cost her an effort which she would not allow to betray itself.  Mr. Hallam Tennyson and his wife, both of most pleasing presence and manners, did everything to make our stay agreeable.  I saw the poet to the best advantage, under his own trees and walking over his own domain.  He took delight in pointing out to me the finest and the rarest of his trees,—­and there were many beauties among them.  I recalled my morning’s visit to Whittier at Oak Knoll, in Danvers, a little more than a year ago, when he led me to one of his favorites, an aspiring evergreen which shot up like a flame.  I thought of the graceful American elms in front of Longfellow’s house and the sturdy English elms that stand in front of Lowell’s.  In this garden of England, the Isle of Wight, where everything grows with such a lavish extravagance of greenness that it seems as if it must bankrupt the soil before autumn, I felt as if weary eyes and overtasked brains might reach their happiest haven of rest.  We all remember Shenstone’s epigram on the pane of a tavern window.  If we find our “warmest welcome at an inn,” we find our most soothing companionship in the trees among which we have lived, some of which we may ourselves have planted.  We lean against them, and they never betray our trust; they shield us from the sun and from the rain; their spring welcome is a new birth, which never loses its freshness; they lay their beautiful robes at our feet in autumn; in winter they “stand and wait,” emblems of patience and of truth, for they hide nothing, not even the little leaf-buds which hint to us of hope, the last element in their triple symbolism.

This digression, suggested by the remembrance of the poet under his trees, breaks my narrative, but gives me the opportunity of paying a debt of gratitude.  For I have owned many beautiful trees, and loved many more outside of my own leafy harem.  Those who write verses have no special claim to be lovers of trees, but so far as one is of the poetical temperament he is likely to be a tree-lover.  Poets have, as a rule, more than the average nervous sensibility and irritability.  Trees have no nerves.  They live and die without suffering, without self-questioning or self-reproach.  They have the divine gift of silence.  They cannot obtrude upon the solitary moments when one is to himself the most agreeable of companions.  The whole vegetable world, even “the meanest flower that blows,” is lovely to contemplate.  What if creation had paused there, and you or I had been called upon to decide whether self-conscious life should be added in the form of the existing animal creation, and the hitherto peaceful universe should come under the rule of Nature as we now know her,

  “red in tooth and claw”?

Are we not glad that the responsibility of the decision did not rest on us?