frankincense ever was to a Jew. If we can get nothing better, we love to read over the names of trees in a catalogue. Many an hour have we sat at night, when after exciting work, we needed to be quieted, and read nurserymen's catalogues, and Loudon's Encyclopedias, and Arboretum, until the smell of the woods exhaled from the page, and the sound of leaves was in our ears, and sylvan glades opened to our eyes that would have made old Chaucer laugh and indite a rapturous rush of lines. growing things, but enshrined in a thousand rich associations of history and literature. Who ever sees a hawthorn or a sweet brier (the eglantine), that his thoughts do not, like a bolt of light, burst through ranks of poets, and ranges of sparkling conceits which have been born since England had a written language, and of which the rose, the willow, the eglantine, the hawthorn, and other scores of vines or trees, have been the cause, as they are now and forevermore the suggestors and remembrancers ? Who ever looks upon an oak, and does not think of navies, of storms, of battles on the ocean, of the noble lyrics of the sea, of English glades, of the fugitive Charles, the tree-mounted monarch, of the Herne oak, of parks and forests, of Robin Hood and his merry men; Friar Tuck not excepted, of old baronial halls with mellow But how much more do we love trees in all their summer pomp and plenitude. Not for their names and affinities, not for their secret physiology, and as material for science; not for any reason that we can give, except that when with them we are happy. The eye is full, the ear is full, the whole sense and all the tastes solaced, and our whole nature re-light streaming through diamond-shaped joices with that various and full happiness which one has when the soul is suspended in the midst of Beethoven's symphonies and is lifted hither and thither, as if blown by sweet sounds through the airy passage of a full heavenly dream. panes upon oaken floors, and of carved oaken wainscotings. And who that has ever traveled in English second-class cushionless cars has not other and less genial remembrances of the enduring solidity of the impervious unelastic oak? One stalwart oak I have, and only one, yet discovered. On my west line is a fringe of forest, through which rushes, in Spring, trickles in early summer, and dies out entirely in August, the issues of a noble spring from the near hillside. On the eastern edge of this belt of trees stands the monarchical Our first excursion in Lenox was one of salutation to our notable trees. We had a nervous anxiety to see that the axe had not hewn, nor the lightning struck them; that no worm had gnawed at the root, or cattle at the trunk; that their branches were not broken, nor their leaves failing from drought. We found them all standing in their upright-oak, wide-branching on the east toward the ness. They lifted up their heads towards heaven, and sent down to us from all their boughs a leafy whisper of recognition and affection. Blessed be the dew that cools their evening leaves, and the rains that quench their daily thirst! May the storm be as merciful to them when in winter it roars through their branches, as is a harper to his harp! Let the snow lie lightly on their boughs, and long hence be the summer that shall find no leaves to clothe these nobles of the pasture! First in our regard, as it is in the whole nobility of trees, stands the white elm, no less esteemed because it is an American tree, known abroad only by importation, and never seen in all its magnificence, except in our own valleys. The old oaks of England are very excellent in their way, gnarled and rugged. The elm has strength as significant as they, and a grace, a royalty, that leaves the oak like a boor in comparison. Had the elm been an English tree, and had Chaucer seen and loved and sung it; had Shakespeare and every English poet hung some garlands upon it, it would have lifted up its head now, not only the noblest of all open pasture and the free light, but on its western side lean and branchless from the pressure of neighboring trees; for trees, like men, can not grow to the real nature that is in them when crowded by too much society. Both need to be touched on every side by sun and air, and by nothing else, if they are to be rounded out into full symmetry. Growing right up by its side, and through its branches is a long wifely elm-beauty and grace imbosomed by strength. Their leaves come and go together, and all the summer long they mingle their rustling harmonies. Their roots pasture in the same soil, nor could either of them be hewn down without tearing away the branches and marring the beauty of the other. And a tree, when thoroughly disbranched, may, by time and care, regain its health again, but never its beauty. Under this oak I love to sit and hear all the things which its leaves have to tell. No printed leaves have more treasures of history or of literature to those who know how to listen. But, if clouds kindly shield us from the sun, we love as well to couch down on the grass some thirty yards off, and amidst A DISCOURSE OF TREES. the fragrant smell of crushed herbs, to watch | root and plump down into its bosom! In the fancies of the trees and clouds. roguish winds will never be done teasing the