lds, in the stately way-side trees and carefully
kept plantations of wood, and in the old and high cultivation that has
humanized the very sods by mingling so much of man's toil and care among
them. To an American there is a kind of sanctity even in an English
turnip-field, when he thinks how long that small square of ground has
been known and recognized as a possession, transmitted from father to
son, trodden often by memorable feet, and utterly redeemed from savagery
by old acquaintanceship with civilized eyes. The wildest things in
England are more than half tame. The trees, for instance, whether in
hedgerow, park, or what they call forest, have nothing wild about them.
They are never ragged; there is a certain decorous restraint in the
freest outspread of their branches, though they spread wider than any
self-nurturing tree; they are tall, vigorous, bulky, with a look of
age-long life, and a promise of more years to come, all of which will
bring them into closer kindred with the race of man. Somebody or other
has known them from the sapling upward; and if they endure long enough,
they grow to be traditionally observed and honored, and connected with
the fortunes of old families, till, like Tennyson's Talking Oak, they
babble with a thousand leafy tongues to ears that can understand them.

An American tree, however, if it could grow in fair competition with an
English one of similar species, would probably be the more picturesque
object of the two. The Warwickshire elm has not so beautiful a shape
as those that overhang our village-street; and as for the redoubtable
English oak, there is a certain John-Bullism in its figure, a compact
rotundity of foliage, a lack of irregular and various outline, that make
it look wonderfully like a gigantic cauliflower. Its leaf, too, is much
smaller than that of most varieties of American oak; nor do I mean
to doubt that the latter, with free leave to grow, reverent care and
cultivation, and immunity from the axe, would live out its centuries
as sturdily as its English brother, and prove far the nobler and more
majestic specimen of a tree at the end of them. Still, however one's
Yankee patriotism may struggle against the admission, it must be owned
that the trees and other objects of an English landscape take hold of
the observer by numberless minute tendrils, as it were, which, look as
closely as we choose, we never find in an American scene. The parasitic
growth is so luxuriant, t