The lesson of a tree

I should not take either the biggest or the most picturesque¹ tree to illustrate² it. Here is one of my favorites now before me, a fine yellow poplar, quite straight, perhaps 90 feet high, and four thick at the butt³. How strong, vital, enduring! how dumbly eloquent⁴! What suggestions of imperturbability⁵ and being, as against the human trait of mere⁶ seeming. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably artistic⁷, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage⁸. It is, yet says nothing. How it rebukes⁹ by its tough and equable serenity¹⁰ all weathers, this gusty-temper’d little whiffet, man, that runs indoors at a mite¹¹ of rain or snow. Science (or rather half-way science) scoffs¹² at reminiscence of dryad and hamadryad, and of trees speaking. But, if they don't, they do as well as most speaking, writing, poetry, sermons -- or rather they do a great deal better. I should say indeed that those old dryad-reminiscences are quite as true as any, and profounder than most reminiscences we get. ("Cut this out," as the quack¹³ mediciners say, and keep by you.) Go and sit in a grove¹⁴ or woods, with one or more of those voiceless companions, and read the foregoing, and think.

 

One lesson from affiliating¹⁵ a tree -- perhaps the greatest moral lesson anyhow from earth, rocks, animals, is that same lesson of inherency, of what is, without the least regard to what the looker on (the critic) supposes or says, or whether he likes or dislikes. What worse -- what more general malady¹⁶ pervades¹⁷ each and all of us, our literature, education, attitude toward each other, (even toward ourselves,) than a morbid¹⁸ trouble about seems, (generally temporarily seems too,) and no trouble at all, or hardly any, about the sane¹⁹, slow-growing, perennial²⁰, real parts of character, books, friendship, marriage -- humanity's invisible foundations and hold-together?

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