five-barred gate, and I felt all through me, without need of uttering the words, "This is it!"

You will find this tree described, with many others, in the excellent "Report upon the Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts." The author has given my friend the Professor credit for some of his measurements, but measured this tree himself carefully. It is a grand elm for size of trunk, spread of limbs, and muscular development,-one of the first, perhaps the first, of the first class of New England elms.

The largest actual girth I have ever found at five feet from the ground is in the great elm lying a stone's throw or two north of the main road (if my points of compass are right) in Springfield. But this has much the appearance of having been formed by the union of two trunks growing side by side.

The West-Springfield elm and one upon Northampton meadows belong also to the first class of trees. There is a noble old wreck of an elm at Hatfield, which used to spread its claws out over a circumference of thirty-five feet or more before they covered the foot of its bole up with earth. This is the American elm most like an oak of any I have ever

seen.

The Sheffield elm is equally remarkable for size and perfection of form. I have seen nothing that comes near it in Berkshire County, and few to compare with it anywhere. I am not sure that I remember any other first-class elms in New England, but there may be many.

- What makes a first-class elm? Why, size, in the first place, and chiefly. Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet above the ground, and with a spread of branches a hundred feet across, may claim that title, according to my scale. All of them, with the questionable exception of the Springfield tree above referred to, stop, so far as my experience goes, at about twenty-two or twenty-three feet of girth and a hundred and twenty of spread.

Elms of the second class, generally ranging from fourteen to eighteen feet, are comparatively common. The queen of them all is that glorious tree near one of the churches in Springfield. Beautiful and stately she is beyond all praise. The "great tree" on Boston Common comes in the second rank, as does the one at Cohasset, which used to have, and probably has still, a head as round as an apple-tree, and that at Newburyport, with scores of others which might be mentioned. These last two have perhaps been over-celebrated. Both, however, are pleasing vegetables. The poor old Pittsfield elm lives on its past reputation. A wig of false leaves is indispensable to make it presentable.

[I don't doubt there may be some monster-elm or other, vegetating green, but inglorious, in some remote New England village, which only wants a sacred singer to make it celebrated. Send us your measurements, -(certified by the postmaster, to avoid possible imposition),-circumference five feet from soil, length of line from bough-end to bough-end, and we will see what can be done for you.]

-I wish somebody would get us up the following work:

"SYLVA NOVANGLICA.

Photographs of New England Elms and other Trees, taken upon the Same Scale of Magnitude. With Letter-Press Descriptions, by a distinguished Literary Gentleman. Boston: & Co. 185-."

The same camera should be used, as far as possible, at a fixed distance. Our friend, who has given us so many interesting figures in his "Trees of America," must not think this Prospectus invades his province; a dozen portraits, with lively descriptions, would be a pretty complement to his large work, which, so far as published, I find excellent. If my plan were carried out, and another series of a dozen English trees pho

tographed on the same scale, the comparison would be charming.

It has always been a favorite idea of mine to bring the life of the Old and the New World face to face, by an accurate comparison of their various types of organization. We should begin with man, of course; institute a large and exact comparison between the development of la pianta umana, as Alfieri called it, in different sections of each country, in the different callings, at different ages, estimating height, weight, force by the dynamometer and the spirometer, and finishing off with a series of typical photographs, giving the principal national physiognomies. Mr. Hutchinson has given us some excellent English data to begin with.

Then I would follow this up by contrasting the various parallel forms of life in the two continents. Our naturalists have often referred to this incidentally or expressly; but the animus of Nature in the two half globes of the planet is so momentous a point of interest to our race, that it should be made a subject of express and elaborate study. Go out with me into that walk which we call "the Mall," and look at the English and American elms. The American elm is tall, graceful, slender-sprayed, and drooping as if from languor. The English elm is compact, robust, holds its branches up, and carries its leaves for weeks longer than our own native tree.

Is this typical of the creative force on the two sides of the ocean, or not? Nothing but a careful comparison through the whole realm of life can answer this question.

There is a parallelism without identity in the animal and vegetable life of the two continents, which favors the task of comparison in an extraordinary manner. Just as we have two trees alike in many ways, yet not the same, both elms, yet easily distinguishable, just so we have a complete flora and a fauna, which, parting from the same ideal, embody it with various modifica

tions. Inventive power is the only quality of which the Creative Intelligence seems to be economical; just as with our largest human minds, that is the divinest of faculties, and the one that most exhausts the mind which exercises it. As the same patterns have very commonly been followed, we can see which is worked out in the largest spirit, and determine the exact limitations under which the Creator places the movement of life in all its manifestations in either locality. We should find ourselves in a very false position if it should prove that Anglo-Saxons can't live here, but die out, if not kept up by fresh supplies, as Dr. Knox and other more or less wise persons have maintained. It may turn out the other way, as I have heard one of our literary celebrities argue, and though I took the other side, I liked his best,-that the American is the Englishman reinforced.

- Will you walk out and look at those elms with me after breakfast?-I said to the schoolmistress.

[I am not going to tell lies about it, and say that she blushed, as I suppose she ought to have done, at such a tremendous piece of gallantry as that was for our boarding-house. On the contrary, she turned a little pale, but smiled brightly and said,-Yes, with pleasure, but she must walk towards her school.— She went for her bonnet. The old gentleman opposite followed her with his eyes, and said he wished he was a young fellow. Presently she came down, looking very pretty in her half-mourning bonnet, and carrying a schoolbook in her hand.]

CHAPTER XII

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

Of all our American singers, Whittier deserves preeminently the distinction of being the poet of the people. By sheer force of his moral character, coupled with his facile lyrical gift, this poor New England country boy worked his way up from obscurity and, by his poetical achievement, left behind him, in the domain of American letters, a name of which any author might justly feel proud. As a poet of the people the Quaker bard reflects in his verse the feelings and sentiments, the ideals and aspirations, at least in a measure, of the American nation. But, like Wordsworth, Whittier is a very unequal poet. At his best he is noble and uplifting and his message stirs and stimulates the reader to inspiring conceptions and purposes. When his genius deserts him and inspiration is wanting, his muse is decidedly pedestrian and lapses into mere doggerel. On such occasions he exhibits some glaring defects which materially mar the beauty and melody of his verse, such as his atrocious rhymes, his slipshod habit of pronunciation, and his unpardonable tenuity and tediousness. Yet, despite these serious blemishes, his poetry took firm hold upon the affections of his countrymen and won for its author a permanent and enduring name in our literature.

Whittier came of good sturdy New England stock. His ancestors for several generations back had lived in the Merrimac Valley of Eastern Massachusetts, and were known as honest, law-abiding,