become mermaids, keep far from such places, The such nooks could trout lie. Unless ye would leaves, that run away and come back, with all innocent grasshoppers, and all ebony nimble playfulness. Now and then a strong- crickets! Do not believe in appearances. er puff dashes up the leaves, showing the You peer over and know that there is no downy under surfaces that flash white all danger. You can see the radiant gravel. along the up-blown and tremulous forest- You know that no enemy lurks in that fairy edge. Now the wind draws back his breath, pool. You can see every nook and corner of and all the woods are still. Then some sin- it, and it is as sweet a bathing pool as ever gle leaf is tickled, and quivers all alone. I am sure there is no wind. was swam by long-legged grasshoppers. Over about it are still. Where it gets its motion I little drabbled, and quicker than light, he The other leaves the root comes a butterfly with both sails a can not tell, but there it goes fanning itself is plucked down, leaving three or four buband restless among its sober fellows. and by one or two others catch the impulse. life. There! did I not tell you? By bles behind him, fit emblems of a butterfly's The rest hold out a moment, but soon catch-away all maiden crickets and grasshoppers! ing the contagious merriment, away goes the These fair surfaces, so pure, so crystaline, so Now go whole tree and all its neighbors, the leaves surely safe, have a trout somewhere in them running in ripples all down the forest side. lying in wait for you! I expect almost to hear them laugh out loud. A stroke of wind upon the forest, indolently swelling and subsiding, is like a stroke upon a hive of bees, for sound; and like stirring a fire full of sparks for upspringing thoughts and ideal suggestions. The melodious whirl draws out a flittering swarm of sweet images that play before the eye like those evening troops of gauzy insects that hang in the air between you and the sun, and pipe their own music, and fit in airy rounds of mingled dance as if the whole errand of their lives was to swing in mazes of sweet music. Different species of trees move their leaves very differently, so that one may sometimes tell by the motion of shadows on the ground, if he be too indolent to look up, under what kind of tree he is dozing. On the tulip-tree, (which has the finest name that ever tree had, making the very pronouncing of its name almost like the utterance of a strain of music -liriodendron tulipifera)-on the tulip-tree, the aspen, and on all native poplars, the leaves are apparently Anglo-Saxon or Germanic, having an intense individualism. Each one moves to suit itself. same wind one is trilling up and down, anUnder the other is whirling, another slowly vibrating right and left, and others still, quieting themselves to sleep, as a mother gently pats her slumbering child; and each one intent upon a motion of its own. trees have single frisky leaves, but, usually, Sometimes other the oaks, maples, beeches, have community of motion. They are all acting together, or all are alike still. What is sweeter than a murmur of leaves, unless it be the musical gurgling of water that runs secretly and cuts under the roots of these trees, and makes little bubbling pools that laugh to see the drops stumble over the 66 music, leaves above and water below? What But what if one sits between both kinds of if birds are among the leaves, sending out random calls, far piercing and sweet, as if they were lovers saying, cushion of fresh new moss, that swells up beMy dear, are you there?" If you are half reclining upon a tween the many-plied and twisted roots of a huge beech tree, and if you have been there will still keep motionless, you may see what a half an hour without moving, and if you they who only walk through forests never see. * * * Thus do you stand, noble elms! Lifted up dolent birds care to seek you; and only so high are your topmost boughs, that no inwonted beat, that love exertion, and aspire those of nimble wings, and they with unto sing where none sing higher.-Aspiration! ble bosom. so Heaven gives it pure as flames to the noselfishness it comes to be only Ambition! But debased with passion and which we name the Queen, that we first felt It was in the presence of this pasture-elm, to our very marrow, that we had indeed being of awe that we looked up into its face, come owners of the soil! It was with a feeland when I whispered to myself, This is mine, there was a shrinking as if there were sacrilege in the very thought of property in such a creature of God as this cathedral-topold church? So did I, standing in the shadped tree! Does a man bare his head in some ow of this regal tree, and looking up into that completed glory, at which three hundred gers! years have been at work with noiseless fingrasshopper? What was I in its presence but a My heart said "I may not Thou belongest to the air. call thee property, and that property mine! child of summer. Thou art the Thou art the mighty tem ple where birds praise God. Thou belongest | sound of its leaves. If we lived in olden to no man's hand, but to all men's eyes that do love beauty, and that have learned through beauty to behold God! Stand, then, in thine own beauty and grandeur! I shall be a lover and a protector, to