They are the frame to a picture which is daily painted behind them. An
avenue of Elms as large as our largest and three miles long would seem
to lead to some admirable place, though only C---- were at the end of
it.
A village needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheering
prospects to keep off melancholy and superstition. Show me two villages,
one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of October, the
other a merely trivial and treeless waste, or with only a single tree or
two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found
the most starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate
drinkers. Every wash-tub and milk-can and gravestone will be exposed.
The inhabitants will disappear abruptly behind their barns and houses,
like desert Arabs amid their rocks, and I shall look to see spears in
their hands. They will be ready to accept the most barren and forlorn
doctrine,--as that the world is speedily coming to an end, or has
already got to it, or that they themselves are turned wrong side
outward. They will perchance crack their dry joints at one another and
call it a spiritual communication.
But to confine ourselves to the Maples. What if we were to take half as
much pains in protecting them as we do in setting them out,--not
stupidly tie our horses to our dahlia-stems?
What meant the fathers by establishing this _perfectly living_
institution before the church,--this institution which needs no
repairing nor repainting, which is continually enlarged and repaired by
its growth? Surely they
"Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Themselves from God they could not free;
They planted better than they knew;--
The conscious trees to beauty grew.
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