So again of trees in England.  Trees here are an order of nobility; and they wear their crowns right kingly.  A few years ago, when Miss Sedgwick was in this country, while admiring some splendid trees in a nobleman’s park, a lady standing by said to her encouragingly, “O, well, I suppose your trees in America will be grown up after a while!” Since that time another style of thinking of America has come up, and the remark that I most generally hear made is, “O, I suppose we cannot think of showing you any thing in the way of trees, coming as you do from America!” Throwing out of account, however, the gigantic growth of our western river bottoms, where I have seen sycamore trunks twenty feet in diameter—­leaving out of account, I say, all this mammoth arboria, these English parks have trees as fine and as effective, of their kind, as any of ours; and when I say their trees are an order of nobility, I mean that they pay a reverence to them such as their magnificence deserves.  Such elms as adorn the streets of New Haven, or overarch the meadows of Andover, would in England be considered as of a value which no money could represent; no pains, no expense would be spared to preserve their life and health; they would never be shot dead by having gas pipes laid under them, as they have been in some of our New England towns; or suffered to be devoured by canker worms for want of any amount of money spent in their defence.

Some of the finest trees in this place are magnificent cedars of Lebanon, which bring to mind the expression in Psalms, “Excellent as the cedars.”  They are the very impersonation of kingly majesty, and are fitted to grace the old feudal stronghold of Warwick the king maker.  These trees, standing as they do amid magnificent sweeps and undulations of lawn, throwing out their mighty arms with such majestic breadth and freedom of outline, are themselves a living, growing, historical epic.  Their seed was brought from Holy Land in the old days of the crusades; and a hundred legends might be made up of the time, date, and occasion of their planting.  These crusades have left their mark every where through Europe, from the cross panel on the doors of common houses to the oriental touches and arabesques of castles and cathedrals.

In the reign of Stephen there was a certain Roger de Newburg, second Earl of Warwick, who appears to have been an exceedingly active and public-spirited character; and, besides conquering part of Wales, founded in this neighborhood various priories and hospitals, among which was the house of the Templars, and a hospital for lepers.  He made several pilgrimages to Holy Land; and so I think it as likely as most theories that he ought to have the credit of these cedars.