day's journey. Not one is unperceived, even though great timber should
be passed, and hill-sides dense and deep with trees. The fancy makes a
poplar day of it. Immediately the country looks alive with signals; for
the poplars everywhere reply to the glance. The woods may be all
various, but the poplars are separate.

All their many kinds (and aspens, their kin, must be counted with them)
shake themselves perpetually free of the motionless forest. It is easy
to gather them. Glances sent into the far distance pay them a flash of
recognition of their gentle flashes; and as you journey you are suddenly
aware of them close by. Light and the breezes are as quick as the eyes
of a poplar-lover to find the willing tree that dances to be seen.

No lurking for them, no reluctance. One could never make for oneself an
oak day so well. The oaks would wait to be found, and many would be
missed from the gathering. But the poplars are alert enough for a
traveller by express; they have an alarum aloft, and do not sleep. From
within some little grove of other trees a single poplar makes a slight
sign; or a long row of poplars suddenly sweep the wind. They are salient
everywhere, and full of replies. They are as fresh as streams.

It is difficult to realize a drought where there are many poplars. And
yet their green is not rich; the coolest have a colour much mingled with
a cloud-grey. It does but need fresh and simple eyes to recognize their
unfaded life. When the other trees grow dark and keep still, the poplar
and the aspen do not darken--or hardly--and the deepest summer will not
find a day in which they do not keep awake. No waters are so vigilant,
even where a lake is bare to the wind.

When Keats said of his Dian that she fastened up her hair "with fingers
cool as aspen leaves," he knew the coolest thing in the world. It is a
coolness of colour, as well as of a leaf which the breeze takes on both
sides--the greenish and the greyish. The poplar green has no glows, no
gold; it is an austere colour, as little rich as the colour of willows,
and less silvery than theirs. The sun can hardly gild it; but he can
shine between. Poplars and aspens let the sun through with the wind. You
may have the sky sprinkled through them in high midsummer, when all the
woods are close.

Sending your fancy poplar-gathering, then, you ensnare wild trees,
beating with life. No fisher's net ever took such glancing fishes, nor
did