keep drought from thy roots, and the axe from thy trunk." For, remorseless men there are crawling yet upon the face of the earth, smitten blind and inwardly dead, whose only thought of a tree of ages is, that it is food for the axe and the saw! These are the wretches of whom the Scripture speaks : "A man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees." Thus famous, or rather infamous was the last owner but one, before me, of this farm. Upon the crown of the hill, just where an artist would have planted them, had he wished to have them exactly in the right place, grew some two hundred stalwart and ancient maples, beeches, ashes, and oaks, a narrow belt-like forest, forming a screen from the northern and western winds in winter, and a harp of endless music for the summer. The wretched owner of this farm tempted of the Devil, cut down the whole blessed band and brotherhood of trees, that he might fill his pocket with two pitiful dollars a cord for the wood! Well, his pocket was the best part of him. The iron furnaces have devoured my grove, and their huge stumps, that stood like gravestones, have been cleared away, that a grove may be planted in the same spot, for the next hundred years to nourish into the stature and glory of that which is gone. In other places, I find the memorials of many noble trees slain; here, a hemlock that carried up its eternal green a hundred feet into the winter air; there, a huge doubletrunked chestnut, dear old grandfather of hundreds of children that have for generations clubbed its boughs, or shook its nutladen top, and laughed and shouted as bushels of chestnuts rattled down. Now, the tree exists only in the form of looped-holed posts and weather-browned rails. I do hope the fellow got a shiver in his fingers every time he touched the hemlock plank, or let down the bars made of those chestnut rails! To most people a grove is a grove, and all groves are alike. But no two groves are alike. There is as marked a difference between different forests as between different communities. A grove of pines without underbrush, carpeted with the fine-fingered russet leaves of the pine, and odorous of resinous gums, has scarcely a trace of likeness to a maple woods, either in the insects, the birds, the shrubs, the light and shade, or the times among young mythologies, we should say that pines held the imprisoned spirit of naiads and water-nymphs, and that their sounds were of the water for whose lucid depths they always sighed. At any rate, the first pines must have grown on the sea-shore, and learned their first accents from the suri and the waves; and all their posterity have inherited the sound, and borne it inland to the mountains. I like best a forest of mingled trees, ash, maple, oak, beech, hickory, and evergreens, with birches growing along the edges of the brook that carries itself through the roots and stones, toward the willows that grow in yonder meadow. It should be deep and sombre in some directions, running off into shadowy recesses and coverts beyond all footsteps. In such a wood there is endless variety. It will breathe as many voices to your fancy as might be brought from any organ beneath the pressure of some Handel's hands. By the way, Handel and Beethoven always remind me of forests. So do some poets, whose numbers are various as the infinity of vegetation, fine as the choicest cut leaves, strong and rugged in places as the unbarked trunk and gnarled roots at the ground's surface. Is there any other place, except the sea-side, where hours are so short and moments so swift as in a forest? Where else except in the rare communion of those friends much loved, do we awake from pleasure, whose calm flow is without a ripple, into surprise that whole hours are gone which we thought but just begun-blossomed and dropped, which we thought but just budding! HENRY WARD BEECHER. THE SUICIDE BANKER. I have said that in 1854 the tide had turned with John Sadleir. Alas! throughout that year, and all the weary days of 1855, unknown to even his nearest and dearest friends, he was suffering tortures indescribable! Some of his colossal speculations had turned out adversely; and he had misappropriated the last shilling of the Tipperary Bank. Another venture, he thinks, may recoup all: it only leads to deeper ruin! He must go on: he cannot turn back now. But where are the funds to be reached for further wild endeavors? All calmly as ever he had trod the lobby of the House of Commons. No eye could detect on that impassive countenance of his that there was aught but the satisfaction of success within. His political associates joked with him over Gavan Duffy's “political funeral." They effusively felicitated him on the signal overthrow and final dispersion of his adversaries. "Ireland is now your own, John," said one of them; "you have conquered all along the line. You must be as happy as a king!" He smiled his cold sad smile, and said, Yes, to be sure he was. At home in Ireland his own journal, and all the Liberal Government organs, were never tired of sounding his praise and proclaiming his triumph over the dead Lucas and the exiled Duffy. Nightly, after leaving the House of Commons, John Sadleir sat up late in the private study of his town house, 11, Glo'ster Terrace, Hyde Park. Morning often