, eye-lashing the stream, roofing the waterfall, sprinkling the meadow, burying the homestead, or darkening leagues of hill, plain, and valley, trees have always "haunted me like a passion." Let me summon a few of them, prime favorites, and familiar to the American forest.
The aspen—what soft, silver-gray tints on its leaves, how smooth its mottled bark, its whole shape how delicate and sensitive! You may be sitting on the homestead lawn some summer noon, the trees all motionless, and the hot air trembling over the surface of the unstirred grass. Suddenly you will hear a fluttering like the unloosing of a rapid brook, and looking whence comes the sound, you will see the aspen shaking as if falling to pieces, or the leaves were little wings each striving to fly off. All this time the broad leaf of the maple close by, does not even lift its pointed edges. This soft murmur really sends a coolness through the sultry atmosphere; but while your ear is drinking the music and your eye filled with the tumultuous dancing, instantly both cease as if the tree were stricken with a palsy, and the quiet leaves flash back the sunshine like so many fairy mirrors.
Next the elm. How noble the lift and droop of its branches! With such graceful downward curves on either side, it has the shape of the Greek vase. Such lavish foliage also, running down the trunk to the very roots, as if a rich vine were wreathed around it! And what frame-works those branches shape, breaking the landscape beyond into half-oval scenes which look through the chiaroscuro as
