drop, which the sun has let escape unmelted even on into the meridian hours, on the topmost pink-bud, within which the teeming leaf struggles to expand into beauty,—the topmost pink-bud of that little lime-tree, but three winters old, and half a spring!-Hark! that is Harry, at home on a holiday, rustling like a roe in the coppicewood, in search of the nest of the blackbird or mavis;-yet ten years ago that rocky hill-side was unplanted, and "that bold boy, so bright and beautiful," unborn. Who, then,-be his age what it may, would either linger, "with fond, reluctant, amorous delay," to take unto himself a wife, for the purpose of having children, or to enclose a waste for the purpose of having trees?

At what time of life a human being,-man or woman, -looks best, it might be hard to say. A virgin of eighteen, straight and tall, bright, blooming, and balmy, seems, to our old eyes, a very beautiful and delightful sight. Inwardly we bless her, and pray that she may be as happy as she is innocent. So, too, is an oak tree, about the same age, standing by itself, without a twig on its straight, smooth, round, glossy, silver stem, for some few feet from the ground, and then branching out into a stately flutter of dark green leaves; the shape being indistinct in its regular but not formal over-fallings, and over-foldings, and overhangings, of light and shade. Such an oak tree is indeed truly beautiful, with all its tenderness, gracefulness, and delicacy, ay, a delicacy almost seeming to be fragile,— as if the cushat, whirring from its concealment, would crush the new spring-shoots, sensitive almost as the gossamer, with which every twig is intertwined. Leaning on our staff, we bless it, and call it even by that very virgin's name; and ever thenceforth behold Louisa lying in its shade.-Gentle reader, what it is to be an old, dreamy, visionary, prosing poet!

Good God! let any one who accuses trees of laziness in growing only keep out of sight of them for a few years; and then, returning home to them under cloud of night, all at once open his eyes, of a fine, sunny, summer morning, and ask them how they have been since he and they mutually murmured farewell! He will not recognise the face, or the figure of a single tree. That sycamore, whose top

shoot a cow, you know, browsed off, to the breaking of your heart, some four or five years ago, is now as high as the "riggin" of the cottage, and is murmuring with bees among its blossoms quite like an old tree. What precocity! That Wych elm, hidebound as it seemed of yore, and with only one arm that it could hardly lift from its side, is now a Briareus. Is that the larch you used to hop over?-now almost fit to be a mast of one of the fairy fleet on Windermere !—you thought you would never have forgotten the triangle of the three birches,—but you stare at them now as if they had dropped from the clouds !— and since you think that beech-that round hill of leaves -is not the same shrub you left sticking in the gravel, why call the old gardener hither, and swear him to its identity on the Bible.

Before this confounded gout attacked our toe, we were great pedestrians, and used to stalk about all over the banks and braes from sunrising to sunsetting, through all seasons of the year. Few sights would please us more than that of a new mansion-house, or villa, or cottage ornée, rising up in some sheltered, but open-fronted nook, commanding a view of a few bends of a stream or river winding along old lea, or rich holm ploughed fields,— sloping uplands, with here and there a farm-house and trees, and in the distance hill-tops quite clear, and cutting the sky, wreathed with mists, or for a time hidden in clouds. It set the imagination and the heart at work together, to look at the young hedgerows and plantations, belts, clumps, and single trees, hurdled in from the nibbling sheep. Ay, some younger brother, who, twenty, or thirty, or forty years ago, went abroad to the East, or the West, to push his fortune, has returned to the neighbourhood of his native vale at last, to live and to die among the braes, where once, among the yellow broom, the schoolboy sported gladsome as any bird. Busy has he been in adorning, perhaps the man who fixes his faith on Price on the Picturesque, would say in disfiguring,—the inland haven where he has dropt anchor, and will continue to ride till the vessel of life parts from her moorings, and drifts away on the shoreless sea of eternity. For our own parts, we are not easily offended by any conformation

into which trees can be thrown-the bad taste of another must not be suffered to throw us into a bad temper-and as long as the trees are green in their season, and in their season, purple, and orange, and yellow, and refrain from murdering each other, to our eye they are pleasant to look upon, to our ear it is music, indeed, to hear them all a-murmur along with the murmuring winds. Hundreds— thousands of such dwellings have, in our time, arisen all over the face of Scotland; and there is room enough, we devoutly trust, and verily believe, for hundreds and thousands more. Of a people's prosperity what pleasanter proof! And, therefore, may all the well-fenced woods make more and more wonderful shoots every year. Beneath and among their shelter, may not a single slate be blown from the blue roof, peering through the trees, on the eyes of distant traveller, as he wheels along on the top of his most gracious majesty's mail-coach;-may the dryads soon wipe away their tears for the death of the children that must, in thinnings, be "wede away;"—and may the rookeries and heronries of Scotland increase in number for the long space of ten thousand revolving years!

