ts own livelihood and happiness
according to its needs, by irregularities of action both in its play and
its work, either stretching out to get its required nourishment from
light and rain, by finding some sufficient breathing-place among the
other branches, or knotting and gathering itself up to get strength for
any load which its fruitful blossoms may lay upon it, and for any stress
of its storm-tossed luxuriance of leaves; or playing hither and thither
as the fitful sunshine may tempt its young shoots, in their undecided
states of mind about their future life.

4. Imperative requirement of each bough to stop within certain limits,
expressive of its kindly fellowship and fraternity with the boughs in
its neighborhood; and to work with them according to its power,
magnitude, and state of health, to bring out the general perfectness of
the great curve, and circumferent stateliness of the whole tree.

216. I think I may leave you, unhelped, to work out the moral analogies
of these laws; you may, perhaps, however, be a little puzzled to see the
meaning of the second one. It typically expresses that healthy human
actions should spring radiantly (like rays) from some single heart
motive; the most beautiful systems of action taking place when this
motive lies at the root of the whole life, and the action is clearly
seen to proceed from it; while also many beautiful secondary systems of
action taking place from motives not so deep or central, but in some
beautiful subordinate connection with the central or life motive.

The other laws, if you think over them, you will find equally
significative; and as you draw trees more and more in their various
states of health and hardship, you will be every day more struck by the
beauty of the types they present of the truths most essential for
mankind to know;[63] and you will see what this vegetation of the earth,
which is necessary to our life, first, as purifying the air for us and
then as food, and just as necessary to our joy in all places of the
earth,--what these trees and leaves, I say, are meant to teach us as we
contemplate them, and read or hear their lovely language, written or
spoken for us, not in frightful black letters nor in dull sentences, but
in fair green and shadowy shapes of waving words, and blossomed
brightness of odoriferous wit, and sweet whispers of unintrusive wisdom,
and playful morality.

217. Well, I am sorry myself to leave the wood, whatever my reader