It has lived among men, and been a familiar
object to them, and seen them brought to be christened and married and
buried in the neighboring church and church-yard, through so many
centuries, that it knows all about our race, so far as fifty generations
of the Whitnash people can supply such knowledge. And, after all, what a
weary life it must have been for the old tree! Tedious beyond
imagination! Such, I think, is the final impression on the mind of an
American visitor, when his delight at finding something permanent begins
to yield to his Western love of change, and he becomes sensible of the
heavy air of a spot where the forefathers and foremothers have grown up
together, intermarried, and died, through a long succession of lives,
without any intermixture of new elements, till family features and
character are all run in the same inevitable mould. Life is there
fossilized in its greenest leaf. The man who died yesterday or ever so
long ago walks the village-street to-day, and chooses the same wife that
he married a hundred years since, and must be buried again to-morrow
under the same kindred dust that has already covered him half a score of
times. The stone threshold of his cottage is worn away with his
hob-nailed footsteps, scuffling over it from the reign of the first
Plantagenet to that of Victoria.
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