One would say, that Nature, like untrained persons,
could not sit still without nestling about or doing something with
her limbs or features, and that high breeding was only to be looked
for in trim gardens, where the soul of the trees is ill at ease
perhaps, but their manners are unexceptionable, and a rustling branch
or leaf falling out of season is an indecorum. The real forest is
hardly still except in the Indian summer; then there is death in the
house, and they are waiting for the sharp shrunken months to come
with white raiment for the summer's burial.
There were many hemlocks in this neighborhood, the grandest and most
solemn of all the forest-trees in the mountain regions. Up to a
certain period of growth they are eminently beautiful, their boughs
disposed in the most graceful pagoda-like series of close terraces,
thick and dark with green crystalline leaflets. In spring the tender
shoots come out of a paler green, finger-like, as if they were
pointing to the violets at their feet. But when the trees have grown
old, and their rough boles measure a yard through their diameter,
they are no longer beautiful, but they have a sad solemnity all their
own, too full of meaning to require the heart's comment to be framed
in words.
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