dawned and found him at his lonely labors. What were they? In the stillness and secrecy of those midnight hours John Sadleir, the man of success, the millionaire, the Lord of the Treasury that had been, the peer of the realm that was to be, was occupied in forging deeds, conveyances, and bills for hundreds of thousands of pounds! He some yet unexhausted means of raising this Still, accumulating disaster overpowered In this case, what he feared in so many others exactly occurred. Mr. Wilkinson had previously advanced him large sums, for which, to be sure, Mr. Sadleir, on request, had given security,-one of those numerous title-deeds which he had fabricated during the past year. Mr. Wilkinson that same Saturday night despatched his partner, Mr. Stevens, to Dublin, to look after the matter. On Monday this gentleman found that the deed was a forgery. But by that time a still more dreadful tale was known to all the world. There is reason to think John Sadleir knew of Mr. Stevens's start for Dublin before ten o'clock that evening. His intimate friend, Mr. Norris, solicitor, of Bedford Row, called on him about half-past ten, and remained half an hour. The fact was discussed between them that the Tipperary Bank must stop payment on Monday morning. John Sadleir sat him down, all alone, in that study, and callous must be the heart that can contemplate him in that hour and not compassionate his agony. All was over: he must die. He was yet, indeed, in the prime "Feb. 16, 1856.-Telegram from James Sadleir, 30 and vigor of manhood. Considerably above Merion Square South, Dublin, to John Sadleir, Esq., M. the middle height," says one who knew him P., Reform Club, London: All right at all the branches; well, "his figure was youthful, but his face, only a few small things refused there. If from twenty-that was indeed remarkable. Strongly to thirty thousand over here on Monday morning all is safe." marked, sallow, eyes and hair intensely black, and the lines of the mouth worn into deep channels." The busy schemes, the lofty ambitions, the daring speculations, were ended now. The poorest cottier on a Tipperary hill-side might look the morrow in the face and cling to life; but for him, the envied man of thousands, the morning sun must rise in vain. He seized a pen, and devoted half an hour to letter-writing. Oh, that woful correspondence of the despairing soul with those whom it loves, and is to lose forever! Then he took a small silver tankard from the sideboard and put it in his breastpocket, beside a small phial which he had purchased early in that fatal day. As he passed through the hall and took his hat from the stand, he told the butler not to wait up for him. He went out, and closed the door behind him with a firm hand. The clocks were striking twelve: 'twas Sunday morning; God's holy day had come. Ah, far away on the Suir side were an aged father and mother, with whom when a child he often trod the path to early mass, when Sunday bells were music to his ear! And now!-oh, fatal lure of wealth! oh, damned, mocking fiend! -to this, to this it had come at last! He dare not think of God, or friend, or home Next morning, on a little mound on Hampstead Heath, the passers-by noticed a gentleman stretched as if in sleep. A silver tankard had fallen from his hand and lay upon the ground. It smelt strongly of prussic acid. A crowd soon gathered; the police arrived; they lifted up the body, all stiff and stark. It was the corpse of John Sadleir, the banker. On Monday the news flashed through the kingdom. There was alarm in London; there was wild panic in Ireland. The Tipperary Bank closed its doors; the country people flocked into the towns. They surrounded and attacked the branches: the poor victims imagined their money must be within, and they got crowbars, picks, and spades to force the walls and "dig it out." The scenes of mad despair which the streets of Thurles and Tipperary saw that day would melt a heart of adamant. Old men went about like maniacs, confused and hysterical; widows knelt in the street and, aloud, asked God was it true they were beggared for ever. Even the poor-law unions, which had kept their accounts in the bank, lost all, and had not a shilling to buy the paupers' dinner the day the branch doors closed. The letters which the unhappy suicide penned that Saturday night reveal much of the terrible story so long hidden from the world. Banks, railways, assurance associations, land companies, every undertaking with which he had been connected, were flung into dismay, and for months fresh revelations of fraud, forgery, and robbery came daily and hourly to view. By the month of April the total of such discoveries had reached one million two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. A. M. SULLIVAN, M. P. CARCASSONNE. FROM THE FRENCH OF GUSTAVE NADAUD. I'm growing old, I've sixty years; I've labored all my life in vain: It lies beyond the mountains blue, Ah! had the vintage plenteous grown! Not more nor less than Sunday gay: In shining robes and garments fair The people walk upon their way. One gazes there on castle walls As grand as those of Babylon, I do not know fair Carcassonne, Ambition ruins all mankind; When I had looked on Carcassonne, In this my prayer if I offend: Have traveled even to Narbonne; |