Not that we hold it to be a matter of pure indifference, how people plant trees. We have an eye for the picturesque, the sublime, and the beautiful, and cannot open it, without seeing at once the very spirit of the scene. ye! who have had the happiness to be born among the murmers of hereditary trees, can ye be blind to the system pursued by that planter-nature? Nature plants often on a great scale, darkening, far as the telescope can command the umbrage, sides of mountains that are heard roaring still with hundreds of hidden cataracts. And nature often plants on a small scale, dropping down the stately birk so beautiful, among the sprinkled hazels, by the side of the little waterfall of the wimpling burnie, that stands dishevelling there her tresses to the dew-wind, like a queen's daughter, who hath just issued from the pool of pearls, and shines aloft and aloof from her attendant maidens. But man is so proud of his own works, that he ceases to regard those of nature. Why keep poring on that book of plates, purchased at less than half price at a sale, when nature flutters before your eyes her own folio, which all

who run may read,—although to study it as it ought to be studied, you must certainly sit down on mossy stump, ledge of an old bridge, stone wall, stream bank, or broomy brae, and gaze, and gaze, till woods and sky become like your very self, and your very self like them, at once incorporated together and spiritualized. After a few years' such lessons-you may become a planter—and under your hands not only shall the desert blossom like the rose, but murmur like the palm, and if "southward through Eden goes a river large," and your name be Adam, what a sceptic not to believe yourself the first of men, your wife the fairest of her daughters Eve, and your policy

Paradise!

Unless you look and listen, and lay to heart what you see and hear, you will make a pretty pickle of planting. Huge wagons come hulking along the cross-roads piled up with all sorts of young trees swathed in mats, and you and your Grieve and his men cannot rest till they are all stuck into the soil-higgledy, piggledy, promisky, and on the principle of liberty and equality-each plant being allowed the same want of elbow-room, and the same chance-no choice of dry or moisture. Here a great awkward overgrown hobbledehoy of a poplar, who keeps perpetually turning up the whites of his leaves at every breath that blows, stands shivering like an aspen cheek by jowl with a squat, sturdy, short-necked, bandy-legged pech of a Scotch fir, as dour as the devil in a squall, though, unlike that gentleman, unable to stand hot weather, and looking in a brown study, indeed during the dog-days. Here, again, the greenest of all saughs, brightening with the love of life, in a small marsh,-for the saugh loves wet like the whaup,--by the side of the yellowest of all larches, pining and dwindling in the fear of death, shooting six inches on an average every year, but which is the top-shoot no man can tell, and eaten alive by insects. There, seven as pretty young oaks as you may see on a spring or summer's morning committing fratricide for possession of that knoll! Now that yonder ash has, after a sore tussle, got these two elms down, you may depend upon it he will not let them up again in a hurry; or if he does, why that sycamore will settle him for such stupidity, having the

advantage of the ground, and being his superior in height, weight, and length, and at least his equal in science. And then is there not something exceedingly pretty in the variegation of such patchwork policy? Pretty as any coverlet to any old woman's bed in all the parish? No great, huge, black, sullen, sulky masses of shade-no broad bright bursts of sunshine, enough to drive a man mad with sudden mirth or melancholy, as he wanders among the woods-but every tree standing by itself, with an enormous organ of individuality, so that you cannot help trying to count them, yet never get beyond a score, being put out of your reckoning by an unexpected poplar standing with his back against a rock, in vain combat with a sharp-nailed silver fir, scratching his very eyes out—a beech bathing in a puddle of moss-water-or something in the shape of an ornamental shrub, struggling in the manyfingered grasp of the strangulating heather, like a Cockney entangled among the Scottish thistles of Blackwood's Magazine.

Then what a pest are your prigs of professional planters! They walk with such an air about your rural premises, as if you had not a single eye in your head, and did not know a frowning ash from a weeping birch, a bour-tree from a gooseberry bush, whins from broom, or rasps from rowans. If there be a barn or byre on the estate, they begin with planting it out as if it were a poors' house, or an infirmary, or a tanyard, or perhaps pulling it down; in which case, what becomes of the corn and the cows?

"Of a' the airts the wind can blaw,

You dearly lo'e the west;

For there the bonny lassie lives,

The lass that you lo'e best."

And with many a beautiful sunset has your soul sunk away behind the gorgeous weather-gleam, into her fair and far-off bosom. The monster plants it out, too, and be hanged to him, with a spindle-shanked grove, that will continue to wear a truly transplanted and haggard appearance to the day of judgment.

Having thus, day after day, planted out all "old familiar faces," nothing will satisfy him but to open up; and down go temples and towers that never can be rebuilt-trees old as sin, stately as Satan, beautiful as virtue, and reve