hat the trunk of the tree, so gray and dry in
our climate, is better worth observing than the boughs and foliage; a
verdant mossiness coats it all over, so that it looks almost as green as
the leaves; and often, moreover, the stately stem is clustered about,
high upward, with creeping and twining shrubs, the ivy, and sometimes
the mistletoe, close-clinging friends, nurtured by the moisture and
never too fervid sunshine, and supporting themselves by the old tree's
abundant strength. We call it a parasitical vegetation; but, if the
phrase imply any reproach, it is unkind to bestow it on this beautiful
affection and relationship which exist in England between one order of
plants and another: the strong tree being always ready to give support
to the trailing shrub, lift it to the sun, and feed it out of its own
heart, if it crave such food; and the shrub, on its part, repaying its
foster-father with an ample luxuriance of beauty, and adding Corinthian
grace to the tree's lofty strength. No bitter winter nips these tender
little sympathies, no hot sun burns the life out of them; and therefore
they outlast the longevity of the oak, and, if the woodman permitted,
would bury it in a green grave, when all is over.

Should there be nothing else along the road to look at, an English hedge
might well suffice to occupy the eyes, and, to a depth beyond what he
would suppose, the heart of an American. We often set out hedges in our
own soil, but might as well set out figs or pineapples and expect to
gather fruit of them. Something grows, to be sure, which we choose to
call a hedge; but it lacks the dense, luxuriant variety of vegetation
that is accumulated into the English original, in which a botanist would
find a thousand shrubs and gracious herbs that the hedge-maker never
thought of planting there. Among them, growing wild, are many of the
kindred blossoms of the very flowers which our pilgrim fathers brought
from England, for the sake of their simple beauty and home-like
associations, and which we have ever since been cultivating in gardens.
There is not a softer trait to be found in the character of those stern
men than that they should have been sensible of these flower-roots
clinging among the fibres of their rugged hearts, and have felt the
necessity of bringing them over sea and making them hereditary in the
new land, instead of trusting to what rarer beauty the wilderness might
have in store for them.

Or, if the road-side