O the pleasure with trees!
Wonderful how the trees rise and stand up, with strong trunks, with branches,
And the pale green leaves of the trees prolific!
The slender tapering trees, great columnar trees,
The nodding, slumbering, and liquid trees,
Clustering trees, young and old,
Trees in fulness of tender foliage, branching and leafing,
The stalwart limbs of trees emerging,
Uttering joyous leaves of dark green.

The growths of pine and cedar and hemlock and live-oak and locust and chestnut and hickory and lime tree and cottonwood,
The scented bay tree, the yellow pine, the magnificent elm tree, the laurel tree with large white flowers,
The lemon and orange, the graceful palmetto,
Cypresses growing out of the white sand that spreads far and flat.

Forests of the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim,
Majestic pines—ghostly pines so still—primitive, druidical, solitary and savage,
Solemn shadowy cedars, clinging cedars, with tall shapes dingily seen;
I love the aromatic cedar, anyhow—its naked ruggedness, its just palpable odor, (so different from the perfumer’s best,)
Its silence, its equable acceptance of winter’s cold and summer’s heat, of rain or drouth.

The moist fresh stillness of the woods,
Far-born, far-dying, living long,
The old woods charged with mistletoe and trailing moss,
The red cedar festoon’d with tylandria.
I see where the live-oak is growing,
The waving drapery on the old, warty, venerable live-oak trailing long and low,
Noiselessly waved by the wind, 
Parasites with color’d flowers and berries enveloping huge trees.

A wide avenue of noble trees, planted by hands long mouldering in the grave, nourished from the decay of the bodies of men, but quite many of them evidently capable of throwing out their annual blossoms and fruit yet.
Apple orchards, the rosy blush of budding apple trees, the trees all cover’d with blossoms—
Rich apple-blossomed earth!
The apple buds cluster together on the apple branches, and the fruit afterward.

Eloquent hemlocks, some old and hoary—secretive, shaggy, weather-beaten and let-alone,
Plenty of locusts and fine maples, and the balm of Gilead,
It seems to me I never saw more vitality of trees.

Stately tulip tree with yellow cup-shaped flowers, the Apollo of the woods,
Tall and graceful, yet robust and sinewy,
Inimitable in hang of foliage and throwing out of limb,
As if the beauteous, vital, leafy creature could walk, if it only would.

Far, far in the forest, lights and shades and rare effects on tree-foliage and grass,
The play of shine and shade on the trees, as the supple boughs wag now in their brightest tenderest green,
The shadows of the boughs dapple in the sunshine around me,
The mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive.

The clear beams are now thrown in many new places, on the quilted, seam’d, bronze-drab, lower tree trunks, flooding their young and old columnar ruggedness with strong light, unfolding to my sense new amazing features of silent, shaggy charm, the solid bark, the expression of harmless impassiveness, with many a bulge and gnarl unreck’d before.

The forms of the trees leafless, silent,
The yet naked trees, giving prospects hidden in summer,
With clear interstices, in trunk and myriad angles of branches;
Forests coated with transparent ice,
And icicles hanging from the boughs and crackling in the wind;
Pine trees and fir trees torn by northern blasts,
How strong, vital, enduring! how dumbly eloquent!

The unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees—
A tree is what it is,
Being what it is because it must be just that.
A tree is a tree,
So innocent and harmless, yet so savage, and you can’t make it out better than it is.
It is, yet says nothing,
But what suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming, (O seeming! seeming! seeming!)
How it rebukes, by its tough and equable serenity in all weathers, this gusty-temper’d little whiffet, man, that runs indoors at a mite of rain or snow.

The solid forests give fluid utterances,
They do as well as most speaking, writing, poetry, sermons—
Or rather they do a great deal better—
A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, a chorus of century-lasting, unseen dryads,
The wood-spirits from their haunts of a thousand years join the refrain,
Voices ecstatic, ancient, and rustling—
What tales those old trees could tell!
(I should say indeed that those old dryad-reminiscences are quite as true as any, and profounder than most reminiscences we get.)

Long I roam’d the woods, with the singular wild pleasure of being alone in the woods. I know all the big trees and have come to a sociable silent understanding with most of them in the sunlit air.
I hold on boughs of slender trees caressingly there in the sun and shade—pulling and pushing, exercising my whole body—wrestle with their innocent stalwartness—and know the virtue thereof passes from them into me. After I wrestle with the tree awhile—a beautiful object, every branch, every leaf perfect—I can feel its young sap and sinew and virtue welling up out of the ground and rising through me, like mercury to heat—tingling through me from crown to toe, like health’s wine.  

I would take a splendid sapling in my hands, pull it back, let it fly, as it did with a will, into position again—its uprightness. One day I stopped in the exercise, the thought striking me: This is great amusement to me; I wonder if not as great to the sapling? Maybe we interchange—maybe the trees are more aware of it all than I ever thought.
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me? I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees and always drop fruit as I pass.  

In the revealings of such light, such exceptional hour, such mood, one does not wonder at the old story fables, (indeed, why fables?) of people falling into love-sickness with trees, seiz’d ecstatic with the mystic realism of the resistless silent strength in them.

I had a sort of dream-trance the other day, in which I saw my favorite trees step out and promenade up, down, and around, very curiously—with a whisper from one, leaning down as it pass’d me, murmuring out of its myriad leaves, “We do all this on the present occasion, exceptionally, just for you.”

I fling out my fancies toward them,
Surely there is something more in each of the trees, some living soul,
In my soul I plainly heard the wood-spirit join the refrain,
As some old tree thrill’d with its soul:
Know I bear the soul befitting me,
I too have consciousness, identity,
And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth.

NEXT: FIELDS AND PLANTS

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