both, I fear it
may have cost her an effort which she would not allow to betray itself.
Mr. Hallam Tennyson and his wife, both of most pleasing presence and
manners, did everything to make our stay agreeable. I saw the poet to
the best advantage, under his own trees and walking over his own domain.
He took delight in pointing out to me the finest and the rarest of his
trees,--and there were many beauties among them. I recalled my morning's
visit to Whittier at Oak Knoll, in Danvers, a little more than a year
ago, when he led me to one of his favorites, an aspiring evergreen which
shot up like a flame. I thought of the graceful American elms in front
of Longfellow's house and the sturdy English elms that stand in front of
Lowell's. In this garden of England, the Isle of Wight, where everything
grows with such a lavish extravagance of greenness that it seems as if
it must bankrupt the soil before autumn, I felt as if weary eyes and
overtasked brains might reach their happiest haven of rest. We all
remember Shenstone's epigram on the pane of a tavern window. If we find
our "warmest welcome at an inn," we find our most soothing companionship
in the trees among which we have lived, some of which we may ourselves
have planted. We lean against them, and they never betray our trust;
they shield us from the sun and from the rain; their spring welcome is a
new birth, which never loses its freshness; they lay their beautiful
robes at our feet in autumn; in winter they "stand and wait," emblems of
patience and of truth, for they hide nothing, not even the little
leaf-buds which hint to us of hope, the last element in their triple
symbolism.

This digression, suggested by the remembrance of the poet under his
trees, breaks my narrative, but gives me the opportunity of paying a
debt of gratitude. For I have owned many beautiful trees, and loved many
more outside of my own leafy harem. Those who write verses have no
special claim to be lovers of trees, but so far as one is of the
poetical temperament he is likely to be a tree-lover. Poets have, as a
rule, more than the average nervous sensibility and irritability. Trees
have no nerves. They live and die without suffering, without
self-questioning or self-reproach. They have the divine gift of silence.
They cannot obtrude upon the solitary moments when one is to himself the
most agreeable of companions. The whole vegetable world, even "the
meanest flower that blows," is lovely to cont