I wonder how long straw lasts, if one takes care of
it? A Leghorn bonnet, (if now such things are,) carefully put away,--even
properly taken care of when it is worn,--how long will it last, young
ladies?

I have just been reading the fifth chapter of II. Esdras, and am fain to
say, with less discomfort than otherwise I might have felt, (the example
being set me by the archangel Uriel,) "I am not sent to tell thee, for I do
not know." How old is the oldest straw known? the oldest {165} linen? the
oldest hemp? We have mummy wheat,--cloth of papyrus, which is a kind of
straw. The paper reeds by the brooks, the flax-flower in the field, leave
such imperishable frame behind them. And Ponte-della-Paglia, in Venice; and
Straw Street, of Paris, remembered in Heaven,--there is no occasion to
change their names, as one may have to change 'Waterloo Bridge,' or the
'Rue de l'Imperatrice.' Poor Empress! Had she but known that her true
dominion was in the straw streets of her fields; not in the stone streets
of her cities!

But think how wonderful this imperishableness of the stem of many plants
is, even in their annual work: how much more in their perennial work! The
noble stability between death and life, of a piece of perfect wood? It
cannot grow, but will not decay; keeps record of its years of life, but
surrenders them to become a constantly serviceable thing: which may be
sailed in, on the sea, built with, on the land, carved by Donatello,
painted on by Fra Angelico. And it is not the wood's fault, but the fault
of Florence in not taking proper care of it, that the panel of Sandro
Botticelli's loveliest picture has cracked, (not with heat, I believe, but
blighting frost), a quarter of an inch wide through the Madonna's face.

But what is this strange state of undecaying wood? What sort of latent life
has it, which it only finally parts with when it rots?

Nay, what is the law by which its natural life is measured? What makes a
tree 'old'? One sees the {166} Spanish-chesnut trunks among the Apennines
growing into caves, instead of logs. Vast hollows, confused among the
recessed darknesses of the marble crags, surrounded by mere laths of living
stem, each with its coronal of glorious green leaves. Why can't the tree go
on, and on,--hollowing itself into a Fairy--no--a Dryad, Ring,--till it
becomes a perfect Stonehenge of a tree? Truly, "I am not sent to tell thee,
for I do not know."

The worst of it is, however, that I don't