travellers.  No such man was meant in the blessing; nor any man resident in or near the valley.  It was he who was “passing through” it, and who stopped, not to search for a dribbling vein of water to satisfy his own momentary thirst, but to make a well, broad and deep, after the oriental circumference, at which all future travellers that way might drink with gladness.  That was the man on whom the blessing rested as a condition, not as a wish.  Look at the word, and get the right meaning of it.  It is [HEBREW WORD], not [HEBREW WORD]; it is a blessedness, not a benediction.  It means a permanent reality of happiness, like that of Obededom, not a cheap “I thank you!” or “the Lord bless you!” from here and there a man or woman who appreciates the benefaction.

And he deserves the same who, “passing through” the short years of man’s life here on earth, plants trees like the living, lofty columns of this long cathedral aisle.  How unselfish and generous is this gift to coming generations!  How inestimable in its value and surpassing the worth of wealth!—­surpassing the measurement of gold and silver!  From my seat here, I look up to the magnificent frontage of that baronial palace.  I see its towers, turrets and minarets; its grand and sculptured gateways and portals through this long, leaf-arched aisle.  Not forty, but nearer four hundred years, doubtless, was that pile in building.  Architecture of the pre-Norman period, and of all subsequent or cognate orders, diversifies the tastes and shapings of the structure.  Suppose the whole should take fire to-night and burn to the ground.  The wealth of the owner could command genius, skill and labor enough to rebuild it in three years, perhaps in one.  The Czar of all the Russias did as large a thing once as this last, in the reconstruction of a palace.  Perhaps the building is insured for its positive value, and the insurance money would erect a better one.  But lift an axe upon that tall centurion of these templed elms.  Cut through the closely-grained rings that register each succeeding year of two centuries.  Hear the peculiar sounding of the heart-strokes, when the lofty, well-poised structure is balancing itself, and quivering through every fibre and leaf and twig on the few unsevered tendons that have not yet felt the keen edge of the woodman’s steel.  See the first leaning it cannot recover.  Hear the first cracking of the central vertebra; then the mournful, moaning whir in the air; then the tremendous crash upon the green earth; the vibration of the mighty trunk on the ground, like the writhing and tremor of an ox struck by the butcher’s axe; the rebound into the air of dismembered branches; the frightened flight of leaves and dust, and all the other distractions of that hour of death and destruction.  Look upon that ruin!  The wealth, genius and labor that could build a hundred Windsor Castles, and rebuild all the cathedrals of England in a decade, could not rebuild in two centuries that elm to the life and stature you levelled to the dust in two hours.