St. Paul daily globe., 1896-04-24
RIVER AT s A. NJ.
AMONG THE TREES.

The man or woman who loves not
Che trees, like him or her who has
no music in the soul, is only ''ft for
treason, strategems and spoils" Much
as the pioneer, invading the forests,
seemed, in his ruthless slaughter of
the innocents, to show a fierce icono-
clasm, it was only another case of
loving Rome more than Caesar-the
love of the trees had to give way to
the superior love of a home of and for
his own. If something Of resentment
remained after the back-breaking chop
ping, logging, burning, clearing and
sharp conflicts with the stumps and
their spreading roots, and showed it.
self in unshaded homesteads, it was
a feeling that passed away with the
men who conquered the forests; and
there was a resurgence in their de-
scendants Of the old hereditary love,
bred in the race when our barbarian
forebears lived with the trees and
made their homes with and of them.
1t came back with mastering force
when the pioneers had cut away the
forest fringe of the prairies of the
interior and began to make their
homes on the treeless plains. Out Of
the hunger Of the eye and the soul
for trees grew the sentiment that has
found expression in the Arbor day
enactments of nearly all the states,
and which is being observed today by
tree lovers all over the state.
There is something Of a sense Of
kinship in this love Of men for trees,
which Lowell felt when he wrote:
Il care not how men trace their ancestry
To ape or Adam; let them please their whim
But in June am midday to believe
a tree among my far progenitors.'
They share their physical character
istics with man. They, too, have
their respiratory and circulatory
organs; they draw their feed from
earth and sky, and digestive organs
convert it into the material for susie
nance and growth. Each species has
Its distinct character, and each sepa-
rate tree distinct notifications of it.
Like human beings, their lives are but
the development of the individual germ
modified by environment. They have
their likes and dislikes; the latter
plainly shown when some mischance
has put into close proximity such an
tipathies as exist between the cotton
wood and our wild plum, which makes
the latter, when winter reveals it's
form, appear to be flying in terror
from its burly neighbor.
Lowell shared the old notion that en-
dowed trees with sensibilities, and
wrote, in an April letter, that 81 still
feel the blind motions of spring in
my veins with the same sense of prickle
as trees do, for I suppose their sense
of April must be very much like ours,
when a limb that has been asleep, as
we call it, is fumbling after it's sus-
pended animation again" When Bos-
ton had crowded her population out to
Cambridge and made the acres of Elm
wood too valuable to keep for their
grass and crops, he sold off all but
the few acres retained for the home
stead, but his heart bled when the
mercenary owner mailed to my willow
a board with these words on it: These
trees for sale.' The wretch is going
to peddle them for firewoodI If 1 had
the money I would buy the ground
they stand on to save them, the dear
friends of a lifetime One experiences
a touch of this sense of linship when
on returning from regions where the
trees are strangers like the people,
he meets again the familiar oaks and
elms, birches and pines. Lowell ''ex-
ulted when he saw trees whose cousins
grow in Massachusetts" when he came
back to Dresden from a tour in Italy.
81 thought I never saw anything SO
fine (as the laburnums around Lage
Lugano). but when saw the frs and
pines and mountain ashes, felt what
a Northerler and homely soul I was,