Suggestive programs for special day exercises/Arbor Day/Poet of Trees

by George William Curtis

THE POET OF THE TREES.

It is pleasant to remember on Arbor Day that Bryant, our oldest American poet and the father of our American literature, is especially the poet of trees. He grew up among the solitary hills of western Massachusetts, where the woods were his nursery and the trees his earliest comrades. The solemnity of the forest breathes through all his verse, and he had always, even in the city, a grave, rustic air, as of a man who heard the babbling brooks and to whom the trees told their secrets.

—Geo. Wm. Curtis.